The NFL's troubles aren't over yet

Welcome to Inside Sports, a bi-weekly look behind the scenes of the sports business and those who cover it.

This week, we look at the NFL with an insider who spent more than a year tracking America's most powerful sporting organization: New York Times reporter Mark Leibovich.

The National Football League’s business model can be distilled down to one piece of data: just 7% of the NFL’s fanbase have watched a game live in a stadium.

Hence when the game’s television ratings began to plummet a couple of seasons back, it swiftly unnerved those who roam the corridors of the league’s head office on Park Avenue.

After all, America’s most popular sport draws 50% of its revenue from television contracts.

It was at about this time that esteemed New York Times political reporter— and admitted football tragic — Mark Leibovich decided to abandon his bunker in the paper's Washington bureau and spend a year submersing himself in the league.

The result is Big Game, a superbly written, outrageously entertaining account of a year spent trailing football’s caravan and intermingling in its most elite circles.

Sure, the NFL endures as America’s true sporting superpower. But why, Leibovich wanted to know, in the face of intermittent scandal and malfeasance involving its players, coaches and owners did the game’s appeal endure.

Why does it mean so much to so many people?

Leibovich was granted audiences with a handful of the sport’s eccentric billionaire team owners along with the NFL commissioner, Roger Goodell.

What he discovered in those conversations startled him.

Football followers would likely find it difficult to fathom how much power is wielded by the owners of the league’s 32 franchises, Leibovich told me, particularly in comparison with other sporting leagues.

“But,” he adds warily, “what most people would probably be even more shocked by is just how unimpressive these owners are.”

The NFL as depicted by Leibovich in Big Game is a league that retains its vice-like grip on sports, media and popular culture in spite of itself. 

“I talked to Roger Goodell a lot,” he says. “He didn’t seem to have much of a clue on how to do anything except talk in anodyne phrases and keep a group of fragile, old rich guys happy.”

There’s little doubt that the 2017/18 season was the NFL’s annus horribilis.

The league was beset by racial protests, regular Twitter taunts from the president, declines in stadium attendance figures and TV ratings, and, perhaps most saliently, some ghastly football.

But much to the chagrin of those baying for its demise, the NFL seems to have emerged relatively unscathed. The presidential tweets have stopped, protest coverage has petered out, TV ratings are on the rise and a group of young, emerging superstars are captivating the constituency each week.

“Most of the parties involved want things to revert back to a degree of normalcy,” Leibovich says. “And that’s where we are right now.”

Still, Leibovich is not entirely convinced the NFL “is as out of the woods as people might think.” Somewhat alarmingly, he believes the league is in the midst of a leadership crisis.

“It was clear they didn’t know what the hell they were doing even last year,” he says. “Just because they have some interesting teams and good ratings numbers doesn’t suddenly change that they still have a bunch of really old, really short-sighted owners running the game. And there is a real cultural problem with parents being comfortable about having their kids play the game.”

The age of the owners — most are over 70 — and the stodgy culture of its management places it out of step with younger generations of American sports fans, he argues.

Participation rates at youth levels are down precipitously, and young fans appear more enamored with the NBA.

“The NFL should be worried about the NBA,” he says. “There’s growing global interest in it, its workforce is increasingly global, and the commissioner, owners and players just seem to have such a greater clue on how to connect with where the culture is going to be.”

As for soccer, which regularly outdraws football in terms of crowds at live games in cities such as Atlanta, Miami and Seattle, the sport’s status as a global colossus underpinned by the likes of players such as Messi and Ronaldo are drastically impacting its U.S. following.

“It feels like soccer has been the flavor of the month in this country for about 30 years,” he says. “But with the World Cup and the influx of games on TV and just the greater awareness we have now for this generation of superstars from Europe and South America, there’s more momentum.”

Stadium attendance is an issue for most U.S. sports and in the NFL, teams in Nashville, Miami and Atlanta rarely play in front of full houses.

“Attendance figures are much less meaningful than TV ratings,” Leibovich says. Yet savvy owners like Dallas Cowboys boss Jerry Jones are adamant filling seats should be a priority.

“Jerry thinks empty stadium seats look terrible on TV,” he says. “It’s not unlike a political rally where you might have 10,000 people, but if there’s 5,000 empty seats, it’s looks kind of empty.”

Perhaps the most significant issue for the NFL is the nation’s most populous state: California.

The San Diego Chargers exited their hometown for good last year, heading to Los Angeles, after failing to secure local government funding for a new stadium. In L.A., they have been roundly rejected by fans.

“The Chargers are embarrassing,” he says. “They’re playing in a 30,000 capacity soccer stadium which they can’t sell out and is routinely filled with opposition fans.”

Then there’s the Oakland Raiders, who are set to leave their city for the same reasons – the inability to secure government funding for a new stadium – and will move to Las Vegas.

“There is terrible ill-will in all these cities towards the NFL,” he says. “This stadium stuff isn’t exclusive to football. It’s happened in the NBA, too. But Oakland and San Diego were both great Californian football towns. LA tends to be a big predictor of where tastes are going in the country, so it is concerning too that the LA Rams have trouble selling tickets.

“People are getting smarter about these stadium deals that have gone through in the past and have had questionable decisions attached to them.”

Most football fans have a very parochial set of concerns. They don’t care about the game per se, they are mostly just interested in their team.

In Leibovich’s case, as a New England Patriots fan, he was able to spend significant time with the team’s eccentric owner Robert Kraft and engaged with both his favorite player, Tom Brady, and Brady’s father, Tom Sr. The latter becomes a crucial character in the book, serving as an unfiltered voice for players and their families.

So, did his reporting have an impact on his ability to be a Patriots fan?

“I’m not one of these people who turns off the TV to protest the moral ambiguity and cultural dissonance the NFL inflicts on us,” he admits. “If there’s a game on, and it’s halfway competitive and interesting, I’m probably going to watch.”

It’s at this point that Leibovich recalls a recent Thursday night event for his book that coincided with an uninspiring football match-up: the insipid New York Jets playing the hapless Cleveland Browns.

He began his book talk that night by sarcastically thanking the assembled crowd for giving up the opportunity to watch the blockbuster Jets-Browns game to attend his event. The line got a big laugh.

But when he eventually returned to his hotel room later that night, Leibovich switched on his TV and the game was at halftime. Of course, it turned out to be one of the most intriguing and entertaining games of the year: the Browns rallied to celebrate their first win in almost two years and in the process, they debuted a new star quarterback, Baker Mayfield.

“It was just a great game and narrative,” he says. “And it’s all we talked about in my office the next day. Football has this way of inflicting a really, really great story on you when you least expect it. You can be all sarcastic and cynical, but when it’s all said and done, I ended up that night back in my hotel room alone, completely hooked. That’s what the NFL tends to do.”