REVEALED: NFL boss Roger Goodell's scheme to transform league into $25 billion behemoth... but is it at the expense of loyal American fans?

NFL commissioners don't have highlight reels, but if they did, Roger Goodell's tape would start with his state-of-the-league address at Orlando's Ritz-Carlton Grande Lakes resort in March of 2010.

It wasn't a comfortable time for Goodell, who'd been promoted to commissioner at the onset of a 2006 labor deal negotiated by his predecessor, Paul Tagliabue. Despite the NFL's unquestioned status as America's most popular sports league, Goodell was facing criticism over the league's handling of concussion injuries and had recently laid off 15 percent of his office's staff amid a struggling economy.

But it was that fraught 2006 labor deal as well as a seven-year low in ticket sales that truly troubled NFL team owners gathered at the Ritz ballroom. Described by Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones as a 'mean mother,' the collective-bargaining agreement (CBA) shifted 60 percent of all football revenue to the players, leaving the owners with a dwindling piece of the pie at a time when stadium costs were soaring.

They'd already voted to opt out of the deal two years earlier, thereby setting the stage for the 2011 lockout. In the meantime, Goodell desperately needed the support of billionaire owners, all of whom wanted 'to get bigger,' as Ken Belson, author of 'Every Day Is Sunday' told Daily Mail.

Goodell famously took the stage in Orlando and laid out his goal of raising NFL revenue from $8 billion to an unthinkable $25 billion by 2027. 

'Roger doesn't view the other leagues as competition,' a league staffer told Belson in his new book, which also focuses on Jones and New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft. 'He wants to be mentioned with Disney and the Vatican, these massive institutions.'

Considered to be the media authority on the NFL's inner workings, Belson sees the quote as 'accurate.'

'Disney is a media company and the Vatican is an institution,' Belson told Daily Mail. 'He's not looking about just putting on games. He wants to be 24/7, 365, and to do that, you got to make a lot of money.'

And he's proven adept at doing exactly that.

Goodell's NFL boasted $23 billion in revenue for the 2024 season and the league is on pace to reach his $25 billion goal by his 2027 deadline, when his own contract is set to expire.

'I thought the target was aggressive, but to be honest, achievable,' Kraft told Belson of the $25 billion goal. 'I'm proud of Roger for putting it on the table to motivate everyone in the league office and the business management of teams that we all had to pull it together and try and make that happen.'

That growth may not make him a success in the eyes of fans, many of whom blame Goodell for various league controversies like anthem protests or player conduct issues. But it has helped him build favor with owners – or at least the 24 he needs on any given issue for the requisite two-thirds voting majority.

In turn, Goodell rewarded his bosses by successfully negotiating with the players' union to add a lucrative 17th game to the regular season. Furthermore, he's settled a $1 billion class-action concussion lawsuit, secured a 10-year CBA and finalized an 11-year media rights deal that pays $111 billion through the 2033 season.

He has also made no secret of his plans to take the game global, and it is his aim to have 16 international games a season - one for every team, every year.

This season has seen games take place in London, Dublin and Sao Paulo, with Berlin and Madrid still to come, and Melbourne on the list for 2026. Asia is in the crosshairs next, and Goodell has been open about his 'serious' plans to turn the NFL into a 'global sport'.

That plan, though, has been seen by many as anti-American. Every game the league - and, therefore, Goodell - takes abroad, is one less for the US fan to enjoy on home soil. 

'The average fan cares, and has a protective instinct. They don't want their team to lose a home game', Belson said recently in an interview with Off The Ball.

'18 [games] is very much on the NFL's radar,' he adds, but the players have pushed back strongly on that, and it will be a real test of Goodell's leadership to get such a controversial plan over the line.

But those sorts of decisions are exactly the reason Goodell gets paid the big bucks. Along the way, he has become one of the highest-paid executives in the country earning around $128 million between 2019 and 2021, according to Belson.

But while he may be compensated like a Silicon Valley or Wall Street CEO, Goodell has little in common with typical C-suite personalities.

'He's more of a politician than a CEO,' one executive told Belson.

Unsurprisingly, Goodell is actually the son of a politician - New York congressman and senator Charles Goodell, who famously attacked fellow Republican Richard Nixon over US involvement in the Vietnam War. 

Like his father before him, Goodell's talent lies in building consensus. Only unlike Charles, who needed coalitions of voters and fellow legislators, Roger is working with moody billionaires fond of getting their own way.

And as owners told Belson, therein lies Goodell's real gift.

'Jerry [Jones] was pretty tough with Roger, but Roger very easily turns the page and has a short memory,' New York Giants co-owner John Mara said. 'He still deals with Jerry all the time. And that's in the past.'

'What he does, which is what really good leaders do, he'll be the last one to talk,' Falcons owner Arthur Blank told Belson. 'He'll get everyone else's opinion in the room and listen to all the conversation and then he'll inform, with that knowledge that he's just picked up and his own inherent thinking about something, what we ought to do.'

Like any commissioner, Goodell is not the boss, but rather an employee of team owners, just like Pete Rozelle and Tagliabue before him. It's something that Tagliabue learned first hand in 1999, when then-Miami Dolphins owner Wayne Huizenga felt he and another league executive 'were trying to turn the league into a media company,' as Belson wrote in his book.

The other executive resigned under pressure, although Tagliabue managed to keep his job. Still, according to Belson, 'the message had been sent: The owners were in charge, not league executives.'

Goodell faces that same dynamic to a degree but does enjoy a bit more leeway than Tagliabue had before him, Belson explained.

The best example may come from 2019, when Goodell responded to the controversy over anthem protests by striking a deal with Jay-Z's Roc Nation to produce the Super Bowl halftime show. Goodell used the pact as a springboard for several social justice initiatives, which have received mixed reviews from players and the public.

Regardless, player protests died off along with much of the fan criticism the league faced over the demonstrations. 

And as Belson explained, the episode revealed Goodell's willingness to break from team owners.

'Roger was out front on that,' Belson said. 'It was after that disastrous Maroon 5 halftime show at the Atlanta Super Bowl in 2019 with soft ratings and Robert [Kraft] flew out to LA to see Jay-Z with Roger and that was the seed of what became the partnership.

'That was not widely spoken of,' Belson continued. 'It was kept under tight wraps because there would have been too much pushback that potentially would scare off Jay-Z.

'I got two owners calling me, asking: 'What the hell happened?' They didn't know about this.'

Belson paints Jones and, to a lesser degree, Kraft as audacious risk takers. 

Goodell, though, comes off as prudent and calculated in the book. He's been happy to watch the NBA and Major League Baseball experiment with new markets, sports gambling platforms and other technologies, while biding his time for the right options to present themselves.

'It's kind of counterintuitive, because the NFL seems so big and you think it's like Apple or Google, where it's got the best widgets, and maximized it,' Belson said. 'But it actually is very deliberate in the way it goes about business.'

So while MLB was the first major sports league to welcome private equity investments back in 2019, the NFL waited until last year, ultimately allowing teams to sell a 10-percent stake to outside firms. Now, in another win for NFL owners, teams can get cash infusions without surrendering voting rights to outside investors.

The book isn't a fawning portrayal of Goodell, nor Jones or Kraft for that matter. Belson holds his subjects accountable, as he did with the Commissioner on the issue of traumatic head injuries.

'Goodell has tried to improve the safety of the game, pushing for rules changes, more aggressive policing of concussions, and better equipment,' Belson wrote of a 2013 panel discussion. 'But he and the panelists treated football-related head trauma as a necessary evil. Goodell repeated the well-worn trope that there's risk in everything, including not playing sports, which is a false choice because athletes can play many sports—basketball, tennis, and so on—with far lower risk of head injury.'

But for all of the controversies, most of which readers know by heart, it's Goodell's successes that stand out in 'Every Day Is Sunday.'

Whereas Tagliabue once met resistance from owners in turning the league into a true media company, Goodell has launched a streaming platform and expanded rights deals, all while helping the NFL become a year-round story across a growing number of platforms. 

Whether or not that helps the league to reach Goodell's $25 billion revenue target is far from the point. 

To Goodell, the important thing is making every day feel like Sunday.  

'The NFL under Pete Rozelle was Madison Avenue,' sports agent Bob LaMonte said, as quoted in Belson's book. 'The NFL under Paul Tagliabue was Wall Street. The NFL under Roger Goodell is Broadway.'