The NFL is coming to Melbourne, and it’s a big deal. A very big deal.
How big? Not quite as “big as the Super Bowl”, to steal a line from rappers Drake and J.Cole, but it’s as close as we’ll get. And a lot bigger than the average American football agnostic here might appreciate.
It’s probably the biggest sporting coup a city can pull off, aside from a FIFA World Cup or Olympic Games; the MCG will join famous venues like Wembley, Twickenham and Tottenham Hotspur stadiums in London, Mexico City’s Estadio Azteca, Munich’s Allianz Arena, and, this year, the storied Santiago Bernabéu in Madrid in hosting a regular-season NFL fixture.
And it’ll be worth a lot to Melbourne. London has been hosting NFL games since 2007, for a combined economic impact of $3 billion. Expect a record number of Sherrin-related photo ops that week.
Let’s run through some numbers to understand the bigness of this initiative, which forms part of a multi-year deal that will see the NFL bring games to these shores on an annual basis.
Salaries
Let’s start with one aspect of American sport that continually fascinates Australians: money.
Their best players get an awful lot of it.
For the 2025 season, each of the 32 teams will have to work within a salary cap range of $421 million and $437 million. The combined salaries for the season of the teams coming to Melbourne will push beyond $850 million.
For comparison’s sake, the AFL’s salary cap this year is $17.76 million, and the NRL’s is $11.4 million – and if you add up both entire competitions (18 in the AFL, 17 in the NFL) it’s a total of roughly $513 million.
So our two biggest football competitions combined equate to one and a bit NFL teams. Humbling.
Individually, the highest-paid player in the NFL in the 2024 season was Dak Prescott, the quarterback from the Dallas Cowboys, who took home an eye-watering $95 million. His Aussie equivalents? Unlike over there, those numbers aren’t released publicly, but as best we can tell, it’s Tom Lynch (Richmond, AFL; approx $1.5 million) and Kalyn Ponga (Newcastle, NRL; approx $1.4 million).
Dallas Cowboys quarterback Dak Prescott.Credit: AP
Both earn less than the average NFL salary, which is about $2.7 million. Which, for the record, is marginally bigger than the current A-League Men salary cap ($2.6 million).
And then there’s the sheer size of an NFL operation. Each team has a roster of 53 players, with an additional 17 spots for ‘practice squad’ players; guys who can help fill out the numbers at training and, if they’re good enough and there’s demand, earn a call-up to the real deal. That’s 70 players per team – so 140 of them will be flying out here next year, most of them giant individuals who are physically unsuited to typical long-haul seating arrangements. Whoa, mamma.
Broadcast figures
In 2023, the average viewership for a regular-season NFL game was 17.9 million in the United States alone. That’s not too far shy of Australia’s entire population which, according to the 2021 census, was 25.4 million. And that’s not including audiences elsewhere on the planet, which are also huge; according to the league, there is a growing base of 6.6 million NFL fans in Australia alone.
The last Super Bowl, meanwhile, was the most-watched program in American TV history, with a total of 123.7 million average viewers across all platforms. Add on top of that another 62.5 million from around the world.
Standing by her man: Taylor Swift with her boyfriend, the Kansas City Chiefs’ Travis Kelce, following his Super Bowl victory last year.Credit: Getty
The NFL’s media rights deals are thus, unsurprisingly, ginormous. Their last agreement, announced in 2021 and running through to 2033, is worth $155 billion. Each team gets an annual cut of about $350 million to run their operations.
The AFL, meanwhile, begins a seven-year deal this year, the richest in Australian sporting history – for a meagre $4.5 billion, which suddenly feels like spare change in a car’s centre console.
Attendances
Here’s one area where we actually have it over the Yanks … sort of. Not really. Maybe a little.
The MCG has a capacity of 100,024 (including about 95,000 seats). That is 12,500 seats more than the biggest stadium in the NFL: MetLife Stadium, home to the Giants and Jets of New York, which can seat 82,500 people (although AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas has 80,000 seats but can reach a capacity of up to 111,000 with standing room).
There are plenty of venues in American football with more seats than the MCG, but they’re all used for the college game, not the professional stuff.
Will this be the highest-attended game in NFL history? No, it won’t. The current record was set in 2009 when the Dallas Cowboys faced the New York Giants at AT&T Stadium, and there were 105,121 in attendance. And in 1980, Super Bowl XIV was held at the Rose Bowl in California in front of 103,985 fans – so six-figure attendance figures are not new.
But if the MCG is packed to the rafters – as it will be – it should be right up there.
A scenic view of the match that set the NFL attendance record in 2009.Credit: Sports Illustrated
Food
What do the people who go to these games do while they’re watching?
Stuff their faces, of course, with the most energy-rich food available to man.
They only track this sort of stuff for the Super Bowl, as far as we can tell, and not for regular-season games – so you’ll have to indulge us, just like Yanks indulge themselves silly when they’re at NFL games. According to NJ.bet, fans consume an average of 2923 calories while watching the Super Bowl, which is almost 1000 calories more than the recommended intake.
That’s a lot of enchiladas.
We look forward to seeing the menu at the MCG. After the half-metre hotdogs and huge helmets filled with nachos – the sort of fare that was served up at the SCG in 2014, when Major League Baseball came to town – the NFL has a lot to live up to.
Somehow, we think they’ll manage.
