How the NFL’s unapologetic marketing strategy is diversifying its fanbase - SportsPro (2025)

With US$120 billion worth of media rights deals and estimated annual team sponsorship revenue of US$2.5 billion, one would be forgiven for thinking that money is always front of mind for the National Football League (NFL).

However, the league’s marketing department, at least, spends its time focusing on a different kind of currency.

“Our only currency at the league, as with any other sport, is relevance,” says Marissa Solis, the NFL’s senior vice president of global brand and consumer marketing. “So we have to stay relevant to the growing fanbase and the future generations.”

It might seem paradoxical for a league that averages more than 17 million viewers for national broadcasts of its regular season games and occupied 72 of the 100 most-watched US television events in 2024 to be talking about increasing its relevance. But there is an acknowledgement within the NFL that there is plenty of room to grow beyond its core fanbase by reaching younger audiences and expanding internationally.

To do that, though, the NFL and its 32 franchises have had to show a willingness to change. Indeed, when Tim Ellis was installed as the league’s chief marketing officer in 2018 after more than seven years at video game developer Activision Blizzard, he was not overly impressed with what he saw.

“I essentially got around all the [team] presidents and said, ‘listen, I’ve taken a really close look at your marketing groups, and it’s not a pretty picture,’” recalls Ellis, who was speaking alongside Solis on-stage at SportsPro New York in March.

“I laid out a blueprint for them [and said], ‘this is what your marketing organisation can and should look like, this is how many people you need in these disciplines, and this is the competency that you need in these areas in order to be successful.’

“There are plenty [of franchises] now who have really strong marketing teams. And that helps us overall – within the US and abroad.”

The NFL has incorporated more inclusive messaging into its communications to help change perceptions of the organisation (Image credit: Getty Images)

‘We do communication a lot of our fanbase doesn’t like’

Ellis took over the league’s marketing department at a time when the league was at war with some of its players over its national anthem policy, under intense scrutiny regarding links between the sport and CTE, the progressive brain disease linked to concussions, and facing claims that it was somewhat out of touch with the modern world. Since then, however, the league has worked hard to change the narrative by repositioning itself as a more open, approachable and inclusive organisation.

Today, the NFL has a two-pronged marketing strategy which aims to service the league’s core audience by serving them content that spotlights the on-field product, while also seeking to transcend the sport with a “helmets off”, human-centric and, sometimes, cause-related approach.

“Fans out there, they don’t really care that much about a league,” Ellis says. “They care about the players, they care about their clubs, and then, in a distant, distant third, it’s the league.

“So even though our brand is the NFL, we’re ambassadors of football. We do everything in our power to get behind the spirit of the athlete and have that human, emotional connection with our fans, and then, depending on what the fans are interested in, finding ways to feed them that type of content.

“And I think we’ve been pretty good at working well with our players and getting behind the things that they care about.”

In addition to creating content focused on player passions like music, fashion and gaming, that strategy has seen the NFL delve deeper into more polarising subjects that it didn’t dare venture into in the past, perhaps in fear of the backlash it might receive from its most ardent supporters. However, the league has doubled down on its commitment to areas such as social justice and diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), and now regularly incorporates inclusive messaging into its communications.

As a result, Ellis claims the NFL has gone from being “dead last” to “number one” amongst all the US major leagues for image perception, which has reached an all-time high for the organisation.

“I think the best strategy we have had, basically, is to say] football is for everyone,” he continues. “And I think we’re very, at times, provocative and brave in the way that we do that.

“We do communication that I know a lot of our fanbase doesn’t like, but it’s OK to make some people uncomfortable, as long as you’re growing your fanbase and as long as you’re doing the things to retain that core audience, which we are.

“I hear a lot at times: ‘Why you do that stuff? Just stick to football. Why are you doing these things that feel to us like politics?’ Well, for us, it’s not politics. It’s just being good humans. It’s according to our values. If it makes some of our audience uncomfortable, that’s OK.

“I think that’s helped us get to where we are and ultimately retain that base and bring in a whole new audience.”

‘If you don’t get fans by the time they’re 18, you never will’

Ellis says the NFL has different programmes to build its audience among the youth segments aged between five and 12 and 12 to 24, while he describes the Hispanic and Latino community as “critical” for the health of the league “today and tomorrow”.

Another major focus for the league in recent times has been building its female fanbase.

While Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce’s relationship with Taylor Swift might have delivered a short-term increase in the NFL’s female following, the league sees flag football as an enduring driver of its popularity among women and for growing the sport overseas. Reports suggest that the organisation has also attracted interest from ten parties – Serena Williams and her husband Alexis Ohanian among them – about investing in a professional flag football competition ahead of the sport’s inclusion at the Los Angeles 2028 Olympic Games.

To that end, it was no surprise that the non-contact version of the sport was the subject of the NFL’s Super Bowl commercial earlier this year, which cast the likes of Pat McAfee, Marshawn Lynch and Myles Garrett alongside some of the best female players in the world to spotlight girls flag football. While playful in its tone, the action-packed, two-minute spot ended on a serious note, with a call to ‘leave the past behind’ and ‘make girls flag football a varsity sport in all 50 states’.

“That’s a critical marketing strategy,” says Ellis. “It’s participation, but it’s a marketing strategy because we know that if you play the game, you’re four times as likely to become a fan. And if you don’t get them by the time that they’re 18 years old, you’re probably never going to get them.”

‘We are not, right now, global’

The NFL’s latest Super Bowl ad speaks to the way that the league’s champion-crowning fixture has become a global marketing platform for some of the organisation’s most prominent strategic initiatives.

Last year, for example, the NFL used its Super Bowl commercial to amplify its international player pathway programme as the league continues to explore opportunities to expand outside of the US. The NFL’s slate of overseas regular season games this year will feature the first fixtures in Spain and Ireland before the league makes its debut in Australia in 2026, but the ambition is to eventually have 16 international matches annually.

Even so, Ellis says that while the international games help “get people interested”, they are “not the end of the strategy”. The goal, he adds, is to be “a top three sport in every market where we operate”.

“Let’s face it: we are not, right now, global,” Ellis concedes. “We play in global games, but we have a long way to go before we’re in the top three sports in our key markets around the world. And we’re very aware of that, self-aware, and we have to make major strides in order to be successful.”

That’s one of the reasons that the NFL introduced its global markets programme, which gives its clubs international marketing rights to develop their audience in specific countries. In doing so, the hope is that the interest fans overseas already hold in the sport morphs into a more hardcore affinity with a specific team and its players, making them more likely to engage with the league on a regular basis.

Launched in 2022, the programme has been expanded to 29 clubs and 21 international markets this year, with the Baltimore Ravens, Green Bay Packers, LA Chargers and Washington Commanders the latest to sign up.

“It’s often several teams in a given market, but they have to prove to us that they’re actually going to invest and they’re actually going to do the things that need to be done in order to be successful there,” Ellis continues.

“And what we’ve found is, over time, it’s actually working. If you go now into the UK, you’ll see that there are certain teams, like the [Minnesota] Vikings, who have been there quite a bit, people know their brand. They know the culture around their brand. They understand who they are as a team, their values and the things that are important to them as a sports group.

“So if the NFL can go in there and do all the things that we’re doing, and then have the teams go into these individual target countries and create fandom for their groups, then it’s really a way for us to be much bigger and stronger.”

‘We’ve taken risks that paid off’

While the NFL is increasingly broadening its horizons, Ellis admits that that the league has historically been “tight on a lot of things”, particularly when it comes to the use of its content.

In recent years, though, the NFL has recognised it has to stop taking itself so seriously if it wants to resonate with different audiences. Like other US sports properties, the league has now experimented with cartoon alt casts and has a fully-fledged creator strategy to help it reach younger fans on emerging platforms through influential online personalities. It has also been one of the most prominent adopters of streaming, with Amazon, YouTube and Netflix now all in possession of a package of games as the league looks to cater to evolving consumption habits.

“You have to show up in a way that your fanbase will engage,” adds Solis. “Ten years ago, we showed up in a very different way. Today, you have to be where your audience is. We can’t expect them to come and just watch our four-hour games, we have to go out and be where they are – whether that’s platforms like TikTok or YouTube, we have to be there.”

The NFL has deepened its engagement with influencers like IShowSpeed in an effort to reach younger audiences

Ellis, meanwhile, believes that the changes that have been implemented within the NFL’s marketing division are symptomatic of a broader willingness to embrace risk within the business.

“Traditionally, we’ve been a very conservative organisation,” he says. “If you think about the shield, which is our logo, it looks like the police shield, like we’re the police. That’s not what we are, that’s not what we want to be.

“So we have done a lot of work to open up the game, open up the rights to these things, not be so controlling over how many things you post per week and things like that. So we’ve really worked hard to allow our partners and to allow the clubs and so forth to have much more flexibility in how they operate.

“I think one of the boldest moves that we have made over the last several years is going from linear TV to our streaming partners and to not only be in certain places. That took some risk, right? And we’re getting TV-like audiences on [streaming platforms like] Amazon, on YouTube, on Netflix.

“There’s lots of things that we did which relaxed some of our somewhat conservative principles and rules, as well as taking risks which really have paid off.”