NFL teams all are trying to accomplish the same thing: Win a Super Bowl. They all get the same media rights check from the NFL, about $430 million in 2025, and they fundamentally share the same primary sources of revenue and costs.
But as businesses, they vary widely in how they’re structured, how many people work there and how teams approach publicity and transparency. Take, for instance, the “front office” section of their websites, a template page common across the league.
You’ll find 349 people listed for the Miami Dolphins, not counting owner Stephen Ross, with players, coaches or rank-and-file football operations staffers. But at the New England Patriots, you’ll see just one person listed other than principal owner Robert Kraft, and that’s Kraft Group President Jonathan Kraft. Between those extremes, there’s a full range of head counts.
Some of this variation in approach to staff lists authentically reflect the size and nature of the business sides of teams. It’s not a surprise the Dolphins have the biggest staff, considering the team operates a Formula 1 race, owns Hard Rock Stadium outright and is a top-three producer of non-football revenue in the NFL, according to sources. Also, they are a talent producer for other sports: Thirty-six people who started with the team below a VP level are now executives at the Dolphins or elsewhere.
“Our people are our most important investment,” Dolphins CEO, president and vice chairman Tom Garfinkel said. “We are growth-minded and try to think differently and innovate when we can and set high standards, so investing in talented people and their development is critical to our ability to continue to grow the business.”
Along those lines, it’s not a surprise to see the Cincinnati Bengals with 103 employees listed (25th highest), considering the Bengals lease their stadium, have limited non-NFL businesses and are known by reputation as one of the league’s most cost-conscious teams.
But the lists also shine a light on widely different approaches to transparency and the virtues of identifying staff in detail. Outside of sports, detailed staff lists are unusual in corporate America below the executive level.
Some teams believe that publishing employees’ names on a staff list is a non-economic value they can provide employees who might stand out in a labor market. That is, if a sponsorship marketing executive or content creator could just as easily work for a different company outside of sports, being able to point to your role in a popular, prestigious NFL team publicly might carry some value to workers.
Others point to the public, collaborative nature of working for a sports team, and the need for outsiders to efficiently navigate the bureaucracy.
“Every team is different, but for us, having a public staff directory adds value from an operational efficiency perspective,” said Patrick Smyth, spokesperson for the Denver Broncos, who list 225 business-side staffers. “That visibility makes it easier to identify points of contact, strengthens partner and league coordination, and supports timely decision-making across the organization.”
The Buffalo Bills used to have a fulsome list, but at some point in the last few years, they drastically pared it down. Now, other than owners, only Brandon Beane, GM/president of football operations; head coach Joe Brady; and Pete Guelli, president of business operations, are listed.
The change happened due to concerns over security, a person familiar with the team said, saying that “best practices” in the IT industry are to not publish extensive details about your workforce to mitigate phishing scams and other targeting of staffers.
According to the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and other organizations, attackers frequently rely on publicly available information about employees to make phishing emails appear legitimate. While someone’s employer is often a matter of public record in other ways (LinkedIn profiles, for instance), a single online staff list makes the scammers’ work easy, experts say.
Other NFL teams who have pared their online staff lists have faced more pedestrian concerns — for instance, the high cost of labor involved in keeping a staff list up to date amid constant change compared to the actual public views of the list. Teams that are part of larger holding companies have another internal challenge: deciding who works for the team versus other parts of the owners’ portfolio. That can change on a day-to-day basis in some situations.
Many teams just haven’t given it much thought. They say the tradition of listing business-side staff dates to the mom-and-pop era of pro football, when media guides were published to help sportswriters research players and coaches, and throwing in the spartan staff of publicists, secretaries and business leaders seemed normal. Now, those support staffs number in the hundreds, and it’s clear some of them exist primarily due to the inertia of having always been that way.
Others have found a middle ground between a full list and virtually nothing. The Tampa Bay Buccaneers list every staffer in their annual media guide at the start of the season, but only list directors and above on the website because those positions are less prone to turnover. The Bucs list 54 people on their site.
A word on methodology: SBJ research aimed to measure the size and roles of business and executive staff. The analysis did not count principal owners, but did count members of the owners’ family if they have full-time jobs with the club. The analysis does not include any coaches or players, and only includes the top officials in football operations.
Research assistant Emma Grace Jimenez contributed to this report.