We know the NFL is big business. But as more business deals get done, as the league continues to expand to every corner of the Internet and every market on the globe, business is booming.
As shared by the Pittsburgh Sports Business Journal a few days ago, the Pittsburgh Steelers – like all NFL teams – received $374.4 million in national revenue for the 2022 season. That’s confirmed based off the Green Bay Packers’ public financial disclosure, the only franchise required to disclose its finances because it’s a public company with shareholders.
As the publication speculates, those numbers will only increase in future years. The NFL has new TV deals with Amazon and partnered with Google/YouTube to move Sunday Ticket from DirectTV to YouTube TV, where it will be accessed by a larger audience (though it poses a problem for those in rural areas who lack a strong broadband connection). Amazon alone is paying $1 billion a season just to have rights to Thursday night games, which began in 2022.
With that, the NFL’s salary cap is expected to continue to rise. It’s risen almost every year since the cap was instituted, though it fell for the 2021 season due to the pandemic that mostly wiped out ticket/concession sales. In 2020, most NFL games were played without fans or a small number of them. For the Steelers, their total official home attendance for the season was less than 16,000 people. More than a dozen teams had zero fans for any of their eight home games.
While the Steelers received a big number from the NFL, it’s a uniform figure distributed to all teams. From there, Pittsburgh receives local money from home games, ticket and concession sales, along with advertising and sponsorships. Swapping Heinz for Acrisure to sponsor their stadium was a cash cow that will reportedly pay the Steelers more than $10 million annually for the next 15 years, a steep increase from what Pittsburgh received from the Kraft/Heinz company.
The 2023 NFL salary cap is set at $224.8 million, a figure that will increase year after year.
