ABSTRACT
In 1920, the National Football League (NFL) was still a shaky proposition, with teams forming and failing on almost a weekly basis. When twelve of the league’s founders met to discuss a formal organization, the team entrance fee was a mere US$100. “There wasn’t one hundred dollars in the room,”said George Halas, who founded the Chicago Bears franchise,“but still each of us put up one hundred dollars for the privilege of losing money” (McDonough, 1994, p. 25). Today, the NFL is a multi-billion dollar conglomerate, with offices in five countries on three continents. In its valuations of NFL teams, Forbes estimates that the 32 teams in the league annually bring in a combined US$8.3 billion in revenues. The Dallas Cowboys are currently ranked as the NFL’s most valuable franchise at US$1.85 billion, but even the “poorest” team, the Jacksonville Jaguars, is worth US$725 million (Badenhauser, 2011).
