Perhaps football fans in the Southern Hemisphere will be unaware what a farce the NFL's Pro Bowl is.
The NFL is reportedly considering moving its 2017 all-star game to Brazil, Fox Sports' Alex Marvez reported. That will be a topic of conversation at the NFL's owners' meetings in Phoenix.
NFL commissioner Roger Goodell has a longstanding goal of hitting $25 billion in annual revenue and thinks that growing the game internationally would help with that. That's why the NFL has cheapened the competitive balance of its regular season by moving selected games to London. It appears that push will continue, even after a successful Pro Bowl in the contiguous United States this past season.
The Pro Bowl in Glendale, Ariz. was a sellout. When the Pro Bowl was in Miami at the end of the 2009 season, more than 70,000 people attended. In both cases, the NFL moved the game from its usual location in Hawaii to the Super Bowl city. You'd figure momentum from that, and giving hometown fans access to the league's stars on a rotating basis, would be a draw. But Brazil is apparently an option.
It's not like Brazil, which hosted the most recent World Cup, doesn't have the stadiums or isn't an enticing destination for players. But it won't help the Pro Bowl's key problem, which is that the game doesn't look much like football. Players don't want to get injured in an end-of-the-season exhibition game, and it's hard to play football if you don't want to hit. There's no way to fix that, either. That, and the failed idea to have team captains pick rosters instead of the traditional AFC vs. NFC format, has finally resulted in big television ratings drops.
A move to Brazil won't fix those issues. But perhaps the fans in South America would be less discerning when it comes to the quality of the Pro Bowl.
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