From an article in the Atlantic
How Superstar Economics Is Killing the NFL's Ratings:
For years the National Football League has been the uncontested king of media in an age of fragmentation. ... After years of steady growth, the NFL’s average television audience fell 8 percent from the previous season.
[...]
The second factor is what you might call the superstar effect. To sustain an audience of tens of millions of weekly viewers, the NFL is principally in the business of minting football
stars, whose storylines they can follow week to week, like episodes of a favorite scripted television show. The proof is in the numbers. The few 2016 games that exceeded last year’s audience had the biggest recognizable stars and rivalries.
[...]
Sports are not so different from film. What national audiences desire above all are heroes, compelling challenges, and sequels. But the NFL’s universe of superheroes is surprisingly sparse at this particular moment. Consider
a commercial proxy for the league’s biggest stars: the players with the most corporate endorsements in 2015. In just two years, the list has been decimated with injuries, retirements, suspensions, and disappointments. Commercial king Peyton Manning has retired, and so has
candy king Marshawn Lynch. JJ Watt is injured, and so is Tony Romo. Drew Brees has missed the playoffs for a third straight year. Eli Manning has been a below-average quarterback since the middle of the Obama administration, while Andrew Luck and Russell Wilson have been alternately brilliant and confounding.
And then, this line:
Tom Brady remains transcendent, but the league puzzlingly celebrated his transcendence by making him the first citizen to be prosecuted under
Boyle’s Law.