I love football. I love my team to which I am forever loyal. There are no fair weather fans in my house and I’m pretty sure football is in my genes. All of that aside, it’s still not hard to look at the industry and be amazed that the amount of money that goes into a game. I’m not even talking about player salaries. Yes, they make a lot of money to play a game. But those guys put their bodies on the line and risk permanent injury to play that game.
I am talking about the business side of the game. How much money goes into the game itself, the tickets, the merchandise, security at the stadium, all the vendors who sell the food and beer, the staff that cleans and maintain the stadiums, the people that keep the parking lots on order.The amount of money that goes into sports gambling is enormous. The online sports gambling sites alone are billion dollar companies. Then there are the analysts, the commentators, the people on the fields with microphones. After all that we haven’t even touched the real money makers, the NFL itself. I read somewhere that the NFL signed a $400 million dollar contract with Microsoft so that everyone on the sidelines would use a Surface tablet. And don’t forget the television networks, the cost of airing the games, or buying those cable and satellite packages. Billions of dollars. For a game. Amazing.
Let’s just say for a second that instead of football, or baseball, or basketball, the teams we cheered for and spent money on were teams of scientists looking for a cure for cancer or finding a clean energy source. Or maybe they would be teams of people trying to help the homeless or pay college tuition or fight to save the rain forests or coral reefs.
I’m not an extremist by any means, I’ve never picketed or protested, I don’t have a “save the whales” t-shirt. Although a part of me wishes I was. My point is, we spend a lot of money on a game. What if we spent it something that lasted longer than a couple hours?