I think it’s an issue that’s good for him personally.
I’m not exactly thrilled to be arguing with people in a sports bar about this though.
I mean, six or seven guys were protesting. Who cares?
Now, it’s a life or death struggle where someone must win.
I just figured out how this goes way beyond Trump and the USFL. I’ll post more later.
We're carrying out these discussions in the context of NFL teams and NFL fans (their customers), but the NFL's biggest customers are actually the TV networks that pay the NFL huge sums of money to broadcast the games. When the NFL was on network television, the fans became "indirect" customers because the deals the NFL cut with the networks were based on the numbers of fans who would tune into the games.
Once TV transitioned from network to cable, digital and web-based platforms, appealing to fans became less important than figuring out how to force those fans -- and even people who weren't fans -- to pay for the NFL's content even if they didn't want to buy it.
ESPN is a perfect example. They pay the NFL about $2 billion per year to broadcast NFL games. The latest estimate I saw was that ESPN had about 87 million subscribers through their cable deals, which is down from their 100 million peak in 2011. This means the ESPN has to collect about $2/month from each of their subscribers (regardless of whether or not these subscribers even want to watch NFL games) just to cover the cost of ESPN's NFL contract. But ESPN's subscriber numbers keep going down, and that number keeps going up.
To deal with this problem (and you can extend ESPN's problem to the other networks as well), the NFL and their network partners have figured out that improving their audience numbers is less effective (since they know they can't make the NFL any more appealing to people who aren't football fans) than forcing more subscribers to buy ESPN whether they want to or not. This is where the cable and satellite TV "bundling" comes in. ESPN can only survive because they cut deals with cable and satellite TV providers to put ESPN into the "free" packages for a fee of about $9/month. They can only do this because cable and satellite companies can force their customers -- to a certain point -- to accept whatever packages they are offered.
The NFL and its broadcast partners recognize that the single biggest threat to their existence is a Federal move to deregulate the entire industry by severing these contracts and forcing the cable and satellite TV companies to let customers choose any combination of channels without being forced to buy these "bundles."
So let's look at the numbers ... Instead of spreading its $2 billion cost to broadcast NFL games among all of its 87 million subscribers, it would have to spread it among a much smaller group who would be willing to pay to get ESPN as a stand-alone channel. ESPN might lose more than half their subscribers if everyone who wasn't forced to buy it in a package had the option of dropping them. That $2/month fee goes up a lot if that happens, since the same $2 billion will be spread among fewer subscribers.
So to make a long story short ...
The NFL's primary objective right now is to protect the power that its networks have to negotiate these deals with the cable and satellite TV companies that force customers to pay for these huge TV deals whether they want to or not.
That's why they hired former Clinton press secretary Joe Lockhart as their spokesman. And that's what companies like NBC/Comcast -- and the NFL by extension -- fear the most. They were counting on a Hillary Clinton administration to leave them alone ... while Donald Trump has made a number of statements over the years about breaking up these crony-capitalism arrangements by enforcing Federal anti-trust laws.