As New Season Opens, Fairer Taxes Could Narrow 7,000-1 Income Gap
As the new National Football League (NFL) season kicks off this week, the economic gap between team owners and their most loyal fans is wider than the beefiest offensive lineman, according to a new analysis by Americans for Tax Fairness (ATF). The mean average of NFL owner wealth is $10.6 billion, which translates roughly into $600 million of annual income. In stark contrast, the median NFL fan has an income of just $85,000, or around 7,000 times less than an owner. That huge wealth and income difference means team owners will be big winners from Republican economic policies while team fans will suffer losses.
“Economic inequality is as much on display in the new NFL season as pinpoint passing, acrobatic catches and slashing runs,” said David Kass, ATF’s executive director. “The fans who loyally support their favorite teams through good years and bad, putting up with steadily rising ticket prices and concession-stand gouging, have little in common with the billionaires who own the franchises. It’s the owners, for instance, who will benefit from Trump-GOP economic policies in the form of huge tax cuts; while fans will lose money from a combination of cuts to public services and Trump’s chaotic tariff regime.”
The recently enacted economic policies of the Trump administration are a huge windfall for the handful of wealthy NFL owners, while making it significantly harder for millions of football fans to afford tickets and stadium concessions. The top 0.1% of highest-income households (of which every owner is certainly a member) will each on average receive a tax cut of over $286,000 next year. Between the 29 owners examined in this report, that tax cut alone is enough money to pay for over 66,000 free game-day tickets. Additionally, the families of these ultra-wealthy owners will each save $6.4 million thanks to Trump’s estate-tax cut, a provision that benefits fewer than 0.2% of families.
Meanwhile, the modest tax benefit the median fan is expected to receive from the Trump-GOP tax-and-spending plan will be completely wiped out and then some by Trump’s tariff hikes, likely costing the median fan $700 a year due to higher prices. An NFL fan who wants to order a hot dog at the game better hope that pork is not coming from Canada (which provides 67% of U.S. imports) or it will be subject to a 35% tariff price hike, making that hot dog $2.23 more expensive on average. Want to wash that overpriced hot dog down with a cold Modelo beer? Get ready to pay the 25% tariff price hike, or $2.29 cent more, to enjoy that icy beverage from Mexico (the source of 85% of all our beer imports).
Even without taking tariffs into account, the price of watching a professional football game has skyrocketed in recent years. Because the league has sold particular broadcast rights to so many different streaming services, it’s estimated a stay-at-home fan would have to pay upwards of a thousand dollars in subscription costs to have access to every game this season. The price of seeing the game in person (combining the cost of tickets, parking and concessions) has shot up around the league an average of 40% over the past decade, far outpacing inflation.
Source: Americans for Tax Fairness
All but four of the league’s 32 teams are owned by an identified billionaire, billionaire family or billionaire partnership. The median ownership net worth among the 29 teams privately owned for which data is available is $7.1 billion. Median U.S. household wealth in 2022 (the latest year with available data) was $192,700–that’s 35,000 times less.
Even compared to their players, NFL owners are making out like bandits. Though 100-million-dollar NFL pay packages make the headlines, the median league player makes $860,000 a year. And the opportunity to earn that amount is brief: the average player survives in the league for only about three years.
The tax treatment of the income players make by risking their health in violent contests each week is radically different from the treatment of passive investment income enjoyed by the owners up in the skyboxes. That average NFL player would pay a marginal income-tax rate of 37% on the top part of his salary; while if an owner made the same $860,000 from stock dividends or the profit from selling a winning investment, he would pay a top rate of only 20%.
In fact, we already know that at least some billionaire NFL owners are paying incredibly low federal income taxes, thanks to IRS documents uncovered by ProPublica. Stan Kroenke and Ann Walton, owners of the Los Angeles Rams and heirs to the Walmart fortune, paid an effective tax rate of just 14% on $786 million of income over six years. Another Walmart heir, Denver Broncos owner Rob Walton, paid an effective tax rate of just 20.6% on $3.9 billion of income over six years. Importantly both of these income figures excluded unrealized capital gains, which likely pushes these NFL owners’ real effective tax rate down into the low single digits.
Green Bay Fans vs Billionaire Owners:
How could the NFL function without the investments of a small clique of ultra-wealthy individuals? And without massive tax cuts how could these billionaires even afford to keep these teams running? We need billionaire team owners, right?
Wrong. There is one NFL team that has no billionaire backers, and is instead owned by the fans: the storied Green Bay Packers. Unlike every other team in the league, the Packers are a public, non-profit organization owned by more than 500,000 fans, with no individual allowed to hold more than 4% of total shares. Since it’s a non-profit, owners get no dividends or share appreciation but they do get a democratic say in the team’s operations and pride in being part of a community project.
If billionaire ownership were really essential to NFL success,the Green Bay Packers should be the worst team in the league. But in fact the Packers are the 4th best team over the last decade, not in spite of their lack of billionaire backing but very much because of it. Not only do they have a spectacular winning record, but they are also much more profitable than the average team despite the lack of billionaire-engineered profit motive. The Packers are ranked the 12th most valuable team (worth an estimated $6.3 billion) and had the 12th highest revenue in 2024 ($638 million), despite serving the smallest media market of any team. The Packers are also one of the least reckless teams when it comes to debt financing, with their outstanding debt about a quarter of the NFL average.
How We Can Make the Economic Game More Fair
President Biden proposed equalizing tax rates at higher incomes so that investment income was treated the same as work income. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) has proposed reducing the estate-tax exemption and increasing the tax rate on huge family fortunes like those of NFL owners. The top Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, Ron Wyden (OR), has a plan to annually tax the unrealized gains of billionaires. All these reforms would narrow the wealth and income divides between fans and owners, putting them on a more level economic playing field.
METHODOLOGY: Wealth estimates of NFL owners are published periodically. The income estimate is based on a recent examination of billionaires’ wealth versus income conducted by a team of eminent economists, including wealth expert Gabriel Zucman. Significantly, that income estimate does not include unrealized capital gains–the increase in value of assets not sold. At the wealth levels enjoyed by NFL owners, this form of income can be as good as money in the bank because investors can borrow against it at low interest rates and avoid paying taxes that would result from selling the underlying asset. A significant portion of each owner’s wealth is in the team itself and NFL teams appreciate in value quickly: the average appraised value of a league franchise jumped 20% between 2024 and 2025. Team ownership has become a more liquid (and therefore valuable) investment since the league last year approved selling minority stakes in franchises to private equity firms.