Pete Rozelle: Developing and Communicating the Sports Brand

Abstract

In being named by Sporting News magazine as the most powerful person in sports for the 20th century, former NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle is largely given credit as the visionary who developed the economic model for professional sports leagues. It was Rozelle’s idea to sell the league’s television broadcast rights as a collective entity to the highest bidding network, then have all teams share that revenue equally to help ensure competitive balance. In addition to developing an economic model that improved the brand quality of the NFL, Rozelle should be recognized as a pioneer in applying branding principles to the sports industry. This article demonstrates that Rozelle was instrumental in defining the current sports brand as more than games, but including many strategic communication initiatives. In applying Shank’s model for the branding process, Rozelle increased the NFL’s brand awareness and fostered its brand image, thus increasing the league’s brand equity and ultimately fan loyalty. Rozelle’s actions helped transform the NFL and continue to influence the entire sports industry today.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 13 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.