American football is popular, but mostly to the local American audience! Around 150 to 160 million people glue themselves to their TV sets to watch a game. But a soccer game — or more commonly, football — has a much larger global audience. A Real Madrid game in the UEFA Champions League draws 500 million viewers worldwide. So why then are American football teams valued at double that of a soccer team?
The American football team, The Dallas Cowboys are currently valued at $13 billion by Forbes, a 29% jump from the year before, while Real Madrid sit at $6.75 billion. That’s almost exactly 2x, and the gap has only grown since 2016, when the Cowboys first knocked Real Madrid off the top spot.
The major reason is the kind of audience American football caters to. The US has an affluent, high-spending consumer base. Global media companies, from CBS to Fox and Apple to Amazon, bid heavily to secure that audience. It also comes down to the nature of the game.
While a soccer match has a continuous 45-minute half, American football games have more frequent breaks, giving companies more room to show ads — and people don’t usually skip channels while watching a live game. This is one of the major reasons these companies are so profitable.
Another major reason is the way money is divided in a major American football league like the NFL. NFL teams receive a fixed amount of revenue from media rights that is split equally among them. So they are never unprofitable.
The popular soccer leagues, like the Premier League, work on a different model. It’s actually a three-way split: 50% of broadcast revenue (both domestic and international) is shared equally among all 20 clubs, 25% is a merit payment based on final league position, and the remaining 25% is a facility fee based on how often a club is shown live on TV — which itself tends to favor the bigger clubs, since they’re on TV more anyway. So in practice, the split skews even more toward the top clubs than a straight two-thirds/one-third divide would suggest.
Also, NFL teams are never relegated, while Premier League or La Liga teams can be. This helps NFL teams command higher valuations. NFL teams also operate under a fixed budget for salaries and player acquisitions — a hard salary cap currently sitting in the $270-280 million per team range, applied uniformly across the league — giving every team an equal opportunity to recruit players.
Even relegation itself has a cushion built in, worth noting. The last-placed Premier League team still walks away with serious money — Sheffield United earned £112.6 million despite finishing bottom in 2023/24 — and relegated clubs receive parachute payments for three years afterward to soften the blow, worth roughly £225 million a year league-wide. So it’s not a cliff, but it’s still nowhere near the guaranteed equal share NFL teams get every single year.
There’s also a piece the revenue-sharing story alone doesn’t capture: NFL team valuations lean heavily on stadium economics. Many NFL stadiums were built with taxpayer subsidies, and teams keep local, non-shared revenue — luxury boxes, naming rights, parking — almost entirely to themselves. Soccer clubs don’t monetize their stadiums the same way, and that’s a big part of why NFL franchise values run so high beyond just the media deal.
Cricket boards operate on the same principle. The BCCI, the most valuable board in cricket at a valuation of around $2 billion, has also introduced hard caps on player spending in its own league, the IPL, to ensure equitable distribution — currently around ₹120 crore (roughly $14-15 million) per team per season. Teams also don’t get relegated, which gives media companies betting heavily on continuous eyeballs an added layer of assurance.
The English Premier League and Spanish La Liga are different — teams there can get relegated. And since there’s no hard cap on player spending, teams with bigger pockets, like Manchester City or Real Madrid, can spend more and skew the league in their favor. While this is better for the bigger teams and their valuations, it skews the competition — teams with smaller budgets underperform, matches can get lopsided, and weaker clubs risk relegation to lower divisions.
To be fair to the European model, though, that same promotion-and-relegation system is exactly what keeps it more meritocratic in one sense — a bad team gets punished, not just financially but by dropping out of the league entirely. The NFL has franchises that have been mediocre for decades and are still worth billions, with zero threat to their status. So the “closed league” model that’s great for valuations isn’t automatically the better model for competitive integrity — it’s a trade-off, not a free win.
Another angle is sports betting. Media companies spend heavily on capturing an audience they know will keep watching a match even if their team is losing, because they’ve wagered on the outcome. This is another reason the high-spending US audience matters so much to them.
At the end of the day, it’s not that American football is more loved than soccer — the viewership numbers make that clear. It’s that the NFL has built a business model that guarantees profitability no matter how a team performs on the field, while soccer’s biggest leagues still tie a chunk of the money to winning and losing. Guaranteed revenue, no relegation, a hard salary cap, and stadium economics that soccer clubs don’t have access to — that combination is worth more to investors than a bigger global audience. Real Madrid has the eyeballs. The Cowboys have the certainty.
And right now, certainty is what’s keeping the valuations up.
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