The picture the NFL wants you to have of America’s most popular sport is that this is a steamroller crushing it at every turn, with revenues, ratings, salaries, and, of course, entertainment and drama breaking through one ceiling after another in a seemingly endless streak of success.And much of that is indeed an accurate portrait.But there’s another snapshot the average fan is increasingly seeing and that’s of an NFL that is taking more out of your wallet than ever, whether you’re headed to games or watching at home.It’s the NFL that was born in America but is looking to export games to feed fans abroad – obviously at the expense of packed stadiums at home.CLICK HERE FOR MORE SPORTS COVERAGE ON FOXNEWS.COMAnd, it is the NFL that has partnered with gambling conglomerates as a way of increasing revenue and interest, perhaps at the expense of feeding addiction.So, yes, the NFL is America’s reality show. It’s fun and captivating, but it’s also unquestionably troubling at times. So how did the NFL behemoth get here?”When I started in the NFL, it was the most popular sport,” said former San Diego Chargers team doctor David Chao, who worked 17 seasons for the team. “By the time I was done, it was more popular than all the other sports combined.”And what’s the fundamental difference? You go to a sports bar during baseball season. It’s all men watching games. You go to a sports bar on Sunday during football season, it’s half women watching games. They’ve doubled their audience. And they added fantasy. But what is fantasy? It’s personal ownership and stake. It’s personal stake in the games.”Chao points out that fans years ago asked him whether a player was available for a game because they wanted the Chargers to win. Fans still care about their teams, but the league has added new fans that want to know that information because they want to set their fantasy team to win.Or they want to have their gambling bets win.Gambling has become a revenue source for the NFL that simply didn’t exist a decade or so ago. The NFL has shifted from outright opposition to active commercial partnership with the sports betting industry. Caesars Entertainment now serves as the league’s official casino sponsor while DraftKings and FanDuel are official sports betting partners.These agreements allow the partners to use NFL trademarks, promote betting activities in league media and engage fans with NFL-branded betting experiences. And while the NFL maintains boundaries designed to protect the integrity of the game, that is a too-thin line for anyone who understands how potential betting information works.”It’s a disaster, it’s the existential threat to football,” said famed NFL agent Leigh Steinberg, whose career was Hollywood’s template for Tom Cruise’s character in the 1996 movie “Jerry Maguire.” “All it takes is one inside piece of information being leaked to a gambler that’s trying to do a prop bet or an athlete that actually shaves performance, and it’s a slippery slope to
NFL’s push for growth is inexorable at expense of fans and amid an ‘existential threat’
