NFL’s drive to grow is inexorable at the expense of fans and amid an ‘existential threat’

The image the NFL wants you to have of America’s most popular sport is that it is a steamroller crushing you at every turn, with revenue, ratings, salaries and, of course, entertainment and drama breaking through ceiling after ceiling in a seemingly endless streak of success.

And much of that is, in fact, an accurate portrayal.

But there’s another snapshot that the average fan is seeing more and more of, and it’s of an NFL that’s getting more out of your wallet than ever before, whether you’re going to watch the games or watching at home.

It is the NFL that was born in the United States but seeks to export games to feed fans abroad, obviously at the expense of full stadiums at home.

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And it is the NFL that has partnered with gambling conglomerates as a way to increase revenue and interest, perhaps at the expense of feeding addiction.

So, yes, the NFL is America’s reality show. It’s fun and engaging, but it’s also unquestioning at times.

So how did the NFL juggernaut get here?

“When I started in the NFL, it was the most popular sport,” said former San Diego Chargers team doctor David Chao, who worked 17 seasons for the team. “When I finished, it was more popular than all the other sports combined.

“And what’s the fundamental difference? You go to a sports bar during baseball season. It’s all men watching the games. You go to a sports bar on Sunday during football season, and half of it is women watching the games. They’ve doubled their audience. And they added fantasy. But what is fantasy? It’s personal ownership and participation. It’s personal participation in the games.”

Chao notes that years ago fans asked him if a player was available for a game because they wanted the Chargers to win. Fans still care about their teams, but the league has added new fans who want to know that information because they want their fantasy team to win.

Or they want their bets to win.

The NFL’s ‘existential threat’

Gambling has become a source of revenue for the NFL that simply didn’t exist about a decade ago.

The NFL has moved from open opposition to an active business partnership with the sports betting industry. Caesars Entertainment now serves as the league’s official casino sponsor, while DraftKings and FanDuel are official sports betting partners.

These agreements allow partners to use NFL trademarks, promote betting activities in league media, and engage fans with NFL-branded betting experiences. And while the NFL maintains limits designed to protect the integrity of the game, that’s too thin a line for anyone who understands how potential betting information works.

“It’s a disaster, it’s an existential threat to football,” said famed NFL agent Leigh Steinberg, whose career was the Hollywood model for Tom Cruise’s character in the 1996 film “Jerry Maguire.” “All it takes is for one piece of inside information to leak to a player who’s trying to make a prop bet or to an athlete that really slows down performance, and it’s a slippery slope to having real competition, and it starts to look like wrestling.

“The game may be good news for revenue, but it’s bad news for the integrity of the game and continued fan interest.”

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The NFL fuels gambling addictions

Steinberg is the author of four books, including his latest, out March 24, titled “The Comeback: A Playbook for Turning Life’s Setbacks into Victories.” Part of that book details Steinberg’s battle with alcohol addiction, and he worries that the NFL’s ties to the game could have a terrible effect on some of its fans.

Beyond probably losing a lot of money, of course.

“They’re going to create a whole new generation of gambling addicts,” he said. “Because certain people can’t handle this. Secondly, if you don’t feel like the games are played on a level playing field, with equal referees, rules, every player trying their hardest… If you put it into the fan’s brain that there’s a possibility that something else is going on besides what they see on the field, it’s a disaster.”

There is already a faction of NFL fans on social media who refer to the NFL as scripted. Some NFL personnel even publicly joke about this narrative. But all it takes is for one player, innocently or not, to share injury information that leaks into gaming circles to affect betting lines, and the NFL would have a scandal on its hands.

Export of NFL games around the world

But none of this is so far slowing the NFL in its constant and seemingly inexorable expansion into a global game.

“In today’s world, we have to be global,” commissioner Roger Goodell told fans in Ireland last season before the Pittsburgh Steelers and Minnesota Vikings played in Dublin. “Every time we play an international game, the fans say they want more. I truly believe our game can and will be global. Our job is to share our game with the rest of the world.”

The NFL will play a record nine international games in 2026 across four continents, seven countries and eight stadiums:

• London, United Kingdom (two matches at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium and one at Wembley Stadium)
• Madrid, Spain (Bernabéu Stadium)
• Melbourne, Australia (Melbourne Cricket Ground)
• Mexico City, Mexico (Banorte Stadium)
• Munich, Germany (FC Bayern Munich Stadium)
• Paris, France (Stade de France Stadium)
• Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (Maracana Stadium)

Paris, Melbourne and Rio are new additions to the international list. And they won’t be the last, if everything goes as planned.

“We’d like to get to 16 games, so everyone plays one game a year internationally,” Goodell said.

Players don’t want game number 18

But every game that is exported is a game that leaves the United States.

Well, the NFL has a long-term plan for that that may appease some fans but will surely displease players and that is to add another game. Although Goodell warned during Super Bowl week that adding an 18th game was “not a done deal,” he added that NFL owners want to discuss such an expansion with the NFL Players Association.

That’s because the NFL definitely wants to someday offer an 18-game, two-week off regular season that begins on or before Labor Day and ends the Sunday before President’s Day. That plan would include two preseason games to give each team a rehearsal for a home-and-away game.

“Our members have no appetite for an 18th regular-season game,” NFL Players Association interim CEO David White said during the union’s annual Super Bowl week news conference in San Francisco.

But the players union has opposed additional games in the past. And then he has given in to additional games in the collective bargaining agreement in exchange for more money. That is why the league believes that one more game can be negotiated again.

More games cost you more money

The motivation for expansion is obvious: more games are added to the product inventory, which the NFL can convert into more revenue.

And most of that revenue comes from the league’s broadcast and television contracts.

Consider that in 2024 the NFL and Netflix signed a three-year deal that put live games on the streaming giant for the first time. Netflix pays about $150 million a year for this right, which is equivalent to four games.

Imagine what the NFL could do if it added 16 more games to its inventory by adding an 18th week to the season. It can sell more games to its streaming partners, which now include streaming services Amazon, YouTube, Peacock and Netflix.

Those streaming services, with their disappointing 30- to 45-second delays compared to live action, could bid for the NFL’s new rate, and then the winning bidders would likely do what capitalists have done since time immemorial: pass their cost on to consumers.

“Part of the reason football became so popular is that for a couple hundred dollars anyone could buy a television and, with rabbit ears, watch various football games over the air,” Steinberg said. “If you suddenly consign and split the package so that consumers have to pay hundreds of dollars to multiple networks and streaming services, it may be a revenue windfall, but it may be short-sighted.

“Because what keeps you active is that everyone in this country can watch football even without cable. And if you have to pay for Hulu or Netflix or Amazon, does that decrease the audience that is critical for the networks’ negotiation?”

Wednesday’s next NFL game

Next year, the NFL wants to add a Wednesday broadcast before its traditional Thanksgiving and Black Friday schedule.

“Each offseason we look for new opportunities to better serve our fans in the schedule-building process,” an NFL spokesperson told News and OutKick. “As Commissioner Goodell has said, Thanksgiving and NFL football have become synonymous, and with the continued growth of fan interest surrounding our games on Thanksgiving and Black Friday, it is exciting for us to explore pursuing additional opportunities related to this special holiday.”

An NFL source added that the addition of Wednesday’s game is not the only new broadcast window the league is exploring for 2026, suggesting other days are in play.

And Wednesday’s game would likely involve teams coming off a bye week.

“The NFL has been doing this for a while,” Chao said. “Do the season opener on Thursdays and then more Thursdays throughout the season. They sneak in on a Friday for everyone. They sneak into the games at Christmas. Obviously, when the college football season ends, they play on a Saturday.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if they moved to Friday, Saturday and Sunday after the high school and college football season. And it’s all about revenue.”

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Player health and safety is an issue

But what about the health and safety of players, which the NFL insists is a priority?

“Wednesday’s game? They’re going to sell it based on security,” Chao said. “They’ll say, ‘You don’t like Thursday games? … We’ll go through Wednesday and you won’t have to play on four days’ rest. You’ll have (10-11) days before and (11) days after’: a mini-bye at the beginning and a mini-bye at the end.

“And they will sell it as an aid to the health and safety of the players.”

The thing is, fans will buy it. The 2025 Thanksgiving Day NFL games broke viewership records, as the average viewership across all three games (Packers vs. Lions, Chiefs vs. Cowboys, and Bengals vs. Ravens) was 44.7 million viewers, the highest average on Thanksgiving Day on record.

That mark of 44.7 million surpassed the previous high of 34.5 million viewers and represented the fourth consecutive year that the NFL set a Thanksgiving Day viewership record.

So yes, the NFL steamroller continues to crush him, major warts and all.

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