If there’s one fantastic benefit of the Green Bay Packers being publicly owned, it’s that they must report their finances on a deep level … in public. And because the NFL at large institutes revenue sharing for all 32 teams, this means we can use the Packers to extrapolate how well the league is doing overall.
News flash: The NFL is thriving.
On Tuesday, the Packers reported a net profit of $60.1 million from local operations. More importantly, they made $402.3 million in national revenue, which, for you math majors out there, means the NFL likely split almost $13 billion amongst every team in the league.
According to the Associated Press, the NFL’s total revenue was higher than $12 billion for the first time ever in 2023, and those numbers are up roughly $1 billion from the previous year.
So, yeah, the league is raking in money right now.
The #Packers received $402.3M in national revenue from the NFL last season. Multiply that by 32 and that means the NFL distributed roughly $12.97 billion to its teams (up from $11.98 billion last year).
Because they’re publicly owned, the #Packers must release their finances.… pic.twitter.com/ExRk4c8gsR
— Ari Meirov (@MySportsUpdate) July 16, 2024
It’s not hard to see why the 2023 NFL season was the most successful for the league to date. Any number of factors — from the Taylor Swift effect with the two-time reigning Super Bowl champion Kansas City Chiefs to expanding television deals that have seen the NFL sell off broadcasting rights to streaming companies — were likely involved. Not to mention that pro football is already exuberantly popular on over-the-air television, with most of the top broadcasts of 2023 (by audience numbers) being NFL games.
READ MORE: The Chiefs’ 2024 schedule feels exploitative
The catch is that this profit will probably only grow even more from here. How could it not? That’s why it’s so funny that NFL owners eventually want 18 games and two bye weeks. That chase for an expanded schedule looks even more brazen after seeing this kind of financial documentation.
Does the sheer, unfiltered greed ever stop? We might never find this out about America’s most popular sports league. Or at least that won’t happen any time soon.