InternetJeff It’s not my opinion, and I have no “opinion” as such. It’s merely an observable objective fact that anyone can see.
Can you post some numbers to quantify those “observable objective facts” that point toward the superiority of the US system?
IMHO. it is not the system, but marketing, and the scale of operation that makes NFL so rich. First, the US has about 350M people while some of the biggest European countries are
- Russia = 143.4M
- Germany = 83.6M
- UK = 70M
- France = 66.7M
- Italy = 60M
- Spain = 47.8M
- Ukraine = 39.5M
- Poland = 37.8M
so the potential market is either less or much less, especially in cases of smaller countries.
With the exception of international games, for the most part, viewers come from same country as the clubs, so the viewership is either much, or much-much lower depending on the country.
And not only the US has a bigger population, but NFL games are broadcasted in many foreign markets, partly because there are no comparable teams and leagues in other countries. (OK, there’s is CFL, but that doesn’t fully comparable)
In any case, changing to a full franchise system would not make any difference elsewhere because that wouldn’t have much, if any effect in viewership, plus it’s very unfair system compared to the relegation system used in most other countries.