Why NFL owners want football in the Olympics

Yahoo

20-05-2025

Why NFL owners want football in the Olympics | Inside Coverage
Yahoo Sports' Jason Fitz, senior NFL reporter Charles Robinson and senior NFL writer Frank Schwab discuss the league's role in getting the sport into the Olympics and having NFL players eligible to compete in the summer games. Hear the full conversation on 'Inside Coverage' - and subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube or wherever you listen.
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Video Transcript
We were having our production meeting, getting ready for the show, and we started talking about flag football.
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And I, I guess I was shook because all I thought was, oh, flag football players must, uh, must think it'd be kind of cool to play in the Olympics.
And you blew my mind because it's about so much more, like everything else in the world is about money.
Follow the money.
But it's about so much more than that, see, Rob.
It blows my mind to think that the owners are sitting here thinking about globalization of a sport.
NFL owners for years have been sitting and staring at India.
China, countries with massive populations where the NFL, there's really nothing there for them.
They're, they're an oddity at best.
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No one plays the sport, they don't understand the sport, they don't know the players.
So the way I kind of focused this was years ago, I spent some time with Jerry Jones, we were talking about China, about how to crack the, the market.
He kind of approached it from two standpoints.
One was sort of top down, where he's like, hey, we do it, you know, you do it the way you try to do it in Western Europe and the UK, you deliver them the NFL product, you go and you play some games there.
You hope eventually that saturates enough of a fan base, and, and then you build it from there.
It's a very much a top-down approach.
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But he's like, to do that, you have to cultivate fans having rivalries with each other.
You have to get fans in Shanghai and Beijing to, to identify with certain teams and then sort of have the friendly rivalries we do as fans in the United States.
Then he said, there's a flip side of it.
Maybe you just need to give them a reason to pick up a football.
And he's like, and it's not so simple, but really, maybe that's the way you start.
Just get them to pick up a football.
I think the way the NFL looks at this is, OK, we go to the Olympics, it's a global stage, you know, all these other sports, hockey's had the Olympic stage, baseball's had the Olympic stage, basketball's had the Olympic stage, soccer's had the Olympic stage.
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We've never had it.
So maybe our way to crack China, to crack India, to get a football in the in the hands of fans, is to get some element of our game into the Olympic stage.
And that's how we'll get a football in the hands of fans, and that's where we'll really start to plant seeds that will get people interested in football as a sport and then the NFL as the best expression of that sport.