What We Can Learn from the NFL

This weekend, the Super Bowl stands as one of the greatest examples of the fusion of sport and entertainment, where a national league garners global interest on a scale that few other events can even dream of.

Every measure of the NFL's success over the past 20 years is impressive, whether it's financial performance, fan engagement, global reach, commercial partnerships or the turbo charging effect on female viewership of Taylor Swift and Chiefs Travis Kelce.

While I don't need to elaborate further on the NFL's well-known achievements, what fascinates me is what the Olympic movement can learn from this sport.

A key factor underpinning the NFL's success is its partnerships with brands, broadcasters, and athletes - which go beyond traditional relationships to create mutually beneficial collaborations.

This is crucial for the future, as the commercial landscape isn’t changing - it has already changed.

Athletes can now build their own brands and share content of their performances, which not only supports them but also helps grow the sport by fostering better and more authentic engagement with fans.  

At World Athletics we know about the power of this as we have lost a few track and field athletes to the NFL – names like former 110m World record holder, Renaldo “Skeets” Nehemiah who moved to the 49ers in the early to mid-1980s and more recently another 110m hurdler, Devon Allen, who has played for the University of Oregon and the Philly Eagles.   Given that track and field is the ‘mother of all sports’, where the core skills of running, jumping and throwing are on display, it is little wonder that scouts from all sports can be seen at track meets across the Americas!

Netflix documentaries, behind-the-scenes clips on social media, and making players more accessible are what clearly build fans' passion and excitement for a sport. It transforms the fan experience from feeling like an observer to feeling like an insider.

We've seen this at World Athletics, where our own Netflix documentary "Sprint" introduced some of our sprinters to new audiences; inspiring and enthusing people when watching the competition in Paris.

I'm proud that the recent sponsorship we announced with Honda wasn't a traditional sponsorship; it included providing World Athletics with an electric vehicle and several other activations to come supporting both our sustainability goals. It is a genuine partnership that can be mutually beneficial to both parties.

Arguably, the Super Bowl is as famous for its halftime show as it is for what happens on either side of it. I've never fully understood the resistance in some parts of the sporting community to keep sport and entertainment separate. We see in the opening and closing ceremonies of the Olympic and Paralympic Games the role music and performance can play in a symbiotic relationship with sport to help build the entertainment and passion of an event.  

At the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games, we understood this.  This is  why we entered into an exclusive music partnership with global powerhouse Universal Music Group and hired the supremely talented Oscar winning film director, Danny Boyle, to create an Opening Ceremony that changed the script on Olympic Opening Ceremonies and is still being talked about over a decade later.

We need to replicate this. The NFL does this so well, building excitement around the draft before the season has even begun, and that golden thread of merging entertainment, fan engagement, and sport running all the way through to the culmination of the season with the Super Bowl.

We simply need to make the Olympic Games more than just a couple of weeks every two years. We need to make the entertainment more than just the opening and closing ceremonies, and we need to embrace the power that art and entertainment have when intertwined with sport.

But beyond that, we need to ensure that we are growing future athletes, and future fans, as without them, there simply is no Olympic Games.

At my own Loughborough University, where I am proud to be the Chancellor, the NFL has its National Academy—a partnership between the university and the college to merge education and American football to develop future NFL stars from outside of America using talent ID programs in Europe and Africa.

Often when I'm at Loughborough, I can see these training sessions from the hotel, and not only am I struck by how tall these amazing athletes are, but the culture and camaraderie of the Academy is inspiring. Very few of these players come from the same country or even know each other beforehand, but this love of sport has bonded people and built a culture that is infectious and growing future talent.

This leads me to something that the NFL doesn't have but the Olympic movement does. The NFL is played by teams in one country—32 teams with close to 1,700 athletes.

At the Paris 2024 Olympic Games, we watched 10,700 athletes from 204 nations compete and for the Paralympic Games 4,400 athletes from 170 nations.  At the Beijing 2022 Winter Games around 3,500 athletes from around 90 nations competed for the Olympic and Paralympic Games.

When we come together either at the World Athletics Championships or at the Olympic or Paralympic Games, we are blessed with thousands of athletes from every corner of the globe. Events where global politics step aside, generating an inquisitive nature to ask about countries people may have never heard of or know very little about.

Their cultures, their connections, and their challenges in reaching the greatest stage on earth as one of the best are stories we simply do not tell enough—and we really need to—not just for the future of the Olympic Movement, but because they enrich the lives of all involved.

Good luck to both teams today.  As a spectator at the SuperBowl 56 in the SoFi Stadium (a venue for the LA28 Olympic Games) and a regular Bulls spectator in the 80s during my training in Chicago ahead of the LA84 Olympic Games, I wish I was there.