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In October 2017, the owners of the 32 NFL teams, along with Commissioner Roger Goodell, various league executives, and even a few players, scrambled the jets for an emergency meeting at NFL headquarters in New York. The focus of the meeting was not CTE, or the league’s minority-hiring practices, or any of the other existential threats plaguing football at the time. It was the threat posed by President Donald Trump.
“The problem we have is we have a president who will use [the NFL] as fodder to do his mission that I don’t feel is in the best interests of America,” said Patriots owner (and past and future Trump supporter) Robert Kraft. “It’s divisive and it’s horrible.” Eagles owner Jeffrey Lurie said, “We’ve got to be careful not to be baited by Trump … We have to find a way to not be divided.” My favorite aged-like-spoiled-milk quote from the ultimately not-so-confidential meeting came from Jaguars owner Shad Khan: “All the damage Trump’s going to do is done.” If only.
Trump’s presidency — the first one — was a true existential crisis for the NFL, during which the league found itself in the middle of every culture-war battle, most notably Colin Kaepernick’s national-anthem protest and its aftermath. Trump went right at the NFL, imploring owners to fire “son of a bitch” players who knelt during the anthem and mocking other players for being diagnosed with concussions. The league’s television ratings, for the first time in a long time, fell during the Trump era. That became yet another culture-war talking point, with Trump claiming the league had gone too woke to survive. At one point he actually disinvited the Eagles from the White House. This all culminated in a once-historic, now mostly forgotten moment during the 2020 NFL draft — the one held virtually — in which Goodell apologized for not listening to players during the kneeling controversy and said, remarkably, “Black Lives Matter.” The moment was seen less as a sudden left turn and more as the league understanding which way the wind was blowing — Trump would lose in November, and the league would finally be rid of him.
Goodell was right — temporarily. If there is any corporation that benefited most dramatically from President Biden’s implicit promise that life would get back to normal without Trump in office, it was the NFL. During the Biden years, the NFL boomed. In 2020, NFL revenue had fallen to $12 billion after reaching $16 billion in 2019; by 2024, it was back up to $23 billion. Its television ratings not only recovered, they exploded; only two of the top-rated 100 broadcasts in 2023 were not directly related to football. The NFL has swallowed the rest of the sports world whole, to the point that selling off a distressed asset like the NFL Network to ESPN is seen as a lifesaver for the network. Perhaps most importantly, the league has been able to stay out of the culture-war discourse in a way it never could during the Trump years, when the league was pulled to and fro by whatever Trump and his supporters happened to be obsessed with. With Biden in office, even Tom Brady could make an election-denial joke about Trump at the White House and everyone could chuckle and go back to the business of making billions and billions of dollars.
That age is over for the NFL, just as it is for the rest of us. The first six months of the Trump presidency, which have featured exactly one actual NFL game (a Super Bowl that Trump attended, creating its own storyline), have featured more political headaches for the league than four years of Biden or, for that matter, a near-century of every other president. Some of this has been dumb but harmless, like Trump calling owners “stupid” for not drafting Colorado quarterback Shedeur Sanders in the first round. (The Browns benched Sanders last weekend and have reportedly considered cutting him, by the way.) But mostly, Trump is treating the NFL with the same authoritarian menace as he is the rest of society. During an Oval Office press conference announcing the construction of a new stadium for the Washington Commanders, Trump made Goodell grovel in front of the cameras, all but forcing the commissioner to thank him for a Canadian trade deal (which wasn’t real) and for the “gift” of the Washington stadium (which Trump had nothing to do with). Now Trump claims that he won’t “approve” the new stadium unless the Commanders change their name back to the epithet it was until 2020.
Trump doesn’t have the power to do that, technically. On the other hand, there are all sorts of things he doesn’t have the power to do that he has ended up doing anyway. And remember, all this friction is happening before the NFL season actually starts. Considering the league’s cultural ubiquity, Trump won’t be able to stay away once games get going.
The football itself, which kicks off on Thursday with a marquee matchup between the Cowboys and the defending-champion Eagles, promises to be thrilling. Several historically struggling but massively popular franchises, from the Bills to the Lions to the Bengals to the Vikings to even those Commanders, are all legitimate championship contenders. The league has transitioned out of the Brady era magnificently, carried by boldfaced names like Jalen Hurts, Josh Allen, Joe Burrow, Jayden Daniels, and of course Patrick Mahomes, who is the most popular player in the league and still isn’t even the most followed figure surrounding his own team. (Taylor Swift’s new album comes out on the Friday before Mahomes, Travis Kelce, and the Chiefs play on Monday Night Football, helpfully, and of course there are certain upcoming nuptials you may have heard about.) These should be the league’s salad days.
But few institutions know better than the NFL how Trump can mess with success, how he can wildly throw wrenches into your best-laid plans, how once you’re in his crosshairs, there’s no place to hide. The NFL is the most powerful sports institution in the world. It has been growing like a weed for half a decade now. But Goodell’s job just got a thousand times harder, thanks to the impudent, relentless whims of a madman. Then again, whose job hasn’t?
