Yesterday, I attended only my second Panthers game that actually counted. The NFL was capping off its monthlong breast cancer awareness campaign,
"A Crucial Catch"--and not surprisingly, Bank of America Stadium was awash in pink. The Panthers wore pink cleats, and UNCC's chapter of Zeta Tau Alpha handed out pink ribbons at the entrance to Bank of America Stadium. You can also buy pink merchandise at the NFL's online store, as well as at individual teams' online stores and at the stadiums.
But then I found out some information that strongly suggests "A Crucial Catch" bears the stench of pinkwashing. It started earlier this month, when ESPN sports business reporter Darren Revell obtained some data from the NFL about how much money from pink merchandise actually goes to fight cancer. The result?
That whetted the interest of Business Insider's Cork Gaines, who crunched the numbers and found the NFL and its business partners keep a disturbingly large amount of the pie from pink merchandise.
In other words, for every $100 in pink merchandise sold, $12.50 goes to the NFL. Of that, $11.25 goes to the American Cancer Society (ACS) and the NFL keeps the rest. The remaining money is then divided up by the company that makes the merchandise (37.5%) and the company that sells the merchandise (50.0%), which is often the NFL and the individual teams.
Then consider that only 71.2% of money the ACS receives goes towards research and cancer programs.
In the end, after everybody has taken their cut, only 8.01% of money spent on pink NFL merchandise is actually going towards cancer research.
I did a double take when I read that figure. Only
8.01%????? That's an obscenely low number. And it might actually be lower than that. It's not clear how much of the money from items being sold directly by the NFL and its teams actually goes to the ACS.
Ryan Basen of Sports on Earth has an idea how low--as he puts it, you'd need negative exponents to express the percentage of what actually goes to fight this disease. He thinks "A Crucial Catch" is just a way to attract female fans.
This sounds like a campaign that needs to be thrown for a loss.