Patriots owner Robert Kraft sees the deal that will make NFL Media part of ESPN and give the NFL 10 percent ownership of ESPN as another step toward the league’s global growth ambitions.
“I think we’ve hooked up with the best partners we can have,” Kraft told NFL Network. “That will help expose us to more homes, more of an international audience. Strategically, we have to grow our salary cap and can only do that by — if we want to keep labor peace, we have to grow our audience. This transaction helps us to do that.”
The NFL is about as popular as any sports league can get in the United States, which means NFL owners have increasingly looked overseas when considering how to grow their business. Kraft emphasized overseas growth when discussing the partnership with ESPN and its parent company, Disney.
“This is a way for us to broaden our audience. We’ve done so much,” Kraft said. “I don’t think there’s any company like Disney and ESPN in doing sports, all sports. We need to expose our product to more people and a greater variety of people. We’re hooking up with the strongest sports amalgamation of sports product. We’re giving them what I believe is the best content, and they’re giving us the greatest operational company to grow our audience globally.”
The NFL is looking at steadily increasing the number of games played outside the United States, and potentially even putting a team or multiple teams in Europe, as it aims to become a significant TV draw in the rest of the world. With every deal the NFL makes, those global ambitions are front and center.
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