Football’s $90 Billion Annual Racket

As someone who loves the game of football, who understands the beauty of its strategy and the thrill of its athletic feats, it is hard to admit what it has become. When you hear that NFL teams now use undercover police officers dressed as opposing fans just to keep the peace, you have to acknowledge that something is deeply broken. The sport I love has been consumed by the industry built around it. It has become a racket, a machine where everyone is focused on getting paid, and the cultural cost is an afterthought.

The scheme just keeps getting crazier and crazier, and its bloat is staggering even at the local level. For high school football games, schools now use apps like Frontline to hire dozens of part time workers for a single game. It is a form of welfare, a system where they hire fifty people to do a job that two could handle. This Ponzi like growth, which demands more and more money and people just to sustain itself, explodes at the professional level. It has created a sprawling ecosystem of private security rackets, surveillance drones, and high tech toys. It creates the appearance of economic activity, but it is not real growth. It is a place for companies to play with their expensive toys.

The modern football economy, combining operational costs and the colossal expenditures on media rights, consumes close to three billion dollars every single weekend. This tidal wave of money means a single football weekend now accounts for over 1.3% of the entire U.S. economy for that three day period.

That number becomes truly alarming when placed against the backdrop of our current national reality. Since the “pandemic,” chronic absenteeism in our schools has skyrocketed. Math and reading scores have plummeted to levels not seen in decades. And while we are fixated on this spectacle, the world does not stop. With nations like Russia acting aggressively on the world stage, this three billion dollar weekly obsession feels less like a pastime and more like a massive, intentional distraction.

I will always love the game itself. But my love for the game cannot blind me to the truth. We have allowed a sport to metastasize from a simple pastime into a massive racket that hijacks a stunning portion of our economy. The game is now owned by a boardroom, and the cost of admission is far more than the price of a ticket. It is a price our country can no longer afford to pay.