Football Makes Money Today. Who Pays for the Damage Decades Later?
The NFL is very good at putting prices on things.
Tickets have prices. Broadcast rights have prices. Advertising has prices. Players have contracts, teams have valuations, and almost every part of a Sunday afternoon can eventually be translated into dollars.
A new study raises a harder question: What price should be attached to damage that may not become visible for decades?
Researchers identified 878 former NFL players who died between 2016 and 2021. Of those, 235 had their brains donated for study. CTE — chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a degenerative brain disease associated with repeated head impacts — was found in 215 of them.
That is 91.4% of the donated brains. But it would be misleading to call that the CTE rate among NFL players. Brain donors are not a random sample; families may be more likely to donate when neurological problems are suspected.
So the researchers asked a more conservative question.
What if every one of the 643 players whose brains were not examined did not have CTE?
Even under that assumption, 215 confirmed cases among 878 deaths produces a minimum prevalence of 24.5%.
In other words, at least roughly one in four former NFL players who died during that period had CTE. The study does not tell us the prevalence among living former players, nor does it mean one in four current NFL players has the disease.
The medical finding is disturbing. The economics behind it are just as unusual.
The NFL operates on two different clocks
The first runs quickly.
A game is played. Fans buy tickets. Networks sell advertising. Sponsors pay for attention. Merchandise moves. Media rights generate revenue.
Most of the money attached to the game is recognizable almost immediately.
The second clock can run for decades.
A player may begin football as a child, continue through high school and college, reach the NFL, retire in his twenties or thirties, and only much later develop neurological problems.
Treatment costs money. Disability costs money. Lost earning capacity costs money. Litigation costs money. Long-term care can cost money.
The revenue and the potential liability do not necessarily arrive at the same time.
The revenue is immediate. The liability may not be.
There is already a remarkable number attached to that second clock.
As of August 17, 2026, the official NFL concussion settlement program reported 20,569 registered settlement class members and 4,603 submitted claim packages. There were 2,199 payable monetary awards totaling:
$1.71 billion
More precisely, $1,710,385,705.
That figure should not be described as “the cost of CTE.” The settlement covers qualifying diagnoses beyond CTE-related claims, including certain neurocognitive impairments and neurological diseases.
Nor does $1.71 billion capture every economic consequence associated with brain injury. Family caregiving, lost income, personal medical expenses and other costs do not neatly appear in one settlement statistic.
But $1.71 billion demonstrates something important.
A football game can finish in three hours.
Its financial consequences can last much longer.
So who actually owns the risk?
It would be easy to turn this into a simple story in which the NFL makes the money and therefore should carry every cost.
The biology makes that argument more complicated.
An NFL career does not begin with a player's first professional snap. Many players have already spent years absorbing repetitive head impacts in youth, high-school and college football before reaching the league.
The new research reinforces the importance of cumulative exposure to repetitive head impacts, rather than treating CTE as the consequence of one identifiable hit.
That creates an awkward economic problem.
Imagine a player who spends years in youth football, four years in high school, four in college and then several seasons in the NFL.
If neurological disease appears decades later, where exactly should the cost sit?
With the NFL?
The individual team?
College football?
A high school?
An insurer?
The player?
His family?
There may be legal answers in particular cases. There is no simple economic answer that works for every player.
The damage, if it occurs, can accumulate across organizations and across years.
The bill arrives much later.
Insurance exposes the problem
Insurance companies exist to put prices on uncertainty.
An insurer estimates the probability of something going wrong, estimates how much it could cost, collects premiums and pools the risk across many customers.
Football-related brain injury makes that calculation unusually difficult.
A head impact occurs today. Symptoms may appear many years later. A player may have experienced thousands of other impacts in between. CTE itself still requires post-mortem examination for definitive diagnosis.
How much should an insurer charge today for a liability that may become apparent decades from now?
This is no longer a theoretical question.
More than 500 players in Australia's AFL were told in 2026 that insurance through their superannuation arrangement would no longer provide total and permanent disability benefits for claims involving concussion, traumatic head injury, CTE and related neurological impairment.
Zurich told Australia's ABC there was “widespread uncertainty” surrounding the potential magnitude of CTE and the long-term consequences of concussion.
The AFL and AFL Players' Association do operate a separate injury and support fund. Funding under their current collective bargaining agreement is scheduled to total $54 million, including benefits intended to help former players whose earning capacity is significantly impaired by injuries associated with their playing careers.
But the insurance episode illustrates something larger.
If an insurer decides a particular risk is too uncertain to cover, the risk does not disappear.
Someone else is left holding it.
That could be the league, a club, another insurer, a public system, the player or the player's family.
The hidden price of a sports product
Insurance has a useful term for costs that emerge long after the event that created them: long-tail liabilities.
Football provides an unusually clear example of the idea.
A simplified timeline might look like this:
2026
Game
→ Ticket revenue
→ Advertising
→ Sponsorship
→ Media revenue
Then perhaps:
2046
Neurological illness
→ Medical care
→ Disability
→ Insurance claim
→ Litigation or compensation
There is no suggestion that every football player will develop CTE. The new study does not establish that, and it should not be interpreted that way.
The interesting business question is that some of the potential cost of producing today's entertainment may not be measurable today.
That makes football different from a product whose major costs are paid before it reaches the customer.
A stadium can be budgeted.
A player's salary can be negotiated.
Production costs can be calculated.
Broadcast rights can be auctioned.
The future economic cost of thousands of repetitive head impacts is much harder to put into a spreadsheet.
What does one hit cost?
Probably the wrong question.
There is no credible dollar value that can be assigned to an individual tackle and then multiplied by the number of tackles in a season.
Risk accumulates differently among different people. Exposure varies. Medical outcomes vary. The science continues to develop.
But that uncertainty is itself economically important.
Markets work best when costs can be identified and priced.
If a company pollutes a river and somebody else pays to clean it up, the sticker price of the company's product does not reflect its entire economic cost.
Contact sports create a very different problem, but the underlying question is surprisingly similar:
Does the price of the product include the cost of the risk required to produce it?
For football, we don't fully know.
The NFL concussion settlement tells us that at least part of that cost has become measurable. The latest CTE research suggests the underlying health issue may be substantial. The Australian insurance market shows what can happen when private insurers become uncomfortable pricing long-term neurological risk.
And none of those numbers answers the hardest question:
Who should ultimately pay?
BEYOND THE OBVIOUS.
A fan watching football sees a game.
A broadcaster sees programming.
An advertiser sees attention.
A team sees an entertainment business.
An insurer sees something else: risk.
All of those things exist at the same time.
The money is simply recognized on different schedules.
A ticket can be sold today. An advertisement can be billed tomorrow. A media contract can be valued for years in advance.
A brain injury may not present its economic cost until long after the stadium has emptied.
The revenue is immediate. The liability may not be.
Perhaps that is the hidden economics of contact sports.
The difficult question isn't simply how much money football makes.
It's how much the sport truly costs — and whose balance sheet eventually receives the bill.
BEYOND THE OBVIOUS.
Sources
Concussion & CTE Foundation — 2026 NFL CTE Prevalence Study
Official NFL Concussion Settlement — Program Statistics
Official NFL Concussion Settlement — Reports & Statistics