The Super Bowl Will Gross Half a Billion Dollars This Year, But the NFL Really Needs Your Free Labor

Most sports fans don’t know is that the NFL is considered a nonprofit organization, which allows it to receive millions in public funding. So you can think of volunteering for the league as kind of like donating your time to a local nonprofit in need, like a soup kitchen. A soup kitchen that brings in $500 million and pays its head, commissioner, Roger Goodell, over $40 million a year.

An investigation by the Minneapolis Star-Tribune revealed 153 pages of requests that the NFL has made for the site of the 2018 Super Bowl in Minneapolis, including a $500 million stadium financed by taxpayers. Other requests from the league, as detailed by NPR, include:

· The league gets every cent of ticket revenue

· 35,000 free parking spaces

· Free ads in local newspapers and on radio stations, and lots of free billboards (just so we’ll know the Super Bowl is in town)

· All ATMs at the stadium must be those with NFL-approved credit cards

· Free presidential suites in the top hotels

· If cellphone reception isn’t quite good enough around and about, then Minneapolis has to build the NFL sufficient new cellphone towers

· The NFL even unsuccessfully tried to demand the right to select the only vendors at the airport — the public airport — who could sell NFL merchandise

That’s a pretty bossy soup kitchen.