As Phil de Picciotto, the president of Octagon, a worldwide sports and entertainment agency, said in an interview on Friday: “The N.F.L. is essentially the marketplace that everybody comes to and everybody meets at, whether it’s physically or digitally.”
Put another way, the N.F.L.’s games are now primarily intellectual property to slice, dice and resell.
This isn’t by accident. The tremendous cultural pull of football has made games the last communal, live destination programming for broadcasters, a huge draw for media platforms looking to build their streaming audiences. The majority of TV’s top 100 most-viewed programs each year are football games. In a fractured media landscape, the N.F.L. stands alone like Goliath.
In the weeks before the Super Bowl, the retirement of Tom Brady, the league’s biggest draw over a 22-season career, and news that a former coach, Brian Flores, was suing the N.F.L. for discrimination overshadowed discussions about how the two Super Bowl teams would match up. Those headlines, big as they were, had nothing on the most important event to the N.F.L.’s bottom line, a deal that went largely unnoticed among fans when it was announced last March.
The league negotiated new broadcast agreements with NBC, CBS, ESPN, Fox and Amazon worth about $110 billion over 11 years, nearly double the value of its previous contracts and roughly four times more than the N.B.A. currently receives.
The media money rolling in is so vast that every N.F.L. team turns a profit even before it turns on the lights.
Those outsize profits are a big reason that in the coming months the Denver Broncos are projected to sell for around $4 billion, nearly twice as much as what David Tepper paid in 2018 for the Carolina Panthers, the last N.F.L. team to change hands.