Having enjoyed and then agonized over the Cincinnati Bengals making the Super Bowl in the 2021 season and losing to the Los Angeles Rams in February 2022, Mike Schroeder was a little lost the following year when his favorite NFL team made another playoff run.
His wife was pregnant with the couple’s third child, and he wanted to get his then-5-year-old daughter, Ella, into it with him.
“I’m watching what are life-changing games for me but with no one to share them with,” Schroeder said. “My big takeaway was like, ‘She’s not interested because she doesn’t understand what’s happening. And I’m totally ineffective and have been ineffective at teaching her the rules of the sport or how it works.'”
Schroeder recalled a storybook about chess he and Ella had done to learn about that game and decided to try the same concept with football, with his daughter the guinea pig in the process. Over a matter of months, he and friend and fellow father Michael Gold, who live in central Ohio, developed a storybook approach to the sport with a beanbag toss game to represent the concept of four downs — and it stuck.
As the NFL seeks to grow its audience internationally and among younger fans everywhere, Schroeder and Gold have worked with the Bengals domestically and the Indianapolis Colts in Germany to use Future Fans as a way of teaching football.
“I feel like I used to just sit there and watch the Eagles games with my dad, but it just doesn’t seem like it’s that way anymore,” said retired offensive lineman Ross Tucker, who tried it with his daughters and became an investor. “I adore the sport of football. I’m extremely passionate about it. And so I want everyone to be exposed to it and feel like they have a chance to check it out and at least be aware of it.”
Thousands of people attended an event in Stuttgart, Germany, on Sept. 7, ahead of the Colts facing the Atlanta Falcons this Sunday in Berlin, the first regular-season NFL game in the city. Gold said Future Fans was “excited to be part of efforts to bring the game of football to new audiences around the world.”
Gerrit Meier, managing director and head of NFL international, said all 32 teams are involved in the Global Markets Program around the world, with a focus on growing the game from the grassroots up, especially with flag football coming to the Olympics beginning in Los Angeles in 2028.
“Our strategy’s a lot more than about the games,” Meier said at the annual fall owners meeting in New York last month. “In the end, we’re connecting to local communities. That’s where our attention, that’s where our effort, that’s where the investment goes, as well, around the full NFL schedule of games, as well as events across the entire calendar. We need consistent engagement. We see that it works.”
Schroeder and Gold are hoping to be a part of those efforts, and they’ve had activations during Super Bowl week for Future Fans, which they say can teach the rules of football in a couple of weeks for the target audience of children ages 4-8. Kids — or even slightly older fans unfamiliar with the sport — have four chances to throw a beanbag in a hoop, eventually learning more along the way.
The Bengals have had players go to schools to go through the storybook and play the game, while also having their mascot and players record videos to send around the area along with Future Fans kits. Even as the program expands, it might take time to see if it works long term.
“Once these kids get older and as more and more opportunities for football grow, are they going be the next generation of fans?” Bengals director of community engagement Taylor Conklin said. “What we’re really interested to see is five, 10 years down the road: What does the fan look like of how they were introduced to it at an early age, compared to you get into high school, college and then you become a fan?”
For Ella Schroeder, it clicked immediately, her father said. Mike was scheduled to go to the AFC championship game in Kansas City with his brother — until Cincinnati beat Buffalo in the divisional round.
“She looks at me and says: ‘Daddy, please don’t go. All I want to do is watch the game with you,'” Schroeder recalled. “She and I ended up taking in what was a heartbreaking loss on our couch.”
It was not the result they wanted, but that is also part of football, as so many longtime fans know all too well.
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