Roger Goodell is used to being heard.
As the commissioner responsible for the NFL’s explosive growth over the last two decades, Goodell has overseen a transformation at “The Shield” that has turned him from a corporate figurehead into one of the most powerful voices in sports. And while the change of the NFL’s last two decades is perhaps best seen in the league’s Excel spreadsheets — TV deals that used to sell for hundreds of millions are now auctioned off for hundreds of billions — it is perhaps best felt in the strength of the commissioner’s voice when he speaks.
That strength was evident in a private setting after the completion of Super Bowl LVIII, according to a new book about the commissioner and the league, when Goodell reportedly delivered a withering line about his competitors.
“We’re not competing with the NBA or MLB,” Goodell allegedly said. “Our competitors are Apple and Google.”
The truth, of course, is that Goodell didn’t intend his sentence to be a slight to the MLB or NBA. He was merely acknowledging a fact that few outside of the sports business world cared to realize: That the business of the NFL had changed from selling football to selling attention.
The sport at the center of the NFL’s business is football, yes, but the unifying theory at the center of the NFL’s business is attention. The NFL wants as much attention as you are willing to sell, for as long as you are willing to sell it, and even when you are not selling it, the NFL wants to seize your attention in as many ways as possible. The league goes about this in a variety of ingenious ways: Staging a schedule that features games loaded with drama and intrigue, building a year-round calendar that brings meaningful football moments to most months of the year, signing a set of TV rights agreements that force live broadcasts into the every nook and cranny of the country, and yes, greasing the skids for the Fantasy Football obsession that allows even fans of the poor performers to find emotional investment and success.
In many ways, this is the same blueprint (applied very differently) that has fueled the planet-blotting growth of tech giants like Apple and Google. For those companies, the spear was different — the iPhone, and the search engine that served as the gateway to the internet — but the strategy was similar. For both companies, “success” was defined not in cash or market share, but in the way their products managed to have the same stranglehold on consumers that the NFL has exercised increasingly in recent years.
Think about it: The NFL can get away with things that no other sport can. It can decide to take over a day of the week, as it did with Thursday Night Football. It can decide to take over a brand-new platform, as it did with Netflix. It can convince the world to play a fake sport. Hell, it can compete with Santa Claus.
These revelations feel small when they happen, but they coalesce to form something much larger than the sum of its parts. For most Americans, the NFL is much more than a “product.” It is a shared language.
Thankfully, one of golf’s largest stakeholders is already intimately familiar with the NFL’s thinking: The PGA Tour’s newest CEO is Goodell’s longtime right-hand man, Brian Rolapp. Perhaps no man is better equipped to speak about these processes than Rolapp, who helped oversee some of Goodell’s grandest accomplishments as commissioner, and who enters the PGA Tour with an expertise in the attention economy.
“[Brian] is coming from a place where the biggest brands and the biggest stars compete against each other as much as possible in the most high profile time slots on the biggest platforms to drive the most interesting viewership,” a source told GOLF in a feature about his hiring in June. “The PGA Tour needs help in that regard.”
For pro golf, the lesson here is simple: The pursuit is not just about winning TV ratings battles, but also about winning the fight for attention. The blueprint is similar to the NFL’s: Bring golf to as many eyeballs as possible, wherever they live (on TV, YouTube, or social media); find new ways to provide existing events with meaning and drama; and pioneer the levers that will decide the future of the sport. (This strategy, by the way, could also be credited to Augusta National, which counts Goodell as a member.)
That might mean a Tour with a smaller, nimbler schedule that cohesively builds towards something larger. It might mean rethinking the approach to new media, or equipment, or venues or rules. It probably does mean congregating the best players in the world more often. Mostly, though, it means pursuing things that make you better in ways that might not make you immediately richer.
For Rolapp and the rest of the heavyweights at the top of the golf business, these are harder goals than they seem. Chasing football’s success can be tricky business for a sport without the NFL’s might or mettle — and if the commish’s comments sounded outlandish for the NFL, they’d sound even crazier coming out of the mouth of an executive at the PGA Tour.
But there is a message in Goodell’s admission worth hearing for golf as it turns the page on 2025 — a lesson that Goodell himself learned a long time ago.
If you’d like to be heard, pay attention.
