The NFL's Secret Finances: A $10 Billion Mystery
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The National Football League season begins on Thursday night with two teams playing on national television. It doesn’t really matter which teams (Green Bay Packers at Seattle Seahawks) or what channel (NBC). Tens of millions of people will be watching. The NFL is the most popular show on TV and arguably the last totem of American mass culture. Last fall, 34 of the 35 most-watched programs on TV were NFL games. That doesn’t include Super Bowl XLVIII, which set a U.S. viewership record of 111.5 million.
So the NFL is about as public, in one sense, as any business can get. But it’s also run as a very private business.