It s Football Time Once Again It on
On Pro Football
Super Basin'southward Hollywood Moment Outshines N.F.50.'southward Problems
Football saw its biggest star, Tom Brady, retire, new allegations of sexual harassment against a team owner, and a lawsuit that claimed the N.F.L. discriminates in its hiring. None of information technology seemed to thing on Sunday.
INGLEWOOD, Calif. — Bluish and yellow confetti rained downward on the field after the final whistle blew in the Super Bowl on Sunday night every bit the Los Angeles Rams finished off the upstart Cincinnati Bengals, 23-20. It was the Rams' starting time Super Bowl title every bit a California team and a fitting capstone to the Due north.F.Fifty.'s long journey dorsum to Los Angeles.
The game, and its veneer of fireworks, flyovers and high-fives — watched by more than 100 million fans — too affirmed an N.F.L. axiom nonetheless again: The action on the field trumps the league's endless parade of scandals, controversies and debates.
Days earlier Lord's day's game, N.F.L. Commissioner Roger Goodell, at his pregame news briefing, fought off questions about discriminatory hiring practices and the allegations of sexual harassment against a squad owner that led the league to begin yet another investigation into how the Washington football franchise is run.
Goodell pivoted away from the uncomfortable inquisition by leaning on a pillar of the league'southward long-term growth strategy, expansion overseas: He announced that the N.F.L. planned to play 4 games in Germany in the coming years.
The league's transformation into a multimedia juggernaut, i that is able to steamroll any controversy, was on total display in Super Bowl LVI, held adjacent to the nation's entertainment capital, with nary a mention of the troubles that take roiled pro football game of belatedly.
The game was played at SoFi Stadium, a $v billion digital palace congenital by one of the wealthiest men in sports, the team owner Eastward. Stanley Kroenke, who moved the Rams franchise to Los Angeles 6 years ago with the approving of the Northward.F.L. After beingness sued past the city and county of St. Louis for violating their own relocation guidelines, the Rams and the N.F.50. in November agreed to pay $790 million to settle the example. Non to worry: The value of his team has nearly quadrupled since it returned to California in 2016.
Kroenke'southward stadium, which opened in September 2020 and is likewise home to the Los Angeles Chargers, is symbolic of where the league is headed. The last time the Super Bowl was played in the Los Angeles region, in 1993, at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, the North.F.L. was already the nation'south biggest and virtually profitable league. But its revenues were still a part of an analog world in which selling tickets and beer were a major focus.
Since then, the Due north.F.L. has grown into a $16 billion behemoth that digitally distributes its primary product, football game games, so they can be viewed on phones, game consoles and Idiot box screens at any identify and any time. Those same games have also become the fuel for video games, fantasy football game leagues and, most recently, canonical sports gambling, which all pour money into the league through its lucrative licensing deals.
Football-related content and games are now so ubiquitous that many football fans never attend a game. The lxx,048 fans at Dominicus'south championship game used digital tickets that came with a commemorative non-fungible token, or North.F.T.
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.'due south games are at present primarily intellectual holding to piece, dice and resell.
This isn't by accident. The tremendous cultural pull of football has made games the concluding communal, live destination programming for broadcasters, a huge describe for media platforms looking to build their streaming audiences. The majority of Boob tube's top 100 nearly-viewed programs each year are football games. In a fractured media landscape, the N.F.L. stands lonely like Goliath.
In the weeks before the Super Bowl, the retirement of Tom Brady, the league'due south biggest draw over a 22-season career, and news that a former charabanc, Brian Flores, was suing the Northward.F.Fifty. for discrimination overshadowed discussions well-nigh how the two Super Basin teams would match upwardly. Those headlines, large every bit they were, had nothing on the most important result to the N.F.50.'south lesser line, a deal that went largely unnoticed among fans when it was appear final 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 4 times more than the N.B.A. currently receives.
The media coin rolling in is so vast that every Due north.F.50. squad turns a profit even before it turns on the lights.
Those outsize profits are a large reason that in the coming months the Denver Broncos are projected to sell for around $iv billion, nearly twice every bit much as what David Tepper paid in 2018 for the Carolina Panthers, the last North.F.L. team to modify hands.
Aware of the league'south spotty record on diverseness and that nigh every team owner is white, Goodell, at his news conference, mentioned he would "love to run into a various owner" of the Broncos.
With unparalleled cultural reach and resources, the league absorbs criticism for how information technology treats the people who are at the heart of its heavily commodified product. With his lawsuit, Flores, who is a Black Hispanic double-decker, shined an uncomfortable light on the sideline of a league where nearly 60 percent of the players are Black all the same simply a handful of caput coaches are of colour. On Dominicus, fifty-fifty President Biden said in an interview that the Northward.F.L. must rent more coaches of color as "a requirement I think of some only generic decency."
Goodell is also trying to overhaul the league'southward much-scrutinized tape on the handling of women, which was sparked anew by a old employee of the Washington Commanders telling a Congressional round table that the team owner Daniel Snyder had sexually harassed her.
The Northward.F.50. said Flores's accommodate was "without merit," and Snyder chosen the accusations "lies." But Goodell appear 2 new investigations, one of Snyder and the other of the league's hiring record.
The scandals will dent only not diminish the N.F.L.'s latest Hollywood moment, which was decades in the making. When the Rams and the Raiders abandoned Southern California later on the 1994 flavour, the Northward.F.L. tried to entice some other team to motility to the country's 2d-largest metropolitan area. For years, no ane could notice a way to build a new stadium.
While information technology waited to find the right combination of teams and venues, the N.F.L. created websites and mobile phone apps; started N.F.L. Sunday Ticket, a circulate service that shows consumers every out-of-market game; and Game Laissez passer, which does the aforementioned thing on a reckoner.
In 2003, the league started NFL Network, a 24-hour cable channel based in the Los Angeles area devoted to football game.
"It's just snowballed every bit media has continued to increase and proliferate with the number of screens and number of platforms," said Hans Schroeder, the chief operating officeholder at N.F.L. Media.
In the virtual realm, the Madden video game franchise became more sophisticated and ubiquitous. Later on some hesitation, the league embraced fantasy football, which became a precursor to the league embracing legalized sports gambling later some hesitation.
Fred Gaudelli, the producer of "Sunday Nighttime Football" at NBC Sports, sees little letup in this melding of football every bit entertainment: "It'south a machine that keeps getting fed, and it feeds its fans," he said.
Emmanuel Morgan contributed reporting.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/14/sports/football/nfl-super-bowl-hollywood.html
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