July 8th, 2026
We Thought the NFL Was the Ocean
I spent the summer watching the World Cup and got curious about the money behind it. What I found turned my whole sense of American sports upside down.
I've been watching the World Cup this summer like a lot of you, and somewhere in the second week I stopped wondering who would win and started wondering who was getting paid. Call it the businessman in me. So I went and did the research on the business of soccer, fully expecting to confirm what most Americans believe, that soccer is a nice little game that never quite made it big over here.
Boy, was I wrong.
What I thought I knew
Everything I walked in believing was true. The NFL is the most valuable sports league on the planet. The average NFL team is worth about $7 billion. The average Major League Soccer club, around $767 million. The Dallas Cowboys, all by themselves, are worth nearly $13 billion, which is more than all 30 MLS clubs put together. The NFL's television deal pays out roughly $12 billion a year. MLS sold its rights to Apple for $250 million. One number tells the whole American attitude: a single NFL team collects more in shared national media money, north of $430 million, than every MLS club splits from Apple combined.
So the NFL wins. That's exactly what I thought. Then I stepped back and noticed the water.
Then I saw the water
Here's the thing nobody had told me.
The NFL is the biggest fish I have ever seen. It just happens to swim in a pond.
Soccer is the ocean.
The NFL, for all its billions, is played in one country. Soccer is played and paid for on every continent, in more than 200 countries, and it throws off somewhere between $30 and $60 billion a year once you add up clubs, broadcasts, sponsorships, and tournaments. Real Madrid, a club most Americans couldn't find on a map, is worth about $7.5 billion, right in the neighborhood of an average NFL franchise. The NFL isn't small. It's colossal. It's just colossal inside a pond it dug for itself.
Two ways to get rich
What fascinates me is that the two got rich doing the exact opposite of each other. The NFL is the most quietly socialist operation in American capitalism. Thirty-two billionaires agreed to share their TV money almost down the middle, cap their payrolls, and never, under any circumstances, add a new team. Scarcity plus sharing. No new lots on the street, so every lot keeps climbing. Soccer did the reverse. Wide-open markets, no salary cap, thousands of clubs, and inequality that would make your eyes water. One is a stocked pond. The other is the open sea.
What America actually built
Now watch what we did. When America finally got serious about its own soccer league, it didn't copy soccer. It copied football. MLS controls expansion like a velvet rope and sells its media as one national package, the NFL's playbook borrowed wholesale for the world's game. And it's working. $23 billion in value, climbing 6% a year. Miami signed one 39-year-old Argentine named Messi and nearly quadrupled the club's revenue in three seasons. One player.
The ocean comes to the pond
Which brings me back to my couch this summer. The most valuable event in all of sports isn't the Super Bowl. It's the World Cup. And this year the ocean came to the pond, played out in the very stadiums the NFL built. The turf Jerry Jones poured billions into spent the summer hosting the one show on earth worth more than his team.
I keep turning that over. We were certain soccer was the small game and football was the empire. We had the balance sheet right and the map wrong. The scoreboard tells you who won each match. The ledger told me something I was slower to hear. The game we never bothered to love is the richest one there is, and it never needed us to notice.
