Football is the most popular sport in the world, but a different kind of football has the most successful league in the world. The National Football League (NFL) is by far the most profitable league on the planet with a revenue that is more than double the Premier League’s and other top football leagues in Europe.
The Premier League appears to have taken a page or two out of the NFL marketing handbook as it has made moves to grow its reach and maximise earnings.
The NFL in the 2015 season made 13 billion dollars. By comparison, in the same season, the Premier League only took in a measly 5.3 billion dollars. The NFL makes a large portion of their money from monster television contracts with Fox, CBS, NBC and other television networks.
No matter what you think about the NFL, it can’t be denied that it is a money making machine that has a formula for sustained economic success.
While fans may complain about all the jolty action of American football play with all the starts and stoppages after each play, it works out well for advertisers. In the Premier League, the game is more fluid with less stoppages so sponsors buy space on the shirts, which is not currently allowed in the NFL.
Advertisements have become as integral to the NFL as is the forward pass or the helmet. When the Denver Broncos won the Super Bowl the prior season, quarterback Peyton Manning ended up kissing Papa John before his wife.
In one NFL regular season game, fans are subject to viewing an average of 70 commercials that have a run time of 30 seconds. However, people are getting more accustomed to being able to watch their content commercial free which could be an explanation to the NFL dip in viewership. Visit Britain are running a competition to find the biggest Super Fan in the world to bring over to England, with American fans of the Premier League clearly enjoying some good growth.
Even with the numbers for viewership down for the NFL this season with ratings dipping eight percent, the league was able to take in a record 3.5 billion in advert revenue, which was an increase of three percent from the year before.
The Premier League’s main source of revenue is from broadcasting but suffered a sizeable drop off in viewership as the audience per game has dropped 22 percent this year according to business insider.
That hasn’t stopped the broadcasters from signing larger deals with the Premier League. Sky and BT Sports purchased the live Premier League TV rights for the next three seasons for a record £5.136bn.
If the trend of declining viewership continues for the Premier League, which has seen Sky Sports viewers per match down 25 percent from 2010 according to Bloomberg, it may have to rely more heavily on sponsorship.
The Premier League recently decided to remove Barclays as its headline sponsor, instead opting for a strategy of diversifying their sponsorship deals and are trying out, for the first time next year, selling sponsorship space on the sleeve of shirts.
The increased revenue from sponsors should be a benefit for the Premier League and its fans with the influx of money being able to help top clubs compete with teams overseas and to sign the best players in the world.
The game of football doesn’t have the same opportunities for advertising as the NFL but that means that advertisements will have less of an impact on the quality of the product, while reaping the benefits of more revenue.
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