Will NFL thrive in 2066?
Football certain to be different but still hold its grip
Welcome to Super Bowl 100. The year is 2066. The players are huge, averaging well over 300 pounds. The NFL commissioner is a woman. Nearly all of the players hail from the lower end of the socioeconomic ladder. The annual revenue of the league passed the promised land of $25 billion nearly four decades ago. Human beings still coach the games, but computers call most of the plays.
Your guess is as good as mine, of course, but the NFL of the future will hold a place in our society that is very much like the one it maintains today: at the very top of the sports world, a seemingly unstoppable sports/entertainment/cultural behemoth.
Then again, it’s certainly within the realm of possibility that there will be no football, that because of concussions and other health concerns, the game won’t even be around in 2066.
But let’s say that it is, that doctors and safety experts have built better helmets and made other advances to keep players safer. And let’s say that it’s not only still around, but also thriving.
What will it look like? Will it be played in sound stages around the country? Or in stadiums not unlike those we see today? Will people come? Or sit at home and let the game surround them in streaming 3-D? “You think laughably of The
Jetsons,” said Jim Steeg, a former NFL senior vice president who ran the Super Bowl for 26 years. “A floating stadium somewhere up there with robots playing each other.”
“I just hope it won’t be played virtually,” former secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said with a laugh Thursday after appearing at the NFL Women’s Summit in San Francisco.
One thing is a near certainty: The league will continue to be a money machine.
“They’ve got a pretty clean path to generate revenue, but you can’t calculate to what extent they’ll hit bumps in the road on player health issues and labor issues,” said David Carter, executive director of the University of Southern California Sports Business Institute.
He’s still bullish on the NFL’s financial health.
“The NFL will be investing in start-ups involved in game-day operations, the hosting and staging of football games and the like,” he said. “The NFL of tomorrow isn’t just going to be a football league, it will be a major conglomerate that offers football as its main option, but not the only one.”
As technology makes the world a smaller place, the NFL will continue to expand its horizons. “It will be more of a world game,” Steeg said, “playing the Super Bowl in, say, downtown Moscow.” Presumably indoors, of course.
“There is an opportunity to grow internationally,” Carter said, “but not the way the NBA or to a lesser extent Major League Baseball does.”
American football is still American football, after all, while basketball and baseball are played in more places around the world.
So just who will be playing this game in America over the next five decades? Concussion concerns among suburban parents could mean that football will look more like boxing, with players coming from more economically challenged backgrounds.
“Concussions are going to mean a demographic change in the locker room,” renowned sociologist Harry Edwards said. “It’s going to be a predominantly black league. Moving on from there, it will depend upon how much they cultivate the Latino community, which is their other large athlete development pool.”
Then there are women, who still likely won’t play the game, at least at the NFL level, but probably will do just about everything else in it over the next 50 years.
“I think we’ll continue to have women in higher and higher roles in the NFL,” Rice said. Asked if there will be a female commissioner or two or three by 2066, she said, “I think the league is really working hard to try to diversify and so, yes, I fully expect it’s going to happen.”
Cyrus Mehri is an attorney who helped create the NFL’s Rooney Rule, established to increase the number of minority head coaches and general managers in the league. “I would expect even 20 years from now we’re going to see multiple female presidents of clubs and we’ll see multiple men with minority backgrounds running clubs. Those are the barriers of the future that I think 20 years from now we’ll see broken.”
As different as things will be for the NFL, if past is prologue, consider the striking similarities that could exist 50 years from now.
“Think about how much is the same from the first Super Bowl,” Steeg said. “The game is still played on a field that’s 120 yards long. It’s still 11 on 11. In many ways, you could still line up Max McGee and Paul Hornung. The skill set is better now, but the core of the game is still the same, and I think it will be for quite some time.”
There’s no doubt we as a culture love NFL football more today than we did in 1966. Could we possible adore it even more in 2066?
“It’s hard to imagine they could do any more in terms of increasing interest,” Carter said. “I’m probably one of only two or three people not in an office pool now. But thinking ahead? In terms of interest in this game, there is no end in sight.”