The NFL's Logistics Problem

This video was made possible thanks to Skillshare. Learn from over 25,000 classes for free for two months at skl.sh/wendover6. No sports league in the world generates more money than the National Football League. The NFL earns more annual revenue than the English Premier League, the Champions League, Formula One, the Japanese Nippon Professional Baseball League and the Continental Hockey League combined. It is by far the largest sports league in the world by revenue. The NFL is made up of 32 football teams, each of which essentially acts as its own business. These teams are spread throughout the contiguous United States: some are separated by only 30 miles or 45 kilometers, others by almost 3,000 miles or 4,500 kilometers.

Now, American football teams are some of the largest sports, both physically and in numbers. They have a squad of 56 players, most of whom play in a given match. These players weigh on average around 250 pounds or 110 kilograms. The size of this equipment creates some particular travel needs. Each player needs a first-class seat, or at least the free seat next to him in economy, which means those 56 players take up much more than 56 seats. On top of that, a team typically brings more than 100 support staff and an immense amount of cargo to each away game. With the exception of the largest and most valuable, most other professional sports teams in the United States simply fly on chartered narrow-body aircraft such as the A320, 737 or 757, but most NFL teams, given their size , they need something bigger.

NFL teams tend to lease their planes from commercial airlines (American, Delta, United, or Hawaiian Airlines) and typically fly something a little larger than other teams, like a 767 or sometimes even a 777, but the nature of this charter work makes it especially difficult to find a plane to take them. You see, let's take the example of the New York Jets' final game of the 2018 season against the New England Patriots on December 30. For this game, they departed the day before on a United Airlines 767-400 at 3:37 pm landing 30 minutes later, at 4:07 pm, in Providence, Rhode Island. The plane then remained grounded at the Providence airport for the next 26 hours until the game ended.

The next day, the plane took off at 6:30 p.m. bound for New York. The plane's previous flight had been to Buenos Aires and its next flight was to London, and yet during these 26 hours, United only made money on the half-hour charter flight to and from Providence. It's easy to see why this wouldn't really be worth it for the airline, but at least the Jets are located next to a United Airlines hub at Newark Airport. Many teams, like the New Orleans Saints, for example, are not located in a city with an air hub. That makes it even more difficult to find an airline that will accept your charter contract.

That's because, for example, when the team had to travel to Charlotte last season, the 767 that took them had to fly empty from Houston, the closest United hub, then fly to Charlotte, stay on the ground for 33 hours and fly back. to New Orleans and then once again fly empty, this time to New York. In total, for the 2 hours and 51 minutes of flying they paid United, they used this plane for approximately 44 hours. Being located far from an airline hub, where the planes are based, charter flights will almost always require a plane to fly empty. It is for this reason that airlines are raising fares or simply stopping flying with NFL teams, as they consider normal commercial flights to be a more lucrative use of their planes.

American Airlines, in recent years, for example, dropped all the teams it previously flew with except the Carolina Falcons, Dallas Cowboys and Philadelphia Eagles, three teams located at its hub airports. More teams have moved their contract to dedicated charter companies like Atlas Air or Miami Air International, while the New England Patriots even purchased their own set of aircraft to solve this

problem

. Some other teams still have contracts with commercial airlines, but have switched to flying several smaller aircraft as they may be less in demand. The Indianapolis Colts, for example, now typically travel on two Delta 757s that depart within a half-hour of each other.

Other American sports, such as hockey, baseball and basketball, don't have as much of a

problem

because they play many more games per season, making their contracts more attractive to airlines, and they also tend to use smaller teams. Aircraft of which there are more available. The NFL briefly considered investing in its own fleet of planes or at least negotiating a deal with a wholesale airline, as the NBA does with Delta, but for now, NFL teams are seeing their travel costs skyrocket. as the laws of supply and demand prevail. hold. After losing their contract with American Airlines, for example, the Jacksonville Jaguars saw their travel costs double to $4 million a year when they chartered an Atlas Air 747—and remember, that $4 million pays for travel costs for just eight road games. .

But the NFL's most daunting logistical problem is not this. Their most daunting logistical problem relates to the NFL's other big problem: expansion. You see, part of the reason the NFL is the most valuable sports league in the world is because of how saturated the football market is in the United States. 57% of Americans identify as NFL fans. This is a surprising level of market saturation for what is, at its core, a business, but it also presents a problem because, with such a high proportion of the population already fans, it is quite difficult for the NFL to expand its audience. , at least within the U.S.

In the last decade, the league has turned its attention internationally. The NFL now plays regular season games in Mexico City and London. These cities do not have local teams, but rather two teams from the USA will come out to play. For the most part, these international games are aimed at promoting the sport in these two countries that already have significant fan bases that watch the sport on television. There has never been more than one game per season in Mexico City, but in London, in the 2019 season, they will play four regular season games. With 16 regular season games per team per year, any other city that has a resident NFL team typically only has eight home games, meaning London's number isn't that far off.

What's more, the Jacksonville Jaguars are designated as a sort of London home team and therefore play at least one of their games there each year in an attempt to give the city and the country a clear team to support. The league has even said it plans to eventually have eight full games per season in London, the same as any home city in the United States. The reason there are now so many NFL games in London is because the sport of American football has made significant inroads with the UK audience. The NFL estimates it has 13 million fans in the UK, 4 million of whom watch regularly and 47,000 of whom buy games for each NFL game in the UK.

His dedication to the United Kingdom has become so significant that he contributed $12.5 million to the construction of Tottenham Hotspur's new stadium in north London. This recently opened stadium was built to become the home of the NFL in the United Kingdom. It has a permanent synthetic football field beneath its grass soccer field; purpose-built NFL-sized locker rooms; and a media suite created around the preferences of the NFL press. In the coming years, at least two NFL games will be held each year in this stadium. Now, the

logistics

of these international games in London are formidable. When the Seahawks played in London in 2018, they had to ship 1,150 rolls of athletic tape, about 4,000 pounds or 1,800 kilograms of medical supplies, 350 power adapters, 500 shoes, 240 pairs of socks and tens of thousands of pounds more of equipment . to the city weeks before his arrival.

Months earlier, they had to arrange for many of their players, who had never left the United States, to obtain passports. The team's coaches had to carefully schedule their players' sleep during the previous week to reduce jet lag. There is even a hotel in Watford with a purpose-built American football practice pitch where teams normally stay. While these games in London present great difficulties and force teams to sacrifice a coveted home game, teams and their owners appear to tolerate them given their infrequency and the promise of the UK market. But the promise of the U.K. market could prompt the NFL to expand beyond eight international series games a year there.

You see, there is a very real and very serious discussion about the possibility of locating a National Football League team in London. There is no doubt that the city and the country could support a team in terms of fans. The problem, according to the league commissioner, would be having a single team parked more than 3,000 miles or 5,000 kilometers away from the next one. It would be an immense logistical problem considering that, for weekly matches, teams would have to take flights of up to eleven hours crossing up to eight time zones. On the other hand, this London NFL team would have to travel continuously throughout the United States for weeks at a time since, practically, it would make no sense for them to return to London between weekly games.

This would be a huge expense, would likely affect your performance, and would be unpopular with your players. Furthermore, as the UK does not yet have significant American football talent, the majority of the players on this team would come from the US and would need to be persuaded, monetarily or otherwise, to live abroad. from their country of origin. These are just some of the cost issues. Beyond that, it's not cheap to transport an entire NFL team over the Atlantic each week. For international series games, teams flew on 747 Virgin Atlantic or league-contracted A330s, but if London had a full-fledged NFL team, it would likely be treated like any other team, which means that both they and their American competitors would have to organize their own flights.

The wide-body planes that teams would have to rent to cross the Atlantic cost up to $50,000 per flight hour. That means transatlantic travel costs, in terms of the flight alone, would be between $650,000 for an East Coast team or up to a million dollars for West Coast teams. Teams also tend to transport tens of thousands of pounds of freight to each away game, which would further increase the cost. While such an expense would be less of an issue for large, wealthy teams like the Dallas Cowboys or New England Patriots, teams with smaller budgets like the Detroit Lions or Cleveland Browns would certainly have more trouble adding potentially an additional million in coaching costs. journey.

But this level of team isolation is unprecedented. Further west, in the middle of the Pacific, the University of Hawaii has a division one college football team: the Hawaii Rainbow Warriors. The closest team in their conference is 2,600 miles or 4,200 kilometers away, in San Diego. To get there, they take a five-hour flight. That's just an hour or two faster than it would take an NFL team from London to reach its closest competitor: the New England Patriots. While the farthest team in the Rainbow Warrior Conference is just a seven- or eight-hour flight away in Colorado Springs, Colorado, each year they play a series of non-conference games that take them all the way to the US East Coast to 10 hour flight from Honolulu, which is almost exactly the same as the longest travel time required for an NFL team to London.

Not only that, but the Hawaii Rainbow Warriors also have to balance their time with school schedules, meaning they travel to their away games much closer to kickoff than NFL teams typically do. London. The Rainbow Warriors regularly rack up more travel miles than any professional football team. For example, in a particularly grueling month in 2016, the team began its season with an international match in Sydney, Australia, then the following weekend it played in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and then the following weekend it played in Tucson, Arizona , which means 25,000 people flew. miles or 40,000 kilometers in just one month. The Rainbow Warriors also do most of their travel on commercial flights, making their travel even more difficult than the teams in theNFL.

Now, this potentially gives the team a more significant home-field advantage, as they are used to playing jet-lagged, whereas their opponents, when flying to Hawaii, would not be, but it also supports the view that, logistically, It would be possible to add an NFL team in London. There are even professional sports leagues that already require regular travel of similar or greater distances. The Continental Hockey League, for example, has teams spread throughout Asia and Eastern Europe, meaning that teams from Beijing, Vladivostok, Khabarovsk and Beijing regularly have to travel more than 4,000 miles or 6,500 kilometers to play against teams. from Minsk, Riga, and Helsinki.

An even more extreme example would be Super Rugby, which has teams spread across Japan, Argentina, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand. With this, when the Tokyo Sunwolves play against the Buenos Aires Janguares, for example, they have to travel more than 11,000 miles or 18,000 kilometers round trip to get to their game. Part of the NFL's problem is simply the sheer scale of its competitions with many tens of thousands of pounds of equipment and many hundreds of personnel traveling to each game. The problems are surmountable, however, at a cost, but this cost would be partially borne by all other teams in the league.

The question then becomes, given the promise of adding an entirely new country to the league, whether the cost is worth it. Now, if the NFL expands to London, one of the first things the new team will need is a logo. Luckily, there's a class on Skillshare for that. Professional animator Fraser Davidson, who has actually done design work for the NFL, teaches this fantastic course that will guide you through the process of creating your own mascot. This is just one of over 25,000 classes on Skillshare, each teaching him something he can use for work, school, or just for fun.

A few more he would recommend are Storytelling 101, Productivity Masterclass, and Cinematography Basics, all of which you can download offline on the iOS or Android apps. You can learn from any of these 25,000+ classes for free for a month by signing up at skl.sh/wendover6 and you'll support the program while you do it.