Wednesday (March 12) 4:00 p.m. ET kicked off the NFL’s 2025 league year, which explains why you’ve probably heard more about player salaries in the last week than you ever needed to know. A ‘league year’ is like a company’s fiscal year: it’s the period used for accounting purposes to tally up profits and losses. It also brings the start of free agency and resets the league’s salary cap. In other words, the start of a new league year highlights what sports is really all about: bags of billions moving back and forth between players, owners, networks, sponsors and, this year, a new entrant: big-time private equity sharks.

Here’s a quick tutorial on how all that money moves and how the owners guarantee they walk away with big profits.

First, the salary cap
You might’ve heard about edge rusher Myles Garrett’s $40 million-per-year extension with the Cleveland Browns or the $25 million per year the Pittsburgh Steelers just handed receiver D.K. Metcalf. They’re both great players but paying them that much makes it harder for their new teams to build strong rosters around them. That’s because the salary cap is how the league uses money to keep teams competitive by putting a limit on how much money each team can pay players. For 2025, the cap is $279.2 million, up from $255.4 million last year. The salary cap makes it hypothetically possible for every team to have the same chance to win a Super Bowl every year but it also does something owners in every other sport envy: it puts a lid on how much they’re allowed to spend on talent, which takes us to our next point.

Where’s that money come from anyway? 
The NFL brought in a reported $20 billion last year–although the exact number is hard to tell because the league itself doesn’t release a total revenue figure. But there are some things we do know: the league earns most of its money by selling broadcast and streaming rights; its current deals with Fox, CBS, ABC, ESPN, Amazon and Netflix are worth an estimated $110 billion. The NFL also rakes in millions from sponsors like New Era, Toyota, Bud Light, Nike and Campbell's Soup. All that cash gets thrown into a pot of “national revenue,” which is split between each team yearly. But there are other ways that teams can make money that they don’t have to share. Merch and food sales during home games stay with the home team, while most ticket sales get split between the home and away teams, leaving the other owners out.

So what is revenue sharing really?
With the salary cap in place and cash flowing, owners can pull up to the table and get ready to eat, thanks to the NFL’s revenue sharing arrangement. Although every NFL majority owner is a billionaire (at least on paper), they don’t necessarily want to dip into their savings to write game checks every week. So they built a system that guarantees each team a huge lump sum payment every year: they all get an equal share of the money that gets funneled into the “national revenue” category each year.

And here’s where it pays to be a Green Bay Packers fan, or at least to watch the team’s pockets. The Packers are the league’s only publicly-owned team, and the only one that must publicly disclose its finances. This gives us a small window into what the other teams are pulling in because of revenue sharing. 

In the fiscal year that ended in March 2023, for example, the Packers made $68.6 million in operating profit on $610.3 million in total revenue, according to its website. $235.9 million of that, though, was in local revenue–the dollars NFL owners don’t share with one another.. Do the math and it shows the team raked in about $370.4 million for its share of national revenue. Multiply that by 32 teams, it works out to the nearly $11.9 billion in total national revenue that was reported by Forbes for the NFL’s 2022 season.  

The same math works for the next year, when the Packers reported $654.1 million in total revenue, including $402.3 million in national revenue. Front Office Sports reported the NFL’s national revenue at $12.8 billion, about 32 times the Packers’ reported number.

And that, folks, is how the NFL spreads the real money around.