The Super Bowl Economy
For entrepreneur Steve Sodell, the Super Bowl started in late October. That’s when he and his staff of 12 began renting retail space in shopping malls and hotels across the Phoenix metro area—stuffing shelves with NFL-licensed T-shirts, hats, and other collectibles emblazoned with this year’s Super Bowl XLII logo. By the day of the big game on Feb. 3, his makeshift merchandise empire will comprise 24 stores and 42 employees. Ten days later, business shuts down and Sodell starts planning for next year’s Super Bowl in Tampa. “We have a very short window of opportunity to make our money,” he says.
The race for Super Bowl profits is on. While the New England Patriots attempt to become the first team in the National Football League to reach a perfect 19-0 record, businesses across the country are banking on this game to be a bigger economic driver than any single sporting event in history.
Surprisingly, the NFL and the athletes on the field are not the richest beneficiaries of the big game. Players on the winning team each take home $78,000; on the losing team, each player gets $40,000. The league’s biggest take is from merchandise hawked at the game venue, at the online NFL shop, as well as at retail stores across the country. The sales record for such merchandise was set in 1997, at around $125 million, and sales have hovered just below that amount in the years since.
The league also reaps a majority of the proceeds from ticket sales, which will amount to around $57.6 million this year, given a sellout crowd of 72,000 and an average ticket price of $800.
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Photo by Getty Images.
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