Grey New York celebrates the start of another NFL season (which kicks off next month) with the 60-second spot “Football is Family.”
The ad stars New England Patriots tight end Rob Gronkowski, alternating footage of Gronkowski’s pre-game rituals with those of a football-loving boy. While one plays pee wee football and the other in the NFL, they are united by their love of the game. The spot, which ends with the message, “Football is Family,” is hardly anything new for the league. After all, they’ve long been romanticizing the game as an innocent one which boys grow up playing while dreaming of making it to the professional ranks for quite a long time, and it’s been a good selling point for the league. It’s a unifying message, bringing together the game’s youngest players, with the parents who cheer them on and the pros they watch on TV.
For more cynical viewers, however, that message is harder than ever to swallow. There’s the fact that Gronkowski plays for the Patriots, the team that compromised the 2014 NFL postseason with its “Deflategate” scandal, as well as recent domestic abuse scandals (and the league’s handling of said events) and the ongoing question of whether the NFL is doing enough to warn and protect players of the effects of traumatic head injuries. As Adweek points out, this last issue was underscored recently by the induction of the late Junior Seau, for which the league wouldn’t allow Seau’s daughter Sydney to deliver a speech. While it would be unfair to expect the NFL to tackle these issues in an ad for the league’s new season, one of the most obvious criticisms of the league is its inability to address its problems and the willful naivete of “Football is Family” only highlights this. If football really is a family, some might suggest its past time the NFL scheduled some family counseling.