The NFL Wants To Attract Younger Fans. YouTube Blitzed Super Bowl LX To Try To Make That Happen

Moments after the Los Angeles Chargers defeated the Kansas City Chiefs in Brazil in September, with Justin Herbert throwing for 318 yards and three touchdowns, a Chiefs fan was shot out of a canon, through the goal posts, into a lake.

The stunt was led by MrBeast, the content creator better known as Jimmy Donaldson, who has nearly 500M subscribers on YouTube.

This was no coincidence; the game, held in Sao Paolo, was the first ever, exclusive global broadcast of an NFL game and it streamed live on the Google-owned platform.

On top of the MrBeast stunt, the broadcast was hosted by Kay Adams, who has become a rising star on the platform thanks to her Up and Adams show, and featured content from Haley Kalil (8.1M subs), Michelle Khare (5.3M), Marques Brownlee (20.7M), commentary from Deestroying (6.4M) and streams from the likes of iShowSpeed (51M), Robegrill (4.6M) and Más SKabeche (14M).

In San Francisco, YouTube CEO Neal Mohan told Deadline how important his company’s relationship was with the NFL.

It’s all part of a drive to attract new, younger fans to the sport, which came full circle at Super Bowl LX, where YouTube had a major presence.

Ahead of the Seattle Seahawks destroying the New England Patriots, which aired on NBC and Peacock, YouTube held a series of events including a flag football game, a creator collective that featured the likes of Dhar Mann, who has over 26M subscribers and was named Chief Kindness Officer of the NFL ahead of the game, and an exclusive pre-party at Levi’s Stadium.

This event, which was attended by the likes of MrBeast and Alex Cooper with Diplo DJing, was introduced by Mohan and NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell. Goodell told the audience, “We couldn’t do it without you, the creators. You’ve changed the game for us, for our fans.”

The NFL was previously the exclusive domain of the traditional linear broadcast networks. These networks now share rights with Amazon, which has Thursday Night Football, Netflix, which has its Christmas Gameday package and YouTube, which has been in the business with the NFL on Sunday Ticket since 2023 and is thought to have over 2M subscribers, per research house Antenna. “The NFL has seen incredibly strong NFL Sunday Ticket subscriber growth with YouTube with the highest paid subscriber number ever in the history of the product,” the latter said in its recent earnings filing.

“Every sports league, including the NFL, is not resting on their laurels, they’re thinking about how they reach the next generation of fans, and that’s obviously where YouTube comes in,” Mohan said. “We are a platform where there’s young people every single day. We are also one of the largest sports platforms in the world, where there’s billions of hours of sports content being consumed every year. Using creators as a means to tell the story is very natural.”

It’s a long cry from the “drunken sportswriters, hard-eyed hookers, wandering geeks and hustlers” that Hunter S. Thompson noted were roaming around Houston, Texas in 1974 when the Miami Dolphins beat the Minnesota Vikings.

The legion of gamblers looking to pick up a “last-minute sucker bet from some poor bastard half-mad on booze” have also been replaced by the FanDuel generation, who are far more willing to engage with brand-funded content than older fans. Selling out? That’s a Gen-X problem, it seems.

Instead, millions of people tuned in to a flag football game on Saturday night that featured influencers such as Jesser, who has over 37M followers, Pierson Wodzynski and Druski, alongside former NFL stars such as Cam Newton, Michael Vick, Deion Sanders and pop stars Benson Boone and J. Balvin.

The game also saw a slightly sozzled Cardi B turn up in the commentary booth, Method Man was the official celebrity photographer for the game and Love Island stars Serena Page and Kordell Beckham served as sideline commentators.

One of the creators playing in the flag football game was Adam Waheed, a prankster who goes by Adam W to his 21M+ YouTube subscribers. The New York Jets fan told Deadline that YouTube’s partnership with the NFL was a “perfect marriage”, particularly for a football fan.

“It’s allowed so many creators into the game and allowed our audiences into the game. It’s brought such a fandom from outside the traditional football fan. We’re bringing so much light to the game. Out of all of the brand deals that I do, I love working with the NFL the most,” he said.

After the game, Mohan said that the livestream received the most concurrent streams for a flag football game on the platform ever, although the company didn’t reveal numbers.

“I would put what [these creators] do up against any ‘highly produced production’, any day of the week,” Mohan said, highlighting the likes of Adams, Khare and Mark Rober.

Hollywood is desperate to become (or at least, beat) YouTube, while the stars that have made YouTube what it is, are increasingly creating their own studio system.

“Creators are the startups of Hollywood. They are independent studios producing incredibly high quality, engaging content that, in in many cases, brings in much larger audiences than what might have been sort of traditionally produced,” Mohan added. “There’s no distinction between creator driven content and ‘premium content’. That is the lens through which we really look at our investments in this area… and so you should expect to see more of that.”

This has all clearly been blessed by NFL Commissioner Goodell. The man who oversees ‘The Shield’ attended the BAHC Super Bowl LX Innovation Summit presented by YouTube on Friday, which brought together execs from the sports world, tech, venture capital and private equity.

Goodell said that he is always looking to improve the “fan experience”. “How do we use innovation to make them engage more, now on a global basis? That’s a major focus for us, how we do that, and how we find ways to bring our fans closer to the game, how we provide the access, whether it’s the players and the teams, to create off the field interactions,” he said. “Because we only have so many games, and those games are unbelievable because they’re events, but the end of the day, we need to have the interactions outside of it.”

There are only so many games, although there’s been a lot of talk about extending the NFL season to 18 games. The NFL has been planning for every team to play an international game every single season as part of an 18-game season. The NFL Players Association, however, has pushed back with interim executive director David White saying that the players have “no appetite” for such a move.

If such a move did happen, it could also lead to the creation of a new package of rights for the NFL to sell to these deep-pocketed global streaming services. Such a package could sell for more than $1B, per reports.

The league’s current TV contracts with Disney, Paramount, NBCUniversal, Amazon and Fox expire after the 2033 season but there is an opt-out clause that allows it to renegotiate after the 2029 season. Goodell has been testing the waters about getting this done soon, a move that the major players don’t seem to be pushing back from.

“We’ve all seen the media landscape is changing dramatically,” Goodell said at a Super Bowl news conference. “New platforms that didn’t exist five years ago, 10 years ago, for sure, exist. That’s where our fans are in many cases, particularly the younger demographics.”

YouTube hasn’t publicly said that it wants more packages, but its moves around Super Bowl LX suggest that it is continuing to cultivate a much deeper relationship with the NFL. It would be a surprise if the two didn’t cement this further with a rights package during the next set of negotiations.

“We have been long-time partners of the NFL, really going on the entire two-decade history of YouTube. But, in particular, that turbocharged around Sunday Ticket, which has been an enormous success on YouTube,” Mohan said at the Google pre-party. “Thank you to the Commissioner, who has really leaned into YouTube as a way to connect with fans, younger fans, fans all over the world.”