Football season is back! 🏈
And what a long way it’s come from its leather-helmet days.
Today, the NFL is the most valuable sports league in the world.
College football has become a true professional league.
And high school football still owns Friday nights across much of America.
But the game itself is changing (and technology is playing a massive role in all of it).
Heck, we spent over 100 years bringing out two guys holding a chain to figure out whether a football crossed an imaginary line.
That finally changed in 2025.
More on that later…
The Transformation of Football
Think about HOW MUCH happens during a single NFL play.
For most of football’s history, it was analyzed by attending the game or watching a single-angle film recording.
The overall transformation is pretty wild:
In-person scouting: Coaches and scouts evaluated players from the sidelines.
Game film: Teams began recording games and manually breaking down every snap.
Digital film: Platforms made thousands of hours of film searchable and accessible anywhere.
Computer vision: Cameras and software began automatically identifying formations, players, and actions from video.
Player tracking: Sensors and RFID chips made it possible to track the actual movement of every player.
By 2015, the NFL began using RFID chips inside players’ shoulder pads as part of what eventually became Next Gen Stats.
Today, NFL stadiums have 20-30 receivers installed throughout the venue with RFID tags placed inside players’ shoulder pads (and even inside the football itself).
Now add in all of the AI innovations coming down the pike…
And nearly every aspect of football can be analyzed.
*Side Note:
A trend you’ll see across sports is how data leads to information, which then turns into knowledge and eventually changes how the game is played/operated.
Let’s look at some of the companies and technologies pushing it forward…
Emerging Football Technologies
Football is an interesting sport for technology as there are a lot of players on the field doing different tasks.
And unlike basketball or baseball, the ball isn’t always visible.
The Connected Field
Let’s start with the football field itself.
For over 100 years, football has relied on referees, chains, and human eyesight to determine where the football should be spotted and whether it reached the line to gain.
In 2025, the NFL started using Sony’s Hawk-Eye technology as its primary method for measuring first downs.
* This is the same technology used for whether a tennis ball is in or out
The system uses cameras positioned around NFL stadiums to virtually measure the distance between the spotted ball and the line to gain.
Even the pylons have become connected.
C360 (acquired by Cosm) developed cameras that can be placed inside goal-line and line-to-gain pylons, capturing more than 180 degrees of the field.
This stat is pretty wild…
An NFL stadium can have roughly 250 tracking devices operating during a single game.
And that’s where things get interesting…
Data Analytics
Data is the new oil (especially in sports).
And there might not be a sport with more variables than football, which is why despite all the money in the sport, it’s one of the last ones to incorporate a lot of the tech.
Companies like Zebra Technologies helped build the infrastructure behind the NFL’s Next Gen Stats (tracking players through RFID technology).
PFF took another approach, charting and grading individual players on essentially every play.
Now AI is taking it another step.
SumerSports is building analytics tools around roster construction, player evaluation and football strategy.
And Catapult combines player tracking, video and performance data to help teams understand what’s happening in both practices and games.
This is a side note conversation, but also interesting how the NFL is trying to own the equity upside in the technologies that they’re leveraging through their PE vehicle, 32 Equity.
I went deeper on sports leagues becoming venture investors a few years ago here:
Rise of Sports Venture Arms (NFL's 32 Equity Making Big Moves)
With the NFL playoffs currently going on, an announcement the league recently made has slid under the radar.
Coaching & Player Development
Football is a weird sport as it’s mostly just practice and game film.
This stat is crazy:
NFL teams practice all week for roughly 11 minutes of actual ball-in-play action on Sunday.
And because of the danger in the sport, there are only so many live reps you can take.
Which makes virtual reps valuable.
STRIVR pioneered virtual reality training that allows quarterbacks to put on a headset and essentially replay practice from behind center.
StatusPRO is taking immersive football another direction, combining real NFL player data with virtual reality to simulate what it's like to actually play quarterback.
Then there are companies attacking the actual efficiency of practice.
GoRout allows coaches to digitally send plays and scout cards directly to wearable devices on players’ wrists.
I won't go into it here, but camera companies have played a big role, such as Hudl for recruiting/scouting and PlayOn for streaming.
Player Safety
Fans love the violence…
Which makes player safety one of the most important areas of football innovation.
Guardian Caps have become commonplace during NFL practices and some players even wearing them in games.
The NFL reported nearly a 50% reduction in concussions among players wearing Guardian Caps during mandated sessions compared to the pre-mandate average.
And helmet manufacturers are now building models specifically for individual positions (QBs and linemen have way different contact throughout the game).
In 2024, the NFL had a record 12 new helmet models available, including eight position-specific models, while nearly 99% of players were wearing helmets in the league’s top-performing categories.
And obviously concussions play a big part in football…
I put out this market map a few years ago; it covers most of the companies that are still relevant today.
Concussion Tech (The Full Report)
Every year there are roughly 7.6M athletic-related concussions in the United States.
Alternative Football & Other Leagues
And then there’s an entirely different football ecosystem growing alongside the NFL.
After years of alternative leagues coming and going, the XFL and USFL eventually merged to form the UFL.
The European League of Football launched in 2021 and helped build a professional American football ecosystem across Europe.
That ecosystem has since gone through plenty of growing pains, but in 2026 many of its biggest franchises competed in the newly formed European Football Alliance, with teams across Germany, France, Denmark, Czechia, and Austria.
And then there’s flag football.
Recently, we saw the $30m raise where the NFL partnered with TMRW Sports to launch a professional men’s and women’s flag football league.
It makes sense as to why:
An estimated 20 million people across 100+ countries now play flag football.
In the U.S. alone, youth participation has climbed above 4.1 million players, up roughly 50% since 2020.
And in 2028…
Flag football becomes an Olympic sport.
Going Forward
I don’t have much to say here…
Other than the fact that football and technology will keep blending at a rapid rate (exactly like what is happening in basically every sport).
From a founder's point of view, football can be a good sport to build in because of the money available, but also a bad one because of its uniqueness and low number of teams/leagues globally.
I do think football will incubate many other great sports tech companies (like it did with Hudl).
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