NFL’s golden goose faces looming ‘threats’
REPORTER GOES DEEP
Mark Leibovich wanted a break from politics. So the chief national correspondent for the New York Times Magazine decided to write about the National Football League. As it turns out, he went to the wrong place.
His latest book, Big Game: The NFL in Dangerous Times, sheds light on a multibillion-dollar business that has found itself in the political crosshairs like never before, taking fire on Twitter from U.S. President Donald Trump and facing public criticism over everything from concussions to national anthem protests to the relocation of franchises.
Leibovich recently spoke to the Financial Post’s Geoff Zochodne about the state of the league and the storm clouds ahead. The following has been edited and condensed. Zochodne: What made you want to do a book on the NFL?
Leibovich: I’ve always been fascinated by football. And I was a little sick of politics, and I decided I needed a break. So I decided to jump into football and I realized that there was absolutely zero escape from politics whatsoever, just because politics are sort of inescapable these days. I was sort of struck by the internal politics of the owners, and the commissioner, and a lot of the players. Then all of a sudden Donald Trump takes on the NFL, and the whole thing became just an inescapable force. Zochodne: Did you end up enjoying it then?
Leibovich: I did in that it was different. One thing I also realized pretty quickly is that the NFL, it’s a swamp. Washington, where I live and work and have for a long time, is a swamp. A lot of the same creatures recur over and over and over again. And the same with football: you have the money people, you have the owners, you have the agents, you have the media people, you have the players. You go to enough of these tribal events, whether they’re dinners or parties or Super Bowls or drafts, and you just see the same people over and over and over again and you realize everyone’s sort of part of the same deal. Zochodne: So of all these people, who was the most interesting?
Leibovich: Jerry Jones, the owner of the Dallas Cowboys, is certainly very entertaining. We went on the Dallas Cowboys bus and the interview took four, five hours and he drank me under the table, or under the bench of the bus. (New England Patriots quarterback) Tom Brady, who I spent some time with, was fascinating. People know that he’s obviously an amazing player. But people just assume that he’s a pretty boy, who is married to a supermodel, that he has it all. And I just found him to be so legitimately normal, considering how larger than life he seems. Zochodne: As businesses go, how do you rate the NFL right now?
Leibovich: Certainly, the metrics of TV ratings, and profits, and revenues, it’s great. They have this incredible business juggernaut, and they’ve been growing, and have all these big plans to grow for a long time. But if I were an investor, I’d be very, very wary of, certainly, the people who run it, who I don’t think are terribly great, far-sighted business people. And I think there are a lot of sort of existential threats to the game that could really impact it pretty significantly in the next few years.
I think there’s just a lot of really bad will towards the NFL from some pretty important constituencies, one of them being a whole lot of fans, whether they’re the fans of jilted cities like St. Louis or Oakland or San Diego, or fans of teams that they feel the commissioner has screwed, whether it’s Dallas or New England or whatever.
Also, just fans for political reasons. The left and the right have, for different reasons, become very demoralized by the league. Not to mention parents who are hesitant to let their kids play football. There are a lot of storm clouds over the league, and I wouldn’t have a whole lot of confidence based on my experience with these folks that these are the people who can lead the NFL into a pretty uncertain future. Zochodne: Why isn’t the leadership prepared?
Leibovich: It’s very, very easy to get complacent. In meeting these folks, a lot of them are really old. A lot of them are very conservative. They’re very, very biased towards the status quo. (NFL Commissioner) Roger Goodell has become very reactive. He’s also just loathed by the public, and I think that’s a bit of a problem.
So, I just have seen very little evidence that the leadership of this league has a plan to, even in the short term, figure out what’s going to happen with the national anthem protests, because they have no policy there.
Or in the longer term, what happens when the next crisis comes down? What happens when a player dies on the field? What happens when they come out with a test that can measure CTE (a progressive degenerative brain disease “found in people with a history of repetitive brain trauma,” according to Boston University’s CTE Center) in players that are still living? There are any number of things that could be possibly game-changers that you just can’t necessarily see coming.