Two miserable American football teams, the Carolina Panthers and the New York Giants, dueled in the Munich Allianz Arena on Sunday. The league’s cash register is still ringing: the goal is sales of $25 billion per season.
Return game in front of 70,000 spectators, pathos included: The Carolina Panthers and the New York Giants duel in Munich.
Giants quarterback Daniel Jones makes $40 million a year.
According to the NFL, more than three million people tried to get tickets for Sunday’s game
But the numbers prove the NFL strategists right. Alexander Steinforth, who is responsible for Germany at the league, said: “The first time we could have sold three million tickets. And this year there were even more people in line.” However, speculators who wanted to sell their tickets on the gray market for a few euros of profit were caught off guard – many tickets were available for significantly less than the purchase price. Which was undoubtedly due to the manageable attractiveness of this game.
But in terms of attention, the plan worked. Comfortable images from the Hofbräuhaus were transported into the American rooms, clichés of Germany that perhaps help to preserve the politically now somewhat porous German-American friendship (no, we’re not talking about the very good band).
Former national team manager Oliver Bierhoff is now wandering in the orbit of the NFL
The game also received a lot of media attention, albeit partly with the depth of the “most important NFL game of the year” assessment mentioned at the beginning. Former football professional Oliver Bierhoff, for example, gave an interview to “TZ” because he supports the New England Patriots in building their brand in German-speaking countries. Bierhoff said: “The NFL is excellent at creating an emotional connection and appealing to new target groups. The continuous media support of the teams, the proximity to the players and the diverse content – these are success factors that can also be transferred to other sports.”
They were captivating statements from the man who was manager of the German national football team until 2022. And every year they became more and more alienated from their audience because the chronically cold manager completely lacked a feeling for the base. The fact that he sees the NFL, which shields its professionals in oversized training centers like in a high-security wing, as a model example of “closeness” is hardly surprising.
The fact that figures like Bierhoff are floating around in the league’s orbit shows how big American football has already become in Germany. The NFL will also play a game here next year, and the debut is also planned in Spain, at Real Madrid’s Estadio Santiago Bernabeu. At the start of the season, the league traveled to Brazil for the first time; The effort to make the NFL a global event beyond the Super Bowl is massive. Somehow, league commissioner Roger Goodell has to get closer to his goal of $25 billion in sales per season by 2027, which is more than the gross domestic product of Armenia.
There is still a shortfall of almost 5 billion, but growth is steady. And is likely to continue unabated in Europe. As long as millions of people try to get one of 70,000 tickets for a Kehraus game in Munich, Goodell doesn’t have to worry about the security of his job. Under the league boss, who was appointed in 2006, the NFL has broken all commercial records, for which he can be credited: He earns more than $60 million per season.
