NFL commissioner Roger Goodell has signed a new four-year contract extension that will keep him in place through at least March 2031. At the end of this deal, Goodell will be nearly 72 and will have served as NFL commissioner for 24 years.
The NFL’s contract negotiation and approval process is straightforward: The league has a compensation committee run by team owners Robert Kraft (Patriots), John Mara (Giants), Shad Khan (Jaguars), Jimmy Haslam (Browns), Michael Bidwill (Cardinals), and Greg Penner (Broncos). That committee worked with an independent third-party compensation consultant and outside counsel to structure a deal with more than 95% of total compensation tied to various performance-based metrics. The committee then showed the final contract to every team owner and put it to a vote, with Goodell officially signing it last week.
But I don’t want to talk about the process. Instead, I want to talk about how much Roger Goodell gets paid and whether he is worth that amount of money to owners.
The details of Goodell’s contract aren’t public, but we can use available data to back into the numbers. For instance, since the NFL used to be structured as a nonprofit, we know Goodell took home $212.5 million during his first 10 years as commissioner. That transparency vanished when the NFL became a for-profit entity, but the New York Times reported several years ago that Goodell was paid nearly $128 million combined for the 2019 and 2020 seasons. So, if we assume Goodell’s compensation stayed at $60 million every year since 2020 (through 2031), he is on track to make about $1 billion in compensation as commissioner.
That makes Goodell one of the only people I can think of who earned more than $1 billion from a single company without owning any equity in that company. Not to mention, Goodell likely gets a ton of other perks. In 2017, ESPN reported that Goodell’s contractual demands during negotiations included things like the lifetime use of a private jet and also lifetime insurance for him and his family.
So is Roger Goodell actually worth all that money? The easy answer is yes, because franchise valuations have increased so much under his leadership. But you don’t read this newsletter for easy answers, so let’s run through the numbers.
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