Sports

Today’s guest column is from professors John Cairney and Rick Burton.

The more football we watch this fall, the clearer something becomes. As amazing as this sounds, the NFL isn’t just back. It’s well into a new winning streak.

In the not-so-distant past, the NFL’s grip on the “America’s Game” title might’ve looked like it was loosening. The threats weren’t coming just from rival leagues or the loss of an occasional sponsor. The challenges were deeper and more structural.

The list included mounting concerns about player health and safety, particularly around concussions; controversies over player protests and social justice; off-field scandals; and creeping erosion of the public’s trust in the product and league office.

In some ways, it started with commissioner Roger Goodell. His approval rating had plummeted. Fans, players and even some owners openly wondered if he should step aside.

Fast forward to the 2025–26 season, and the contrast couldn’t be starker. In Week 1 the NFL headed to São Paulo, Brazil, underscoring global ambition intent on transforming rhetoric into reality. A record seven international games will be played this year across five countries—Brazil, England, Germany, Ireland and Spain—with Australia joining the slate in 2026.

The globe-hopping games no longer feel like novelties. They’re an embedded part of the NFL’s calendar. Additionally, in a frenzied media world, NFL viewership is surging. ESPN’s broadcast of the Texans–Chiefs matchup delivered 32.7 million viewers, the most watched NFL game in network history. The Chiefs-Bills game gave the league more of the same.

Sponsorship revenues are also at record levels—$2.49 billion league-wide in 2024—and the league’s franchises have never been more valuable. The Dallas Cowboys just eclipsed a net worth of $10 billion, and every single NFL team is valued at more than $5 billion. A decade ago, those figures would have seemed unlikely.

Put the above in context and one thing seems clear: The NFL never lost confidence in its brand, and we think there’s a leadership lesson in that.

Rosabeth Moss Kanter, in her book Confidence: How Winning Streaks and Losing Streaks Begin and End, describes how organizations rise or fall not simply on performance but on belief. Winning streaks are sustained because leaders project assurance and act decisively, reinforcing systems that produce results. Losing streaks spiral when doubt infects decision-making, eroding both morale and execution.

By that standard, the NFL of the mid- to late-2010s looked like an institution teetering on a losing streak. But instead of succumbing to doubt, it acted with confidence.

So how did the NFL reverse its fortunes? The answer lies in organizational conviction expressed through bold goals, direct confrontation with crises and strategic expansion.

When Goodell announced in 2010 he wanted the NFL to reach $25 billion in annual revenue by 2025, eyebrows arched because the league was bringing in in roughly $8 billion annually. The 3 times target seemed audacious, even reckless. But confidence is often revealed in ambition.

Rather than scaling back amid criticism in the late 2010s—including barbs during the Colin Kaepernick-inspired racism protests—the NFL pressed ahead. It secured mammoth broadcast contracts, embraced new primetime slots like Amazon Prime’s Thursday Night Football and invested heavily in digital streaming.

Revenues have since surged past $20 billion annually. The $25 billion mark remains unmet but within reach, and the trajectory reflects Kanter’s argument: Winning organizations reinforce belief by setting bold goals and aligning resources around them.

The most existential threat the NFL faced was not declining ratings but the possibility the public would reject the sport on health and ethical grounds. The concussion crisis and perception the league had mishandled them, looked dangerous.

Here, though, confidence meant acting rather than retreating. Goodell’s administration instituted concussion protocols, standardized treatment and return-to-play guidelines, and invested in medical research. The league settled a landmark lawsuit with former players (initially capped at $765 million but later uncapped to allow unlimited claims).

Critics argued the reforms came too late, but notably, the NFL didn’t allow doubt to paralyze it. Instead, it absorbed the blow, acknowledged the problem and began the long process of restoring trust. They confronted a crisis head on rather than denying or ducking it.

Kanter also notes confident organizations reinforce belief systems even when they come under fire. In the NFL’s case, they “protected the shield.” Their unified communications teams projected a positioning that the NFL was bigger than any single scandal, fallen star or institutional/team misstep. Heavy-handed or not, NFL leaders communicated the league, as an entity, remained in command of its own narrative.

Perhaps the most confident act of all was international expansion. Staging games in São Paulo, Madrid, Berlin, and soon Sydney was not risk-free. A poor showing abroad would have exposed football as parochial, a big sport without global reach.

Instead, the league acted as though the world wanted American-style football—and then worked to make that true. Today, international games are sellout events, broadcast widely (i.e., the recent Berlin game) and celebrated as milestones in the sport’s globalization. The strategy mirrors Kanter’s point: organizations on winning streaks expand their horizons, using momentum to create new opportunities rather than waiting for conditions to be perfect.

What ultimately explains the NFL’s revival is not just media contracts, safety protocols or global scheduling. It may be simpler. The NFL never allowed stakeholders to lose confidence. Even at the height of criticism—when protests dominated headlines, concussion lawsuits mounted, and the commissioner’s popularity cratered—the NFL projected resilience.

To be sure, the NFL can still seem thin-skinned. The leagues’ recent gripes with the NFLPA over the union’s annual report cards have been criticized for being defensively reactive and unnecessary.

Kanter’s research shows when organizations sustain confidence, they turn turbulence into momentum. The NFL is a textbook case. Instead of succumbing to doubt, it has acted decisively, reinforced belief in its brand and transformed challenges into pulled levers generating growth.

In the end, the NFL didn’t just survive the crisis years—it demonstrated organizational sure-footedness, paired with bold leadership, can turn deflation or doubt into continued, sustainable growth. Into a new winning streak.

John Cairney is head of the University of Queensland’s School of Human Movement and Nutrition Sciences. He also serves as deputy executive director for the Office of 2032 Games Engagement and directs Queensland’s Centre for Olympic and Paralympic Studies. Rick Burton is an honorary professor at the University of Queensland and the David B. Falk Emeritus Professor of Sport Management at Syracuse University. He is co-author (with Norm O’Reilly) of The Rise of Major League Soccer (Lyons Press).