We wake up every fall Sunday morning and go about our business.
Football is inevitably a part of it.
We place our wagers, set our fantasy lineups, and plan where to watch the day’s games. We either head out to a tailgate, perhaps splurging for admission, all the while glued to our phone for scoring updates, or prepare ourselves for eight straight hours of watching Red Zone in the comfort of our own home. For many of us, it’s as committed as we are to anything.
But, as Ken Belson tells us before we even open his latest work, “Every Day is Sunday,” because we do this all week long. We started our NFL preparation days before, the Thursday night game we tuned into religiously, regardless of who was playing. Oh wait, there are two more games on Monday. Sweet!
We obsess about the NFL, riding ups and downs from September to February, yet rarely do we give thought as to how this all came about. We just accept it as part of our ritual.
How did the NFL not only supplant our national pastime but dominate every television rating and demographic during our lifetime? How did football become so culturally ingrained that we talk about it daily, weekly if not all year round? How did the NFL overcome every other sport by leaps and bounds with no league coming a close second?
The answers to these questions are provided in Ken Belson’s “Every Day is Sunday: How Jerry Jones, Robert Kraft and Roger Goodell Turned the NFL into a Cultural & Economic Juggernaut.”
Within its pages, you’ll learn of statistics that will blow your mind, if only because this phenomenon happened before our very eyes. We were just too mesmerized to take notice. Player salaries, along with franchise values, have increased exponentially, and then exponentially again, since the 1990s. We marvel, but we don’t mind. It’s a gladiator’s going rate.
This didn’t happen by accident.
“By 2024, thirteen of the world’s twenty most valuable sports franchises in 2024 were NFL teams. The NFL wasn’t just a sports league, it was an immensely profitable American religion, complete with acolytes, pomp and tax breaks. Fans tiptoe past the wreckage, if they notice at all. The games are too much of a narcotic. The NFL didn’t invent the circus; they just have the best acrobats.”
Within “Every Day Is Sunday,” you’ll read about Art Modell, Jim Irsay, Al Davis and tales of teams jumping at the opportunity to move, using their position as leverage because they can. If you live in an NFL city, odds are your team has either relocated, built a new stadium and engaged in a highly publicized debate over who will pay for it. “Fans in Oakland, San Diego, and St. Louis were tossed aside so the owners could make even more money. Oakland and St. Louis spent hundreds of millions of dollars to help their NFL teams only to see them leave.” The Monopoly board negotiations that comprise the NFL’s history are controlled by a few good men, depending on how you define “good.”
You’ll read of the visionary Rupert Murdoch who shotput the NFL’s media revenue by demanding that his network, Fox, pay a pretty penny for televising games. “More than three decades later, the impact of Murdoch’s entry into the NFL continued to ripple through the sports world. He changed the paradigm for sports media rights.”
You’ll read about previous commissioners, Pete Rozelle and Paul Tagliabue, who laid the groundwork for the modern NFL, but the stars of this affair are Jerry Jones, Robert Kraft and Roger Goodell. The book provides background to these three key figures, their similarities, differences and sharing of one common goal: making the NFL all-powerful while getting filthy rich in the process.
While reading up on Jones, Kraft and Goodell might not sound like your cup of tea, think again. Benson expounds upon their roles in how this all came about, and in many ways, how we foot the bill. Belson would also like to remind you that Jerry Jones bought the Dallas Cowboys for $140 million in 1989, a franchise that is currently worth about $13 billion.
“His diplomatic skills made Kraft a longtime partner of and much-needed counterpoint to Jerry Jones. How they went about their business was a study in contrasts. Kraft was less of a dreamer but an expert at sifting through proposals and figuring out how to synthesize them into an actionable plan. He preferred to win people over by making them see the logic on their own, not wearing them down over bottles of Johnnie Walker Blue. Jones sees the love, and even the hatred of the Cowboys as good for the team’s brand. For him, the worst sin is to be boring. Being dull doesn’t sell tickets, jerseys or sponsorships.”
You’ll also meet less popular owners like former Carolina’s Jerry Richardson and Washington’s Daniel Snyder as Belson dives deep into the camaraderie, hierarchy and competitive spirit between the owners and how even the wealthiest can find their way out of the brotherhood.
Belson’s tale begins with the NFL’s groundbreaking, perhaps even league-saving, labor deal of the early 1990s, which set the tone for the upcoming millennium, ensuring both lofty players’ salaries and exponential growth for the owners. That agreement ensured no work stoppages and “made the NFL and players partners, laying the foundation for the league’s startling success over the following three decades.”
Despite his being booed relentlessly at the annual draft, Benson reminds us how Goodell was groomed for the position. He interned for Pete Rozelle and worked under Paul Tagliabue. “Goodell’s election was more than just a change in leadership, it was a change in how the league monetized its assets. Tagliabue was a skilled litigator who preferred to let the owners work out their own differences. At least in his first years as commissioner, Goodell was more of a politician who listened to the owners and synthesized their preferences. Goodell has long wanted the NFL to transcend sports. In his office, he kept a framed cover of a magazine with the names of the biggest corporate brands in the country, a reminder that he wanted the NFL to be among them.”
While he might go down as one of the most reviled commissioners of all time, there is no denying that under Goodell’s watch, the NFL achieved the greatest growth in both interest and income than any other sport in history. “Team valuations had soared so high during Goodell’s tenure that it was getting harder to find buyers for even minority stakes in teams. Goodell isn’t paid just to make money for the owners. He’s also paid to deflect criticism and solve problems, perhaps none bigger than the dangers of the sport itself.” The book is current enough that the private equity phenomenon is discussed at length.
Belson doesn’t shy away from the myriads of issues that confronted Goodell head on: Albert Haynesworth, Pacman Jones, Ben Roethlisberger, Michael Vick and Ray Rice among them, as well as CTE, Sundy Ticket, and Colin Kapernick, all of which provided challenges and even mishandlings from the commissioner’s office. No book on the growth of the modern NFL is complete without a thorough discussion of how delicate the Kaepernick controversy became and even how we no longer give it much thought.
All in all, Every Day is Sunday is a riveting, unbiased and all-inclusive account of how the modern NFL morphed into, as the title suggests, the “cultural and economic juggernaut” it is today. It is a worthwhile, informative supplement to the sport of which we cannot get enough.
I’d suggest reading it in the off-season but as Belson points out, there is no such thing.
