In 2021 the NFL added a 17th regular-season game to settle a labour deal and clear the way for a record television contract, not to give fans more football. The league had played 16 games a season since 1978, but according to ESPN’s Kevin Seifert, NFL owners had been pushing to expand for the best part of a decade.
The extra game was a bargaining chip in the 2020 collective bargaining agreement (the CBA, the contract between the league and the players’ union that sets pay and conditions).
A longer season was the by-product. The players got a slightly bigger share of the money, the owners got more to sell, and the audience got a story about being given more football.
What people say Game 17 was for
The version you hear most is that the league added a game because fans wanted more of it. The NFL did not discourage that view. When the deal passed, Commissioner Roger Goodell welcomed a season that would give supporters “more and better football.”
More games sounds like a favour to the audience, and the audience was not going to argue.
The trouble is that a favour to fans would not have taken ten years of negotiation and a near-tied vote to arrive. Something that simple does not get fought over that hard.
The CBA & Players Union Vote 2020
In March 2020, the players’ union voted to accept a new CBA by 1,019 to 959. That is a margin of 60 from nearly 2,000 ballots. Thirty-odd players changing their minds would have sunk it.
It was not an easy or comfortable yes. The union’s own executive committee had recommended against the deal, and stars like Aaron Rodgers and J.J. Watt argued publicly to reject it.
Buried in the terms was the thing the owners had chased for years: the option, from 2021, to make the regular season 17 games.
What the two sides really traded
Underneath the language, the CBA was a swap. The owners got a longer season and an extra playoff game; the players got money and better conditions. The moving parts:
| What changed | Before | After the CBA |
|---|---|---|
| Regular-season games | 16 | 17 (from 2021) |
| Preseason games | 4 | 3 |
| Players’ share of revenue | 47% | 48.5%, up to 48.8% via TV kicker |
| Playoff teams | 12 | 14 |
Notice the 17th game did not add a fresh week of football out of nowhere. It replaced the fourth preseason game, the warm-up matches that do not count, so players were swapping a low-stakes exhibition for a real one.
The revenue line is where the intent shows. The players’ base share rose from 47% to 48% from 2021, with a built-in climb toward 48.5% (and as high as 48.8%) that triggers as the new TV money lands, not as the football does. Players under contract when the deal was signed were also handed a bonus worth one seventeenth of their salary in any 17-game year. The extra pay was wired to the extra broadcasting, not the extra game.
The BIG prize, a record $110B TV deal
A year later, the real motive arrived. The NFL signed new television deals worth more than $110 billion, the richest in the history of sport. They run for eleven years, began in 2023, and roughly doubled what the networks had been paying.
A 17-game season is more to broadcast: another Sunday window, one more marquee fixture per team, a fuller slate to auction off. The extra game and the mega-deal are the same decision, taken twelve months apart.
Why the “more football” story stuck
The fan-demand line survives because it is the flattering one. “We gave you another game” reads better than “we negotiated a longer, more punishing season in exchange for a bigger cheque on both sides.”
There is a real tension under it, and it is worth naming rather than smoothing over. The players carry the physical cost of a 17th game; the owners and the union pocketed the financial upside. People inside the sport genuinely disagreed about whether that was a fair trade, which is why it came down to sixty votes.
The mark it left on the record book
The extra game turns up every season in one place. When a quarterback throws for the most yards in a year, or a receiver catches the most touchdowns, that total now comes from 17 games where the older records came from 16. Line up the eras and you are not always comparing like with like. A labour negotiation quietly moved the record book, and it did it for reasons that had nothing to do with the players in the record book.
What did it change for us the fans
The 17-game season is not a scheduling quirk. It is the visible edge of a business decision, and once you can see that, more of the modern NFL falls into place: the international fixtures and the push onto streaming are the same instinct, which is to turn football into more inventory to sell.
The season you watch was shaped in a conference room in 2020, by a vote that could easily have gone the other way. For how the 18-week, 17-game calendar actually fits together, I have set it out in how the NFL season is structured. The same deal reshaped the playoffs, which I cover in the expanded 14-team postseason.