Table of Contents
Howie's column is powered by Lyric Kitchen · Bar
The NFL loves to preach tradition, but 2025’s schedule tells the truth: Vikings in London, Falcons in Berlin, Dolphins in Madrid, a game in Dublin for good measure.
That’s not tradition, that’s a pop-up circus tent being dragged across Europe. Respect the game? The owners wouldn’t recognize respect if it fell out of their accounting ledgers.
Peek behind the curtain and you’ll see the reason. Every team already cashes north of four hundred million dollars apiece in shared revenue before selling a single beer, parking pass or ticket.
League-wide, that’s more than thirteen billion sliced up and handed out like birthday cake. The whole machine churns out more than twenty billion a year and the owners are aiming for twenty-five.
The average franchise now sits at a valuation of over seven billion. The game isn’t starving for money. The game is choking on it.
And yet they still ship teams overseas like circus elephants, painted up and told to dance for curious crowds who cheer politely without knowing a fair catch from a face mask.
Why? Because new markets mean new sponsors, new governments eager to subsidize stadium nights, new chances to jack up broadcast contracts. It’s about growth, not of the game but of the balance sheets.
The players, of course, are the ones who bleed for this stunt. They’re the ones crammed into flights, adjusting to time zones, risking another knee on a foreign field. Their careers average three years, and one of those might be wasted flying to Spain for a “home game.”
The union should be pounding fists for hazard pay, double checks, some dignity. Instead, they roll over and collect crumbs while the owners toast champagne in global suites.
And the fans? They’re the ones who truly lose. They lose home games, they lose the soul of football towns, they lose Sunday tradition. Soon enough, they’ll lose a little more from their wallets when “London Live” or the “Berlin Classic” becomes a pay-per-view special.
The NFL has already sold off Thursday nights; the next trick will be selling Sundays in slices.
What the league has built is not expansion but exploitation. It cheapens the product, it disrespects the players, and it treats fans as addicts. And like any addiction, there comes a point where even the die-hards will have to seek treatment.
The NFL doesn’t care. The circus is on the road, the cash is rolling in, and the tent is only getting bigger.
Respect the game? That would mean staying home, keeping the shield where it belongs, and remembering that football is supposed to be a sport, not a traveling carnival.
But the owners can’t hear you. They’re too busy counting the money.
