![]() The sum works out to $32,000 per Monday Night Football game. ![]() From ESPN directly to you, dear NFL player: $550,000. That's the amount ESPN is putting in the average NFL player's purse for the 2006 season, and for seasons to come. Ready? An average of $550,000 per player. Now think about the amount the typical NFL player will earn this year just from ESPN. This represents 17 seconds of Monday Night Football. That's almost exactly the $3.7 billion in broadcast rights fees, divided by roughly 2,000 NFL players on rosters or on injured reserve. This season, average NFL pay - monies actually received, not contract paper value - will be somewhat more than $1.7 million per gentleman. Let's stop to consider what this means to the average NFL athlete. Ticket sales cover the clubs' expenses (coaching, facilities, overhead), and owners make their profit on everything left over (local radio rights, tie-in marketing, parking and food sales). The way the latest NFL-NFLPA agreement works, for all intents and purposes, broadcast fees go directly to players. This fall, just two weekends of games will bring the league the present-dollar value of all pro football broadcasting in 1966. Now the same rights are selling for considerably north of $4 billion, a dozen times as much as a generation ago. Forty years ago, commentators were shocked when NBC and CBS agreed to pay about $340 million (in today's dollars) per year to broadcast NFL games. For television broadcast rights, the NFL now gets about $3.7 billion annually from ESPN, CBS, Fox, NBC and DirecTV (which holds the odious monopoly on the wonderful NFL Sunday Ticket), plus advertising income from the league's upcoming self-published games on NFL Network, plus additional millions for radio and cell phone broadcast rights from Sirius and Sprint. Sure hope you liked those games!Īll rights fees shot up in the new round of NFL network contracts in effect this season, reflecting the incredible popularity of professional football. Ten times the normal cost of prime-time programming. This year, ESPN is paying $1.1 billion for the Monday Night Football package, which works out to $65 million per contest and about $20 million per hour. Typically, prime-time network programming costs a couple million dollars an hour. ![]() Cameras, techies and announcers are extra: ESPN had about 150 production personnel at each game. Airing those games cost ESPN only $129 million. Man, let's hope you enjoyed that first-of-a-kind Monday Night Football doubleheader on ESPN. ![]()
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