About three score years ago, on a January Sunday afternoon in 1967, some of us gathered in college dorm basement lounges to watch pro football’s historic first “Super Bowl.” A good bit has changed since then — in football and America.
The changes in pro football could hardly be more striking. Today’s players dwarf the size and strength of players back then. National Football League linemen here in the 2020s, for instance, weigh on average well over 300 pounds and stand almost six-and-a-half feet tall. Pro football players of that size simply “didn’t exist” before 1980.
Contemporary players earn much more as well. The first NFL collective bargaining agreement, signed a year after that initial Super Bowl in 1967, set a $10,000 minimum annual salary for veteran players, the equivalent of some $90,000 today. In 2024, NFL players averaged $3.2 million, with a median base pay of $860,000.
But pro football players these days pay a steep price for their paychecks. The average player career now lasts only a little over three years. But the much longer careers of players in positions that don’t face much physical contact distort that average. Running backs regularly last no more than two years.
Pro football player lives, more significantly, often run markedly shorter than the lives of their generational peers. Those shorter lifespans reflect both the violence of the collisions between today’s much bigger and stronger players and the much longer length of today’s NFL season. Players participating in that first 1967 Super Bowl only competed in 16 games. Players on the 2025 Super Bowl’s Philadelphia Eagles squad will have competed in 21 games once this season’s competition ends.
The contrast between the dawn of the Super Bowl era and today for NFL team owners rates as even starker.
We need a little history here for context. A century ago, in the NFL’s earliest days, ownership of NFL franchises came at a price that even the modestly affluent could easily afford. Tim Mara, a horse-racing bookkeeper, bought the New York Giants in 1925 for $500, the equivalent of less than $9,000 today. In 1933, Art Rooney bought a Pittsburgh NFL franchise for $2,500, about $60,000 today.
By the 1960s, those early owners were sitting pretty, and much richer Americans, like the oil tycoon H.L. Hunt, wanted in on the pro football action. These rich ended up establishing their own pro circuit, the American Football League, and then, in 1966, cut a deal with NFL owners to merge their two leagues. The first fruit of that merger would be the inaugural “Super Bowl” in 1967.
Back in those mid-20th-century years, the United States overall rated as a much equal place than the nation had been during the NFL’s early years in the 1920s. One key reason: The tax rate on income in the top federal tax bracket had jumped from 25 percent in 1925 to 91 percent.
Only a relatively few of America’s deep pockets — like the oilmen H.L. Hunt and Bud Adams, another of the AFL’s original franchise owners — could manage to end run those stiff top rates, thanks to generous tax loopholes like the infamous oil-depletion allowance.
But by the early 1980s, with the Reagan Revolution’s onset, the distribution of America’s income and wealth was sliding rapidly back to the top-heavy levels of the 1920s. Tax rates on top-bracket income would bottom out at a mere 28 percent by Reagan’s last full White House year in 1988, and the United States would soon be experiencing an explosive growth in billionaire fortunes.
The number of U.S. billionaires — only 13 in the first Forbes 400 count in 1982 — jumped to 66 in 1990 and 298 in 2000 and then all the way up to 404 in 2010 and 614 in 2020.
All these billionaires desperately needed new high-profile playthings. Many found them in NFL franchises. In quick order, teams that had been selling in the tens of millions began going for hundreds of millions and then billions. In 2018, the hedge funder David Tepper spent $2.2 of those billions buying the Carolina Panthers. Four years later, Robson Walton, an heir to the Walmart fortune, led an ownership group that shelled out $4.65 billion to take possession of the Denver Broncos.
Do these sorts of outlays amount to just an innocent deep-pocket hobby? Not given the impact on average taxpayers.
Billions of average taxpayer dollars, a CNN analysis has shown, are “subsidizing the wildly profitable National Football League.” Between 1997 and 2015, NFL owners opened up 20 new stadiums “with the help of $4.7 billion in taxpayer funds.” Owners have saved billions more by financing stadium construction with tax-free municipal bonds, a tax-runaround “originally created by Congress to help fund roads and schools.”
U.S. corporate executives, meanwhile, get to write off the billions they shell out for NFL game luxury suites as legitimate business entertainment expenses.
Average taxpayers don’t get to sit in those suites. They essentially don’t get to sit anywhere in NFL stadiums. In the 2024 season, the average cost for a family of four to attend an NFL game ran $808.
At Super Bowl time, ticket costs soar considerably higher. The face-value price on a single Super Bowl ticket for this year’s game ranges from $950 to $7,500. But no face-value tickets ever go on sale to the general public. The only way for anyone in that public to see the Super Bowl in person? Buy a seat on the secondary market. For Super Bowl LIX, secondary-market tickets are averaging $8,000 each.
Our Super Bowl may now stand, in effect, as our nation’s most visible symbol of plutocratic excess, or, as the sportswriter Sally Jenkins once put it, a “divorced-from-reality debauch.” We still don’t know, Jenkins added, where the “pain threshold of the average NFL fan” sits.
“Thirty-two owners digging relentlessly in our pockets,” she observed some years back, “haven’t found the bottom yet.”
Those billionaire owners still haven’t — and their upside remains enormous. Just between 2020 and 2023 alone, MarketWatch noted last month, the NFL’s cumulative franchise values rose 1,108 percent.
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