TV ratings down, team revenues up: have protests really hurt the NFL?
Donald Trump believes that players’ attempts to highlights racial injustice have hurt the league. But the figures suggest otherwise
The NFL machine restarts this week with the opening of training camps. And, if Donald Trump is to be believed, the league is close to collapse, with a crumbling fanbase and plummeting television ratings, all because some players kneeled in protest during the national anthem last season.
“NFL attendance and ratings are WAY DOWN,” Trump tweeted last September. “Boring games, yes, but many stay away because they love our country. League should back U.S.”
“At least 24 players kneeling this weekend at NFL stadiums that are now having a very hard time filling up,” he tweeted in November.“The American public is fed up with the disrespect the NFL is paying to our Country, our Flag and our National Anthem. Weak and out of control!”
Trump’s rants appeared to rattle NFL owners and they panicked. Apparently terrified of a fan exodus, a ratings collapse and advertiser revolt, the owners threw together a flimsy, passive-aggressive anthem policy that satisfied no one.
And yet for all of Trump’s rage, the owners’ terror and their cowering responses, it turns out the NFL is just fine. We know this because the Green Bay Packers released their annual report this week. Because the Packers are the league’s lone community-owned team they are required to open their books. It is the best window the public gets into the NFL’s actual financial health.
And the Packers financial records suggest the NFL is doing well. According to the report, the amount of money the NFL distributed to teams grew from $7.8bn in 2016 to $8.1bn in 2017, meaning the league added to its estimated $14bn in overall revenue. This was a 5% increase and far from the great economic rot referenced by Trump. The report pointed to a $50m streaming deal with Amazon as a sign of the NFL’s continued financial boom. In fact, the Amazon deal has been expanded two more years for a total of $130m.
We also know the NFL is thriving because the sale of the Carolina Panthers was completed earlier this month for a record $2.275bn, according to the league’s website. The price appears extreme given that Charlotte, North Carolina, is the nation’s 24th-largest television market, but it’s also a sign that owning an NFL team remains attractive to extremely rich people. The previous record price for a team was $1.4bn, when Terry Pegula bought the Buffalo Bills in 2014.
An interesting side note is that the NFL picked Pegula over Trump, who told Sports Illustrated in 2015 that he “bid $2bn all cash on the table,” for the Bills. His boast is, of course, impossible to verifiy, but it leaves one to wonder if running a football team might have taken enough of his time to squelch his itch to run for president in 2016.
But the biggest proof that the league is far from failing, despite Trumps’s rants, came on Wednesday when Forbes released its latest rankings of the world’s most valuable sports franchises. Twenty-nine of the NFL’s 32 teams made the top 50 list, which was topped by the Dallas Cowboys whose worth is estimated to be $4.8bn, more than double the $2bn Forbes valued the team at in 2013.
“NFL owners are minting money thanks to hefty TV contracts and a favorable labor deal with the players,” Forbes gushed in its report, noting that the $3.2bn in income the league took in last year “is $500m more than the combined earnings” of all NBA, NHL and MLB clubs.
In non-financial terms, Trump couldn’t have been more wrong in his Twitter rants last year. Despite player protests, the league continues to make money.
Even the negative factors he tried to reference – falling television ratings and declining attendance – have explainers. Yes, TV ratings were down close to 10% during the 2017 regular season, but the decline mirrored a fall in television viewership across the board. Ultimately, the NFL supplied six of the seven most-watched television programs last year (with only Trump’s Congressional address keeping the NFL from a complete sweep).
The league’s teams did sell 535,246 fewer tickets last season but almost all of that loss came from two teams in transition: the Los Angeles Rams who saw the novelty wear off on their return to the cavernous LA Coliseum, and the Chargers whose move from San Diego to a soccer stadium in the LA suburb of Carson turned out to be a disaster.
The player protests, started by Colin Kaepernick in 2016, have drawn considerable attention and have ignited nationwide conversations about racism. While they became a talking point for Trump and Fox News, they have not hurt the NFL’s revenue, TV ratings or attendance – that’s worth remembering if players protest again this season.
On Wednesday, just as Forbes released its report, Tennessee Titans defensive lineman Jurnell Casey told CNN he plans to kneel for the anthem this season.
“I’m going to take a fine this year, why not?” he told the network during an NFL promotional event in London. “I’m going to protest during the flag”
When he does, when other players follow and the protests of the past two seasons continue, just remember that Trump was wrong. The NFL remains the most lucrative sports league in the world – and it’s getting richer by the year.
