Sunday, February 1, 2015

The Non-Profit Football League.

University of Phoenix Stadium in Glendale, Arizona -- site of Super Bowl XLIX

Considering today is Super Bowl Sunday, I thought it poignant to touch upon a fact most of you are surely not aware of. The National Football League, which pulls in roughly nine to ten billion dollars of revenue every year, is a tax-exempt 501(c)6 organization.

That's right -- the NFL pays zero in taxes.

The absurdity of the National Football League doesn't end there, though. League Commissioner Roger Goodell took home over forty million dollars in earnings last year. Combined, the top five executives of the league were paid over sixty million dollars in salary. But... it gets worse.

Shockingly, the NFL receives an estimated one billion dollars in government subsidies from state and federal programs.

Yep -- you read that correctly. Not only does the NFL not pay taxes, but we the taxpayers actually give the league more money for free.

Why does the government give the NFL subsidies? Because NFL team owners are known to be fickle and ready to move to new cities at any moment. To keep teams locked into specific cities, the government awards these team presidents subsidies to stay put. Of course, the NFL worked hard to make sure the government would assist in their money-making venture. For fiscal year 2013, the NFL spent upwards of eighteen million dollars between two high-powered law firms in New York and Washington, D.C. to act as lobbyists to Congress.


As the old saying goes... money talks. In the NFL's case, it talks all the way to the bank.

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