David Rosenthal: evaluation

Transcript context

…Totally. And if you have a league that figures out how to make sure that it's always competitive, and when I say always competitive, what that translates into it from a business perspective is, let's say every stadium has 40,000 seats and you have eight teams, that means you have the capability to sell 160,000 seats every weekend. And your goal is to sell 160,000 tickets every single weekend. What you basically need is to make sure that it's always a great game to come watch. And to your point that the business model is around the gate or ticket sales rather than TV, that actually stayed the case until 1977. That was the first year that the NFL made more money from television revenue than from ticket sales. That is a full 30 years later than the time period we are talking about here. I didn't realize it was that long because television's going to come in a big way. But back to Bert Bell, the newly drafted commissioner of the NFL, this is his great insight that he realizes as he's marshaling the NFL owners in the battle against the AAFC. He adopts this as his mantra that literally, they made a movie with this title. On any given Sunday, any team in the league should be able to beat any other team. And he pushes this through with the owners and gets them all to agree to this, like, hey, the only way we're going to survive and prosper is if we agree that none of our teams can get so dominant that we end up with a Cleveland Browns situation. All right, so David, Bert Bell, the new commissioner of the NFL adopts this mindset of, we have to keep the game competitive always. What do they do structurally?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.