GRIDIRON GOLD

When the NFL and players struck a deal to end the league’s lockout, they didn’t just save the football season that begins its first full day of games on Sunday. They saved the most profitable sport in America, the most popular show on TV and billions of dollars that would have disappeared from the economy.

During the regular season, the National Football League itself expects to take in about $9.5 billion. The league estimates that sponsorship revenue alone, which is included in that figure, will be up 15 percent from last year.

But the impact of the 10-year labor agreement the league reached in July to end a four-mouth lockout reaches far beyond the NFL’s big corporate sponsors, billionaire owners and millionaire players. The league supports about 110,000 jobs in NFL cities – not just tailbacks and punters but hotel workers and sports-bar owners. Overall, the games add about $5 billion to the broader economy in NFL cities, according to an analysis prepared for the NFL Players Association by Edgeworth Economics.

Now, NFL cities, fans, advertisers, restaurants and bars are preparing for the seasonal economic windfall that comes with the football season.

Here’s a look at some of the economic ripples:

An NFL city on game day: ‘insane’

Downtown Cleveland is hopping on weekends when the Browns play at home. Fans of the home team – and of the visitors, especially when the rival Pittsburgh Steelers are in town – start packing hotels Saturday night. And the partying spills over into city’s historic Warehouse District and bars near the stadium.

“Game days are insane,” says Alice Burns, assistant manager and bartender at Bob Golic’s Sports Bar & Grille, owned by a former Browns star. “Last season, we opened at 7 a.m. and were completely packed by 9 or 10.”

Positively Cleveland, which promotes tourism to the city, estimated four years ago that every Browns game brought $7.9 million in business to Cleveland – $63 million a year.

Concession workers wait

At New Meadowlands Stadium in East Rutherford, N.J., home of the Jets and the Giants, 80 employees at the complex are full-time workers and guaranteed a paycheck. The rest are event employees who had feared that, without football, they’d be out of work.

Tallying up parking attendants, security guards, ushers, ticket takers, janitors, merchandise sellers and concession workers, the Meadowlands employs about 4,000 people on NFL Sundays, says Mark Lamping, the stadium’s CEO. Without football games in the fall and winter, those people don’t work, Lamping says.

Concessions at the stadium are managed by a company called Delaware North, which also does concessions for the Buffalo Bills, Chicago Bears, Cleveland Browns, Carolina Panthers and St. Louis Rams. The company’s payroll for staffing the six stadiums is $24 million. Then there are the food, plate and cup suppliers who count on Delaware North’s orders to stay in business.

“Everyone was on pins and needles,” says Rick Abramson, of Delaware North. “A missed season would be a problem for a lot of people because they’re counting on that money to make ends meet.”

Overall, Delaware North takes in about $100 million per year from food and drink sales at NFL events. The company also employs about 30,000 seasonal workers.

On TV: A ‘halo effect’ irresistible for networks

Last year, the Super Bowl aired on Fox and set a record by attracting 111 million viewers, more than any other single telecast, according to Nielsen’s list of the year’s top 10 programs. The second and third most-watched events were – wait for it – the postgame and pregame shows.

The higher a show’s rating, the more money ad time fetches. So it’s no surprise that NFL programming generates $3.2 billion in advertising revenue for TV networks, according to data from Kantar Media. No other event gives advertisers as much exposure – one reason Bud Light is paying $1.2 billion to be the NFL’s official beer sponsor over the next six years.

It’s not just the networks and advertisers who depend on the NFL for a portion of their revenue. If the season had been canceled, cable providers would have taken a hit, too. Viewers would have canceled sports packages like NFL Red Zone, says Robert Seidman, an analyst for TVbythenumbers.com. Football fanatics pay about $50 per season to get the high-definition channel. And there are plenty of customers who only subscribe to satellite television service DirecTV to get Sunday Ticket, a package that shows every NFL game, Seidman says.