They’re all useful idiots.
That must have been Roger Goodell’s opinion of typical NFL fans as he force-fed them Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl halftime show — a seamy spectacle that made parents cringe and would make a lefty college professor proud.
And the NFL commissioner may have a point. The typical NFL fan — who skews right of center politically, a male and often a Trump voter — appears to be a glutton for left-wing punishment.
In fact, the Bad Bunny fiasco appears to be symptomatic of the NFL’s broader, cynical business wager: It believes all those working-class white dudes who voted for Trump — those useful idiots — will put up with a lot of BS because they are hooked on football like an drug addict on heroin.
Meanwhile, Goodell and his team of marketers are using them as they pump out woke messaging to diversify their fan base into something far different. As one sports executive put it: “Goodell believes he has to expand his demographic and he’s doing it with all this woke stuff. It’s all about money for him.”
Expanding is good since all business is about addition, not subtraction. But going there with left-wing agitprop has proven to be risky at best. Bud Light wanted to move away from cowboys and construction workers as its core customers, so it offered up a commercial featuring a trans woman activist sipping a cold one nearly naked in a bubble bath. The result: The No. 1-selling beer fell to No. 3 and never recovered.
Cheap-chic retailer Target long catered to broad swaths of middle America. That’s until it turned to endless celebrations of LBTGQ+ pride where mothers shopping with their little ones in strollers had to wade through displays of intersectional clothing even for children, not to mention the “tuck-friendly” bathing suits. Business tanked.
Every company listed above (and there are countless others that I cite in my book “Go Woke Go Broke: The Inside Story of the Radicalization of Corporate America”) backed away from wokeness after a consumer backlash. That the NFL ignores all of the above tells you something about its cynical business model and the loyalty to a fault of its current fan base.
Anti-Trump messaging
Consider: This year’s Super Bowl featured a rapper mumbling garbage in Spanish during a performance replete with crude dance numbers and anti-Trump messaging. That’s on top of years of preaching, kneeling and proselytizing; end zones and helmets bearing social-justice messaging; public-service announcements for its “inspire change” marketing push with crudely leftist and simplistic slogans — as if Americans need to stop being something the vast majority are not.
And yet this multibillion-dollar operation has continued to crank out ever higher ratings and profits. The big question is, how do the NFL and Goodell get away with it? Well, you won’t be surprised that people I talk to in the sports business world say the commissioner sees some holes in the logic of “go woke go broke.”
First, Goodell’s team of corporate bureaucrats believe they have the only game in town that offers the red-meat sports experience demanded by the average football fan. He — and yes, it’s still mostly a “he” — loves the controlled brutality of the game; the feeling of being part of a team and fighting for something. It’s an experience you don’t get from baseball or basketball.
He’s hooked and stays hooked as the league has increased engagement through cynical ploys such as sports gambling. We all know how gambling destroys lives and drives people to financial ruin. Yet in partnership with betting apps and sportsbooks, Goodell & Co. has supplied this opium to their masses, transforming what was once the simple pleasure of watching a game into an all consuming, addictive experience.
It’s Vegas on your iPhone and it continues to lure men, especially young men, hooked on a product that bombards them with progressive tropes.
While they’re hooked, the NFL is aggressively searching for its more diverse audience, my sources say. That includes women, whom Goodell’s bean counters believe skew left of center and might support social-justice preaching. Plus, Latin America. It should come as no surprise that Bad Bunny spewed a Pan American message in his skit replete with flags from the Southern Hemisphere that overwhelmed our own.
Will it work in the long term? Maybe — but maybe not. Americans aren’t idiots. They hate to be used and maybe the football fan is wising up. As I reported, the Super Bowl drew its highest numbers Sunday night of 137,826,000 viewers during the 15 minutes of playing time that spanned the second quarter of the game.
Bad Bunny was originally touted to have a record audience at this year’s game. But the fact is that when he performed his leftist schtick, viewership declined sharply, paving the way for a weakened second half for ratings, according to Nielsen data.
All of which speaks to the fact that this long game isn’t over. Even if you’re the NFL, if you go woke, you might still end up broke.
