Context

Bob Safian talks with sports business journalist Michele Steele (formerly of ESPN, Bloomberg, and Forbes, now at the Big Ten Network) at the start of the 2026-2027 NFL season about how the league keeps growing a mature, already-dominant product. The conversation covers team valuations, the fragmentation of NFL broadcasts across nine-plus platforms, a deliberate strategy to grow the female fan base, and a new CTE study that complicates the league's player-safety narrative even as its business keeps expanding. For a PM, the episode is a case study in the tension between short-term monetization tactics and long-term trust with your most loyal users, playing out at the scale of a $20 billion-a-year business.

The Big Idea

The NFL keeps growing revenue by fragmenting distribution and deliberately courting new audience segments, but doing both while a serious safety controversy resurfaces shows how a mature, dominant product can keep optimizing short-term monetization even as it accumulates long-term risk to its core relationship with fans.

Steele argues franchise valuations, quarterback pay, and international expansion are all rising because of genuine scarcity (there are only 32 NFL teams and roughly 32 starting-caliber quarterbacks on the planet) and because sports has become "the center of the entertainment universe." But she is candid that spreading games across eight or nine platforms asks a lot of the most loyal fans, and that the league's safety messaging has not caught up to the science.

Key Insights

1. Scarcity, not just growth, drives sky-high valuations

The Lakers sold for $10 billion and the Seahawks for $9.6 billion, both edging closer to typical NFL franchise values, largely because there are only a handful of NBA or NFL franchises ever available at one time. A dealmaker told Steele that 20 to 30 years ago you couldn't argue sports was the center of the entertainment industry; now it is undisputed; the share of top 100 broadcast TV shows that were sports programming went from 61 out of 100 in 2018 to roughly 90 out of 100 five years later. When a scarce, must-watch asset also has almost no substitute, private equity and family offices bid it up as a hedge against volatile markets, not just because of the sport's popularity.

2. Diversifying revenue channels can quietly punish your best customers

• What: NFL games are now split across roughly nine platforms (CBS, NBC, Fox, ABC, ESPN, YouTube TV, and others), which multiplies the league's revenue sources.
• Why it matters: Steele invokes the 80/20 rule: roughly 80% of a business's returns come from the most loyal 20% of customers, and it's exactly that group, the fans trying to watch every single game, who bear the cost of subscribing to nine different services. A league executive told her the best franchises are run "as public and private trusts," meaning you can't mistreat your customers forever and expect them to remain fans indefinitely.
• Example: Steele herself, a lifelong Jets fan, admits the multi-platform sprawl is "dizzying" even for her, despite being exactly the kind of diehard fan the league most depends on.

3. A named, deliberate strategy can accelerate an organic trend

The NFL's female viewership grew about 9% since 2024, and the league's own CMO has a named internal strategy, "Helmets Off," to intentionally court women by amplifying human-interest storylines, like more visible footage of players' wives and girlfriends after practice. Steele is clear the underlying interest was growing before Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce became a public couple; the league recognized an existing trend and then deliberately amplified it with strategic content choices, rather than the trend being purely organic or purely manufactured.

4. Positional scarcity distorts internal economics without provoking revolt

Quarterback salaries keep pulling further away from other positions because, in Steele's words, the position is "the hardest position in sports," requiring both elite athleticism and being "relatively cerebral." With roughly only 32 starting-caliber quarterbacks in the world, teams pay accordingly, and the salary cap has crossed $300 million per team for the first time. Notably, Steele says she has not heard much internal resentment from players about this imbalance, because players themselves understand the scarcity logic; pay for offensive linemen (who protect the quarterback) has also risen for the same underlying reason.

5. A worsening safety narrative has not yet dented the business, but the risk is compounding

A recent study found roughly one in four NFL players who died between 2016 and 2021 had CTE, and Steele notes some former players believe the real rate is even higher because not every case gets reported. Crucially, she explains CTE is driven by cumulative hits over time, not just the visible, dramatic concussions the NFL's safety protocols (independent neurologists, sideline evaluation tents) are designed to catch, meaning the protocols address a more visible but less complete part of the actual risk. Steele's own read is that the science keeps "hardening" against the sport's safety story while valuations and revenue keep climbing, and the real business risk is a long-tail one: whether parents, not current fans, start steering kids away from playing the sport at all.

Mental Models & Frameworks

The 80/20 rule applied to fan monetization

Steele explicitly invokes the Pareto principle to explain why fragmenting distribution across many platforms is risky even when it grows total revenue: roughly 80% of a media business's value comes from its most loyal 20% of customers, and it's precisely those diehard, high-frequency customers who absorb the most pain from having to juggle multiple subscriptions to follow the product they love most. Use this lens whenever a monetization decision (more subscription tiers, more channels, more platforms) technically grows total addressable revenue but adds friction disproportionately for your most valuable, most loyal user segment; the math on paper can look good while quietly eroding the relationship with the users a business can least afford to lose.

Trade-offs & Nuance

Distribution fragmentation grows revenue but taxes loyalty

Splitting broadcast rights across nine-plus platforms increases the total media-rights revenue the NFL can command, since each platform is a distinct buyer, and it works because casual fans are satisfied watching short clips on social media anyway. But it directly burdens the most committed fans, the people actually trying to watch every game, with cost and complexity, and a league executive's own framing (franchises should be run as public trusts, not pure financial assets) suggests even insiders see the tension. The trade-off has not yet visibly hurt the NFL's business, but Steele's framing implies it is a bet that loyalty is durable enough to absorb ongoing friction, not a bet that the friction is actually good for fans.

International expansion trades home-game revenue for long-term media reach

Playing a record nine games abroad this season, with a goal of every team eventually playing at least one international game per year, sacrifices a home date's local revenue and asks the players' union to accept more travel and disruption. In exchange, the NFL can sell media rights as a global product rather than a domestic one, which Steele says materially increases what those rights are worth. The trade-off depends on the assumption that global audience growth (and the media-rights premium that comes with it) outweighs both the lost home-game revenue and the players' resistance to expanding the international and overall game schedule.

Practical Application

Audit which customer segment absorbs the cost of a monetization change

Before adding a new paid tier, channel, or platform to increase revenue, explicitly map which segment of your users bears the added friction, not just which segment generates the added revenue. If the answer is your most loyal, highest-frequency users (the NFL's "20%" who drive "80%" of value), treat that as a real cost against the decision, not a rounding error, even if the immediate revenue math looks favorable.

Give a growth strategy a name and a visible owner

The NFL's "Helmets Off" strategy for growing female viewership works partly because it is named, owned by the CMO, and deliberately amplifies a trend the team already saw emerging (rising female viewership predating the Swift-Kelce relationship) rather than inventing a trend from nothing. When you notice organic growth in an underserved segment, consider whether naming the strategy internally and assigning clear ownership would help you intentionally accelerate what is already working, rather than treating it as a lucky accident to wait and see about.

Separate the visible safety fix from the underlying risk

The NFL's independent neurologists and sideline evaluation tents address the dramatic, visible hits that fans and media notice, but Steele's reporting shows CTE risk actually comes from cumulative, less visible impacts the current protocols were not designed to catch. When your product or organization builds a safeguard in response to public pressure, explicitly check whether the safeguard addresses the most visible version of the risk or the actual mechanism driving the harm; those can be different problems that require different fixes.

Questions to Consider

• Which of our current customers absorb the most friction from a recent pricing, packaging, or distribution change we made to grow revenue, and is that group also the one we most depend on for retention or word of mouth?
• Do we have a named, owned strategy for any audience segment that is already growing organically, or are we treating that growth as background luck instead of something to deliberately accelerate?
• Is there a safety, quality, or trust issue in our product where our visible fix (like a review process or an alert system) addresses a more obvious version of the risk while the underlying, cumulative version of that risk keeps building unaddressed?
• If a slow-building risk in our product (like the NFL's CTE data) hasn't yet shown up in our growth numbers, how would we know whether that's because the risk isn't real for our business or because the consequences simply haven't arrived yet?

Bottom Line

The NFL's growing valuations and revenue show that a scarce, dominant product can keep monetizing aggressively, fragmenting distribution, courting new segments, expanding internationally, well past the point where its most loyal customers start feeling the strain. The harder lesson is that a business can keep growing for years while a slower-building risk to trust, in this case worsening safety science, compounds quietly underneath it, and growth alone is not proof that the underlying relationship with core users is healthy.

Concepts to Explore

Financialization of scarce assets

Steele describes how private equity and family offices increasingly treat sports franchises as an asset class, a hedge against volatile markets, rather than the "trophy" or prestige purchases they once were. This concept matters beyond sports: any sufficiently scarce, high-status asset (a category-defining brand, a dominant marketplace, a piece of prime digital real estate) can attract capital that values it primarily as a portfolio diversifier, which can change incentives away from serving the asset's original customers or users.