00:00The National Football League, of course, in a week like this at the biggest stage is going to have a press conference with the commissioner and media and everyone else.
00:08And so we're learning a lot more about what the NFL has in store for us in the future.
00:14So let's touch on a few of those things, John, that you learned from exploring some of that media this week.
00:20Yeah, absolutely. Well, the Super Bowl is the biggest symbol that the NFL owns the world.
00:26The whole world stops on Sunday. Nobody does anything.
00:29It's a virtual virtual national holiday on the Super Bowl.
00:34130 million people are going to tune in and that's going to cap a year where ratings are up and the league has never been more powerful.
00:42The trick is, where do you go from here? How do you keep this thing growing?
00:46The first the first trick is to keep the value of the franchises going up.
00:50The Dallas Cowboys are probably the most valuable franchise at about 13 billion dollars.
00:55Some folks in the league would like to see that get up to 20 billion dollars.
00:58If people can buy fractions, you get some private equity in there, buying 10 percent stakes.
01:04All that money can be pumped back into the league.
01:08And the best way you can get more money into the league, of course, is to have more games.
01:12And the league has been pushing for an 18 game season, maybe even a 20 game season.
01:17That would be very tough on the players and the players have said they have no appetite for expanding the season.
01:24But the historically, the players union has not been particularly strong.
01:28And, you know, bottom line, if there's more games, the players get paid more money.
01:33And that's a good thing, especially when you have a fairly short career.
01:37So, you know, more money is more money.
01:39More games is more money.
01:40So I suspect that we'll be there sooner rather than later.
01:44The other thing that's in the on the in the pipeline is a new is a new TV deal.
01:50They recently signed a deal just a few years ago in 2023.
01:53Three hundred and ten billion dollars over 11 years.
01:57Sounds like a lot of money until the NBA followed that up, getting seventy six billion dollars.
02:03So the NFL guys say, hey, time to renegotiate.
02:06The funny thing is the the TV networks are perfectly happy to renegotiate now.
02:12They just want to have football on their portfolio as long as humanly possible.
02:15The day one of them says, oh, we're going to be out of the football business is a day that their stock plummets.
02:21Because when it comes to TV, if you don't have football, you don't have anything.
02:26So it's really powerful.
02:28And that new contract is just going to be a big increase over the current increase.
02:33And the TV networks are going to be really happy to pay it.
02:37Now, they'd like to have before they do the deal, they'd like to have that expansion of games underway.
02:42So they have better ways to slice and dice where these packages are going, how much they can give to streaming, how much will stay on broadcast.
02:50The more games, the better packages you can put together.
02:54The leagues have been doing a better and better job of putting the high profile games in the highest profile windows where the most people can see them.
03:01And that's one of the reasons why you're seeing these ratings numbers being higher and higher, because the good games are where people can actually see them.
03:09The league has got some other interesting things.
03:11They're expanding internationally.
03:12They might have an entire, they're going to have an entire slate where every, they want every team to play an international game in places like France and Germany, Brazil, have already games, Ireland.
03:25They're going to just be all over the world.
03:27Either they're going to have teams there, we're going to set up separate leagues like they had NFL Europe a few years back.
03:32But this is going to be an international business.
03:35And again, more games, more money, more teams, more money.
03:40So that's sort of the plan.
03:41The NFL is also pushing flag football.
03:44That's a way of also getting more people participating in football.
03:47It's hard to get people to strap on pads and helmets.
03:50Flag football is an easy ask, especially for women.
03:53Women are getting into football and that's half the population.
03:56If you get women playing football and a game like flag football into the Olympics, you know, that's another way of expanding the game.
04:04And the other thing that they're doing is they're building some stadiums.
04:07The Kansas City Chiefs are moving out of Missouri and into Kansas.
04:11They got a sweetheart deal from Kansas.
04:13And the Bears are shopping around for a stadium as well.
04:16These are, you know, billion-dollar projects.
04:19The Bears are talking to the people in Indiana.
04:21The people in Illinois are trying to figure out, do we have money?
04:25Do we want to spend money on stadiums?
04:27It's all kind of crazy.
04:29But there's always someone that wants a football team in their backyard because, again, everybody loves football.
04:34Everybody wants football.
04:36Everybody wants to be in the football business.
04:38And you'll see that on display during the Super Bowl with all the celebrities.
04:43The president is going to get interviewed.
04:45It's going to be a day-long celebration of all things NFL.
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