The bulk of the NFL’s enormous revenues comes from the league’s enormous TV contracts with NBC, CBS, FOX, ESPN and DirecTV. But the league also makes a fortune from sponsorships, and they’ve just extended a big one.
Anheuser-Busch and the NFL have agreed to extend Bud Light’s sponsorship of the league for another six years, through the 2022 Super Bowl. According to the Wall Street Journal, the deal will pay the NFL $1.4 billion, which works out to more than $7 million for each team, every year of the sponsorship.
That sponsorship will allow Bud Light to do things like put sponsored highlights on social media and award “Bud Light Players of the Game.” That’s on top of the enormous amount of money that Bud Light (and its rival beer makers) spend to buy commercials on NFL broadcasts.
“We’ve done the math and wouldn’t be renewing this sponsorship if we didn’t believe this would allow us to sell more beer,” Anheuser-Busch executive Lucas Herscovici said.
And that demonstrates once again just how powerful the NFL is. Nothing reaches more Americans — especially beer-drinking men in their 20s and 30s — than the NFL. And so for all the missteps the league has taken on everything from domestic violence to Deflategate, big companies want to do business with the NFL.