The NFL Is Chasing Tech Money. LIV Chased Saudi Money. The Cautionary Tale Is the Same.

The NFL Is Chasing Tech Money. LIV Chased Saudi Money. The Cautionary Tale Is the Same. Get up to $200 off Square hardware when you sign up at square.com/go/WINGO #squarepod #sponsored The NFL has never been more powerful. Ninety of the top 100 rated shows on television last year were NFL games. Sunday Night Football has been the number one rated show in prime time for 15 straight years. Networks are paying north of two and a half billion dollars a year for the right to broadcast games. Roger Goodell is doing his job — making the owners as much money as humanly possible — and he is doing it brilliantly. But there is a version of this story that ends badly. And LIV Golf already showed us exactly how it goes. The Saudis wanted golf. They thought it would be fun. They had money to burn, a brand to reshape, and a vision for what sports washing could do for Saudi Arabia's image on the world stage. They poured billions into LIV Golf. And then the moment it stopped being fun — the moment the returns did not justify the investment — they walked away. PIF pulled the funding. LIV is filing for bankruptcy. Just like that. Now look at what the NFL is doing. Games on Wednesday. Games on Thursday. Games on Friday. A new holiday invented specifically to justify another game. Nine international games this season with plans to expand to ten and eventually sixteen to twenty. The Chiefs played a game every day of the week except Tuesday a couple of years ago. The scarcity model — the thing that made the NFL appointment television — is being dismantled piece by piece. And who is being courted to pay for all of it? Apple. Amazon. Netflix. YouTube. Google. The biggest companies in the world. Companies that would love to have NFL games. Companies that think it would be fun and profitable and a great addition to their platforms. But here is the critical question Trey is asking: do they need it? Apple sells a gazillion iPhones whether or not they have Thursday Night Football. Amazon runs the largest e-commerce operation in human history whether or not they stream a game on Black Friday. Netflix became the most powerful streaming platform in the world before they had a single live sports property. These companies want the NFL. They do not need it. And the moment the economics stop working — the moment it stops being fun — they can walk away just like the Saudis walked away from LIV Golf. No existential threat. No crisis. Just a pivot. CBS cannot do that. NBC cannot do that. Fox cannot do that. ESPN cannot do that. When CBS lost the NFL package in the 1990s it nearly destroyed the network. Former CBS president Les Moonves said it plainly — one dollar with the NFL on our network is worth more than twenty dollars without it. That is not a company that wants the NFL. That is a company that needs it the way it needs oxygen. The NFL is at its absolute peak right now. But as Trey puts it — trees do not grow to the sky. And Mark Cuban said it in 2014 — pigs get fat, hogs get slaughtered. The expiration date on that quote has passed and the NFL has proved him wrong on the timeline. But the principle may still be right. The question is not whether the NFL can make more money chasing tech deals. It can. The question is whether it should — and whether being wanted by the biggest companies in the world is the same thing as being needed by them. It is not. LIV Golf already proved that. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.