One of the best decisions the NFL has made over the last several years was taking the annual NFL Draft on the road. It was hosted in New York City from 1965 to 2014 before a two-year stint in Chicago. Since then, they have moved from city to city, drawing huge in-person audiences. Detroit hosted the 2024 NFL Draft and broke the attendance records for the event with 775,000 fans over three days.
Visit Detroit and the Detroit Sports Commission issued a report that added up the city’s total revenue, which came in at a whopping $213 million, per WILX News.
The NFL announced in late May that Pittsburgh was awarded the 2026 draft, so seeing the type of economic impact Detroit achieved is pretty exciting for the city. The initial estimate just days after the event in Detroit was $165 million, and even those lofty calculations were surpassed by nearly 30 percent.
It is the sum of all the hotel bookings, food and merch sales, vendors supporting the event, sales tax revenue, and everything else that comes with an influx of nearly a million people in a city’s downtown area.
When the event was hosted in tier-one cities like Chicago and New York City, it would draw crowds of 200,000 or so. The move to tier 2 and 3 cities in smaller markets with more dedicated sports fan bases has caused a boom in attendance. Three of the most-attended drafts were Nashville (692,000 population), Las Vegas (656,000), and Detroit (620,000).
That trend of success in smaller cities will be put to the test in Green Bay in 2025, with a population of 106,000. They have a rich football history in that region, but it is also pretty far out of the way of population centers in the country. Their success could be a good sign for Pittsburgh, which has a population of 303,000.
The NFL repeatedly cited Pittsburgh’s geographic proximity to other major sports and football markets as a reason for choosing the city. The turnout could be even higher than the 350,000 attendance estimate that Pittsburgh officials gave to WPXI’s Jenna Harner in May, shortly after the announcement.
“We’re estimating there’ll be over 300 to 350,000 visitors that would come to Pittsburgh, putting an economic impact anywhere from 100 million to $150 million,” Allegheny County Exec Rich Fitzgerald told Harner. “And that’s, I think, being actually somewhat conservative.”
Pittsburgh hosting the draft will be a massive cultural event for the city. It will also bring a large economic boost to local businesses and provide tax revenue to help fund improvements for the city.
