Monday, September 12, 2011

Moneyball in the NFL

The NFL wraps up the inaugural week of its 2011 season tonight, a season that for a while looked like it might not come off at all. The preseason was marred by a lockout on the part of the NFL owners, who argued they were giving up too much money to the players.

The crisis was resolved, however, probably because this is one situation in which there is plenty of money to go around. Forbes magazine annually estimates the value of each of the NFL franchises, and the champion this year was the Dallas Cowboys, checking in at a whopping $1.85 billion. Our local teams, the Giants and the Jets, rank fourth and fifth respectively, with franchise values of $1.3 billion and $1.22 billion. The average NFL franchise is worth about $1.04 billion.

Where's all that money coming from? The NFL's network TV deals alone - there are four of them, with CBS, Fox, NBC and ESPN - total $3.1 billion a year, plus an additional $1 billion from DirecTV's Sunday Ticket. That's more than $125 million for each of the league's 32 teams. And here in New Jersey, the Giants and Jets shared $400 million from MetLife in naming rights for their new stadium. That's a pretty big haul, before either team sells a single ticket.

No comments:

Post a Comment