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No sports league in the world makes more money than the American National Football League.
The NFL earns more yearly revenue than the English Premier League, the Champions League,
Formula One, the Japanese Nippon Professional Baseball League, and the Kontinental Hockey
League combined.
It is by far the largest sports league in the world by revenue.
Making up the NFL are 32 football teams each themselves essentially acting as their own
distinct businesses.
These teams are spread out all across the contiguous United States—some only 30 miles
or 45 kilometers apart from each other, some nearly 3,000 miles or 4,500 kilometers apart.
Now, American football teams are some of the largest in sports, both physically and in
numbers.
They have a roster of 56 players—the majority of which play in any given game.
These players weigh on average about 250 pounds or 110 kilograms.
This team size leads to some particular travel needs.
Players each require a first class seat or, at the very least, the seat next to them free
in economy meaning those 56 players take up far more than 56 seats.
On top of that, a team typically brings more than 100 support staff and an immense amount
of cargo to each away game.
With the exception of the largest, most valuable ones, most other professional sports teams
in the US will just fly on chartered narrow-body aircraft like a320’s, 737’s, or 757’s,
but most NFL teams, given their size, require something larger.
NFL teams tend to charter their aircraft from commercial airlines—American, Delta, United,
or Hawaiian Airlines—and they’ll typically fly something a bit larger than other teams
like a 767 or sometimes even a 777, but the nature of this charter job makes finding a
plane to take them particularly difficult.
You see, let’s take the example of the New York Jets’ last game of the 2018 season
versus the New England Patriots on December 30th.
For this game, they left the day before on a United Airlines 767-400 at 3:37 pm landing
30 minutes later, at 4:07 pm, in Providence, Rhode Island.
The plane then sat on the ground at Providence airport for the next 26 hours until the game
was over.
The following day, the plane took off at 6:30 pm bound for New York.
The aircraft’s previous flight had been to Buenos Aires and its next flight was to
London and yet for these 26 hours, United only made money from the half hour charter
flight to and from Providence.
It’s easy to understand why this wouldn’t really be worth it to the airline, but at
least the Jets are located next to a United Airlines hub at Newark airport.
Many teams, like the New Orleans Saints, for example, are not located in a city with any
airline hub.
That makes finding an airline to take their charter contract even more difficult.
That’s because, for example, when the team had to travel to Charlotte last season, the
767 that took them had to fly in empty from Houston, the nearest United hub, then fly
to Charlotte, sit on the ground for 33 hours, fly back to New Orleans, then once again fly
empty—this time all the way to New York.
All told, for the 2 hours and 51 minutes of flight time United was paid for, they used
this airplane for about 44 hours.
Being located away from an airline hub, where planes are based, means charter flights will
almost always require a plane flying in empty.
It is for this reason that airlines are raising rates or just flat-out stopping flying NFL
teams as they find normal, commercial flying a more lucrative use of their aircraft.
American Airlines, in recent years, for example, dropped all the many teams they previously
flew except for the Carolina Falcons, the Dallas Cowboys, and the Philadelphia Eagles—three
teams located at their hub airports.
More teams have moved their contract to dedicated charter companies such as Atlas Air or Miami
Air International, while the New England Patriots even bought their own set of planes to solve
this issue.
Some other teams still have contracts with commercial airlines but have switched to flying
multiple smaller planes as these can be in less demand.
The Indianapolis Colts, for example, now typically travel in two Delta 757’s leaving within
a half hour of each other.
Other American sports, such as Hockey, Baseball, and Basketball, don’t have nearly as much
of a problem because they play far more games a season, which makes their contract a more
attractive one to the airlines, and they also typically use smaller aircraft of which there
are more available.
The NFL briefly considered investing in its own fleet of aircraft or at least negotiating
a deal with an airline in bulk, like the NBA does with Delta, but for now, NFL teams are
seeing their travel costs skyrocket as the laws of supply and demand take hold.
After losing their contract with American Airlines, for example, the Jacksonville Jaguars
saw their travel costs double to $4 million a year as they chartered an Atlas Air 747
and remember, those $4 million pay for the travel costs to a mere eight away games.
But the NFL’s most daunting logistics problem is not this.
Their most daunting logistics problem relates to the NFL’s other big problem—expansion.
You see, part of the reason the NFL is the most valuable sports league in the world is
because of how saturated the football market is in the US.
57% of Americans identify as NFL fans.
That’s an amazing level of market saturation for what is, at its core, a business, but
that also presents a problem because, with such a high proportion of the population already
fans, it’s quite difficult for the NFL to expand their audience, at least within the
US.
In the past decade or so, the league has turned its attention internationally.
The NFL now plays regular season games in Mexico City and London.
These cities don’t have home teams but rather, two teams from the US will come out and play.
For the most part, these international games are about promoting the sport in these two
countries which already have significant fanbases watching the sport on TV.
There’s never been more than one game a season in Mexico City but in London, in the
2019 season, they’re playing four regular season games.
With the 16 regular-season games per team per year, any other city that has a resident
NFL team typically only has eight home games meaning London’s quantity is really not
that far off.
What’s more, the Jacksonville Jaguars are designated as a sort of home team for London
and therefore play at least one of their games there each year in an attempt to give the
city and country a clear team to root for.
The league has even said that it plans to eventually have a full eight games per season
in London—the same as any home city in the US.
The reason there are now so many NFL games in London is because the sport of American
football has gained significant inroads in the UK audience.
The NFL estimates that it has 13 million fans in the UK, 4 million of which watch regularly,
and 47,000 of which buy games to every single NFL game in the UK.
Its dedication to the UK has become so significant that it contributed $12.5 million to the construction
of the new Tottenham Hotspur Stadium in north London.
This recently opened stadium was built to become the home of the NFL in the UK.
It has a permanent synthetic American football pitch under its grass soccer field; purpose
built, NFL-sized locker rooms; and a media suite built to the preferences of NFL press.
In the coming years, at least two NFL games will occur each year at this stadium.
Now, the logistics of these international games in London are formidable.
When the Seahawks played in London in 2018, they had to ship 1,150 rolls of athletic tape,
about 4,000 pounds or 1,800 kilograms of medical supplies, 350 power adapters, 500 shoes, 240
pairs of socks, and tens of thousands of other pounds of equipment to the city weeks ahead
of their arrival.
Months before, they had to arrange for many of their players, who had never left the US,
to get passports.
The team’s trainers had to carefully schedule their players sleep in the week leading up
to reduce jet-lag.
There’s even a hotel in Watford with a purpose built American football practice pitch that
the teams typically stay in.
While these London matches come at great difficulty and force teams to sacrifice a coveted home
game, the teams and their owners seem to tolerate them given their infrequency and the promise
of the UK market.
But the promise of the UK market could push the NFL to stretch beyond eight international
series games a year there.
You see, there is some very real, very serious discussion of putting a National Football
League team in London.
There is little doubt that the city and country could support a team in terms of fanbase.
The issue, according to the league’s commissioner, would be having one solitary team stationed
more than 3,000 miles or 5,000 kilometers away from the next.
It would be an immense logistics problem considering that, for the weekly games, teams would have
to take flights as long as eleven hours crossing up to eight timezones.
On the flip side, this London NFL team would have to travel continuously throughout the
US for weeks at a time since, practically, it wouldn’t make sense for them to return
to London between the weekly games.
This would come at enormous expense, would likely impact their performance, and prove
unpopular with their players.
In addition, as the UK does not yet have significant American football talent, the majority of
this teams players would come from the US and would need to be persuaded, either monetarily
or otherwise, to live outside their home country.
Those are just some of the cost problems.
Beyond that, it is not cheap to fly a whole NFL team over the Atlantic every week.
For the international series games, teams were flown on chartered Virgin Atlantic 747
or a330’s arranged by the league, but if London had a fully fledged NFL team, it would
likely be treated just like any other team meaning both them and their American competitors
would have to arrange their own flights.
The wide-body planes teams would have to charter to cross the Atlantic come at a cost of up
to $50,000 per flight hour.
That means that transatlantic travel costs, just in terms of the flight, would be anywhere
between $650,000 for an east coast team or up to a full $1 million for west coast teams.
Teams also tend to carry tens of thousands of pounds of cargo to each away game which
would further escalate the cost.
While such an expense would be little issue for large, wealthy teams like the Dallas Cowboys
or New England Patriots, teams with smaller budgets like the Detroit Lions or Cleveland
Browns would certainly have more of an issue with potentially adding an extra million in
travel costs.
But this level of team isolation is not unprecedented.
Further west, in the middle of the Pacific, the University of Hawaii has a division one
college football team—the Hawaii Rainbow Warriors.
The closest team in their conference is 2,600 miles or 4,200 kilometers away in San Diego.
To get there, they take a five hour flight.
That’s only an hour or two faster than it would take a London NFL team to get to its
closest competitor—the New England Patriots.
While the furthest team in the Rainbow Warrior’s conference is only a seven or eight hour flight
away in Colorado Springs, Colorado, they do play a number of non-conference games each
year which take them all the way to the US east coast—an up to 10 hour flight away
from Honolulu which is almost exactly the same as the longest required travel time for
an NFL team to London.
Not only that, but the Hawaii Rainbow Warriors also have to balance their time with class
schedules which means that they travel to their away games far closer to kickoff than
NFL teams typically do to London.
The Rainbow Warriors regularly rack up more travel miles than any professional football
team.
For example, in one particularly grueling month in 2016, the team started its season
with an international match in Sydney, Australia, then the next weekend played in Ann Arbor,
Michigan, then the weekend after that played in Tucson, Arizona meaning they flew 25,000
miles or 40,000 kilometers in just one month.
The Rainbow Warriors also make most of their trips on commercial flights making their travel
even more difficult than that of NFL teams.
Now, this does potentially give the team a more significant home-field advantage since
they’re used to playing with jet lag while their opponents, when they fly to Hawaii,
would not be, but it also supports the view that, logistically, it would be possible to
add an NFL team in London.
There are even professional sports leagues that already regularly require travel over
similar or greater distances.
The Kontinental Hockey League, for example, has teams spread out all across Asia and Eastern
Europe meaning the teams from Beijing, Vladivostok, Khabarovsk, and Beijing regularly have to
travel more than 4,000 miles or 6,500 kilometers to play the teams from Minsk, Riga, and Helsinki.
An even more extreme example would be Super Rugby which has teams spread out across Japan,
Argentina, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand.
With this, when the Tokyo Sunwolves play the Buenos Aires Janguares, for example, they
have to travel more than 11,000 miles or 18,000 kilometers each way to their match.
Part of the NFL’s problem is just the pure scale of their competitions with many tens
of thousands of pounds of equipment and many hundreds of staff traveling to each game.
The problems are surmountable, though, at a cost but this cost would be partially burdened
by every other team in the league.
The question is then, given the promise of adding a whole new country to the league,
is the cost worth it.
Now, if the NFL expands to London, one of the first things the new team will need is
a logo.
Luckily, there’s a class on Skillshare for that.
Professional animator Fraser Davidson, who actually has done design work for the NFL,
teaches this fantastic course which walks you through the process of creating your own
mascot.
This is just one of over 25,000 classes on Skillshare which each teach you something
that you can use for your job, for school, or just for fun.
A few more that I would recommend are Storytelling 101, the Productivity Masterclass, and Cinematography
Basics, all of which you can download offline on the iOS or Android apps.
You can learn from any of these more than 25,000 classes for free for a month by signing
up at skl.sh/wendover6 and you’ll be supporting the show while you’re at it.