Written by Ben Koo at AwfulAnnouncing.com
If there is one sports media story that has flown totally under the radar of reporters and analysts, it’s the NFL trying to squeeze out a little bit more television money with their UK International Series of games. Come Sunday, we may begin to see fans and media wise up to the NFL’s greedy overreach as the Los Angeles Rams will kick off at 6:30 AM Pacific Time. That’s awful.
We’ve written about this a few times before, but let’s do a quick recap.
** In 2010, Roger Goodell went in front of owners and stated a goal for the league to hit $25 billion dollars in revenue by 2027. At the time, the NFL was doing about $8.5 billion annually, meaning that Goodell was hoping to raise revenue $1 billion a year for 18 years to hit the mark. Goodell knew that lapsing television contracts would do a lot of the heavy lifting early on and thus far the league has done well, although somewhat off the pace as last year most estimated the league’s revenue at around $13 billion.
** If Goodell is going to hit his goal (which the owners would LOVE), he’ll have to double revenue in just under a decade and that’s not going to be easy considering the en vogue topic right now is lower NFL ratings, cord cutting, and the bursting of the cable bubble.
** The NFL has been teasing this “Well, MAYBE we’ll just expand into Europe. More teams + more games + more fans = more money!!!!” direction. That’s what everyone focuses on in regards to London, as the NFL has gone from one game a year in the UK from 2007 to 2012 to three last year and three this year, with one in Mexico as well.
** These London games up until 2014 were played almost exclusively at normal kickoff times (1:00 PM ET mostly). But in 2014, the NFL rolled out their first 9:30 AM ET game. Then last year, all three games in London aired at 9:30 AM ET, creating what amounted to a fourth national window. This year again, all three games will be in the 9:30 AM ET kickoff time. And now on Sunday, we’ll see a west coast team playing in this early morning game for the first time. I’ll jump into why that’s bullshit in a minute.
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