December 03, 2008
How The NFL Saves Itself in The Recession
By Steven StarkThis is part of a series about how hard economic times often force sports to make creative changes that end up improving the game to bring in more revenue. (For purposes of speculation, we’re assuming no labor or contract objections from networks or others that, admittedly, could well arise.) This week? Football.
Barack Obama has announced his support for a college football playoff. Columnists such as Jason Whitlock of the Kansas City Star have weighed in on the other side. But Whitlock and even Obama won’t decide whether college football finally goes to a tournament to decide its champion.
The Benjamins will.
That’s the way it usually works in college sports, and it’s certainly the way it’s going to work in a tough economic climate when university endowments – even at the Ivies – are suffering. If the NCAA powers-that-be can find a way to stage a playoff that could add millions to college coffers without diminishing the returns from the bowl games and their current TV coverage, it will happen – even if the games have to take place in February. If they can’t, it won’t.
It’s as simple as that. Really.
It’s the NFL, however, that has the real options to expand revenue in an economic downturn. The current 16-game schedule could easily be expanded to include an extra game or two, if only by playing one or two fewer exhibition games.
Better yet, the NFL could well take a page from England’s soccer Premier League and for one week have each team play somewhere outside the U.S..
In England, the plan had to be put on hold because local fans protested so much at the idea of adding an extra 39th game that would make the schedule unsymmetrical. But NFL fans would have no such objections since their teams’ schedules are all different anyway. And the advantages would be obvious: Staging 16 games on six continents (Fans in Antarctica, sadly, would still have to watch on TV) would be a terrific marketing venture in the attempt to make the NFL a more viable TV venture all over the globe.
The larger issue is whether the NFL could actually place a franchise or two somewhere in another country. On paper at least, it is the league that could do it most easily – since the weeklong rest time between games could accommodate the travel time.
The problem is that the NFL has been a much harder sell overseas than many Americans might think. NFL Europe was pretty much a bust. This year’s regular season game in London didn’t turn on the British as much as might have been hoped.
Even the Super Bowl is not much of a success elsewhere. In Europe no one really watches the Super Bowl. How can it be otherwise? Kickoff is at 11:20 at night in London and an hour later in Western Europe. The same holds true for most of Africa. Head into Asia with its large audiences and kickoff is in the middle of the night at the start of a workweek. One has to go China to find game time at a reasonable hour, and even then, 7:00 a.m. is not usually when the masses gather to watch a sporting event. Even a kickoff time later in the morning in Australia doesn't help much on a summer Monday.
The Americas outside of the U.S. are a different story, but only somewhat. The game may be in prime time but the hearts of the population are elsewhere.
The real problem – as it is with baseball – is that sports reflect the cultures that produce them. American football was the peculiar product of a turn-of-the-last century ethic promoted by elite colleges trying to produce well-rounded "men" in a particular American mold. It only achieved its massive professional popularity after World War II, when the American TV networks discovered that it was the perfect game for the small screen -- easy to cover with a single camera and punctuated by frequent breaks for ever-present commercials. It’s not just that the rest of the world doesn’t have our TV culture. American football's violence and militaristic lingo of "blitzes," "bombs," and "blowouts" can be a turn-off to much of the world.
That isn’t to say the NFL doesn’t have a brand it can do a much better job of promoting globally. But ultimately, soccer and basketball are the world’s most popular games and the ones most capable of going global -- not our football.
Next week: Basketball
