NFL's push for growth is inexorable at expense of fans and amid an 'existential threat'

The picture the NFL wants you to have of America's most popular sport is that this is a steamroller crushing it at every turn, with revenues, ratings, salaries, and, of course, entertainment and drama breaking through one ceiling after another in a seemingly endless streak of success.

And much of that is indeed an accurate portrait.

But there's another snapshot the average fan is increasingly seeing and that's of an NFL that is taking more out of your wallet than ever, whether you're headed to games or watching at home.

It's the NFL that was born in America but is looking to export games to feed fans abroad – obviously at the expense of packed stadiums at home.

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And, it is the NFL that has partnered with gambling conglomerates as a way of increasing revenue and interest, perhaps at the expense of feeding addiction.

So, yes, the NFL is America's reality show. It's fun and captivating, but it's also unquestionably troubling at times. 

So how did the NFL behemoth get here?

"When I started in the NFL, it was the most popular sport," said former San Diego Chargers team doctor David Chao, who worked 17 seasons for the team. "By the time I was done, it was more popular than all the other sports combined.

"And what's the fundamental difference? You go to a sports bar during baseball season. It's all men watching games. You go to a sports bar on Sunday during football season, it's half women watching games. They've doubled their audience. And they added fantasy. But what is fantasy? It's personal ownership and stake. It's personal stake in the games."

Chao points out that fans years ago asked him whether a player was available for a game because they wanted the Chargers to win. Fans still care about their teams, but the league has added new fans that want to know that information because they want to set their fantasy team to win.

Or they want to have their gambling bets win.

Gambling has become a revenue source for the NFL that simply didn't exist a decade or so ago. 

The NFL has shifted from outright opposition to active commercial partnership with the sports betting industry. Caesars Entertainment now serves as the league's official casino sponsor while DraftKings and FanDuel are official sports betting partners.

These agreements allow the partners to use NFL trademarks, promote betting activities in league media, and engage fans with NFL-branded betting experiences. And while the NFL maintains boundaries designed to protect the integrity of the game, that is a too-thin line to anyone who understands how potential betting information works.

"It's a disaster, it's the existential threat to football," said famed NFL agent Leigh Steinberg, whose career was Hollywood's template for Tom Cruise's character in the 1996 movie Jerry Maguire. "All it takes is one inside piece of information being leaked to a gambler that's trying to do a prop bet or an athlete that actually shaves performance, and it's a slippery slope to having a true contest, and it starts to resemble wrestling.

"Gambling is maybe good news for revenue, but it's bad news for the integrity of the game and continued fan interest."

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Steinberg is the author of four books, including his latest due out March 24 titled "The Comeback: A Playbook for Turning Life's Setbacks Into Victories." Part of that book details Steinberg's battle with alcohol addiction, and he's concerned that the NFL's ties to gambling could have a terrible effect on some of its fans.

Beyond likely losing a lot of money, that is.

"They're going to create a whole new generation of gambling addicts," he said. "Because certain people can't handle this. Second of all, if you don't feel the games are played on a level playing field with equal officiating, rules, every player trying his hardest … If you introduce into the fan's brain that there's a possibility that something else is going on other than what they see on the field, it's a disaster."

There is already a faction of NFL fans on social media who refer to the NFL as scripted. Some NFL staff even publicly joke about this narrative. But all it takes is one player, innocently or not, sharing injury information that gets leaked into gambling circles as to affect betting lines, and the NFL would have a scandal on its hands.

But none of this is so far slowing the NFL from its steady, seemingly inexorable expansion into becoming a global game.

"In today’s world, we have to be global," Commissioner Roger Goodell told fans in Ireland last season before the Pittsburgh Steelers and Minnesota Vikings played in Dublin. "Every time we play an international game, fans say they want more. I really, truly believe our game can and will be global. Our job is to share our game with the rest of the world."

The NFL will play a record nine international games in 2026 across four continents, seven countries and eight stadiums: 

Paris, Melbourne and Rio are new additions to the International slate. And they won't be the last, if things go according to plan.

"We would like to get to 16 games, so everyone is playing one game a year internationally," Goodell said.

But every game that is exported is a game that leaves the United States. 

Well, the NFL has a long-range plan for that which may appease some fans but will surely displease players and that is adding another game. Even though Goodell cautioned during Super Bowl week that adding an 18th game was "not a given," he added that NFL owners want to discuss such an expansion with the NFL Players Association. 

That's because the NFL definitely wants to some day offer an 18-game regular season and two bye weeks that begins on or before Labor Day and ends on the Sunday prior to President's Day. That plan would include two preseason games to give each team a dry run for a home and away game.

"Our members have no appetite for an 18th regular-season game," NFL Players Association interim executive director David White said during the union’s annual Super Bowl week news conference in San Francisco.

But the players' union has balked at additional games in the past. And then it has given in to additional games in collective bargaining in return for more money. So the league believes one more game can again be negotiated.

The motivation for the expansion is obvious: More games add to product inventory, which the NFL can convert to more revenue.

And most of that revenue comes through the league's television and streaming contracts. 

Consider that in 2024 the NFL and Netflix signed a three-year contract that put live games on the streaming giant for the first time. Netflix is paying an estimated $150 million per year for this right, which amounts to four games.

Imagine what the NFL could do if it added 16 more games to its inventory by adding an 18th week to the season. It can sell more games to its broadcast partners, which now include streaming services Amazon, YouTube, Peacock and Netflix.

Those streaming services, with their disappointing 30- to 45-second delays compared to live action, would be able to bid on the NFL's new fare and then the winning bidders would likely do what capitalists have done from time immemorial: Pass their cost along to consumers. 

"Part of the reason football got so popular is that for a couple of hundred dollars anybody could buy a TV and, with rabbit ears, over the air watch multiple football games," Steinberg said. "If all of a sudden you consign and split the package to mean consumers have to pay hundreds of dollars to multiple networks and streaming services, it may be a windfall in revenue, but it might be short-sighted.

"Because what keeps you going is that everyone in this country can watch football even without a cable. And if you have to pay for Hulu or Netflix or Amazon, does that diminish the audience that is critical for negotiation for the networks?"

This coming year, the NFL wants to add a Wednesday broadcast prior to its traditional Thanksgiving Day and Black Friday schedule.

"Every offseason we look for new opportunities to best serve our fans in the schedule-making process," an NFL spokesman told Fox News and OutKick. "As Commissioner Goodell has said, Thanksgiving and NFL football have become synonymous and given the continued growth of fan interest around our games on Thanksgiving and Black Friday, looking for additional opportunities tied to this special holiday is exciting for us to explore." 

An NFL source added that the addition of the Wednesday game is not the only new broadcast window the league is exploring for 2026, suggesting other days are in play.

And the Wednesday game would likely involve teams coming off a bye week.

"The NFL's been doing this creep for a while," Chao said. "They do the Thursday season kickoff game and then more Thursdays during the season. They snuck in a Friday on everybody. They snuck in games on Christmas. Obviously, when the college football season is over, they play on a Saturday.

"I wouldn't be surprised if they went to Friday-Saturday-Sunday after the high school and college football season. And it's all about revenue."

But what about player health and safety, which the NFL insists is a priority?

"The Wednesday game? They're going to sell it based on safety," Chao said. "They'll say, ‘You don’t like Thursday games? … We'll slide in Wednesday and you don't have to play on four days rest. You'll have (10-11) days before and (11) days after' – a mini-bye on the front end and a mini-bye on the back end.

"And they'll sell that as helping players' health and safety." 

The thing is fans will buy it. The 2025 Thanksgiving Day NFL games shattered viewership records as the average viewership across all three games — Packers vs. Lions, Chiefs vs. Cowboys and Bengals vs. Ravens — was 44.7 million viewers, the highest Thanksgiving Day average on record.

That 44.7 million mark surpassed the previous high of 34.5 million viewers and represented the fourth consecutive year the NFL has set a Thanksgiving Day viewership record.

So, yes, the NFL steamroller continues to crush it – significant warts and all.

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