did mrbeast buy the nfl
Did MrBeast Buy the NFL? A Dispatch from the End of Civilization, Probably
By the time the rumor ping-ponged its way across five continents, the question had already mutated into a dozen languages: “¿MrBeast compró la NFL?”, “MrBeast hat die NFL gekauft?”, “ミスター・ビーストがNFLを買収したってマジ？” The short answer, delivered with the same enthusiasm a coroner uses to confirm cause of death, is “no.” The longer answer, dear reader, is far more entertaining—and tragic—in equal measure.
In the grand tradition of late-stage capitalism, the mere possibility that a 25-year-old YouTuber famous for giving away private islands could purchase America’s most sacred secular church was greeted with less skeptic than applause. After all, Elon Musk already treats Twitter like a dorm-room whiteboard, and Saudi Arabia is shopping for entire golf tours as casually as one might add a bag of crisps at checkout. Why shouldn’t Jimmy Donaldson—net worth estimated at half a billion dollars and climbing faster than global sea levels—snap up a sports league whose average franchise value just cracked $5.3 billion?
The rumor began, as all noble lies do, in the dankest corners of Reddit. One user pointed out that MrBeast’s latest stunt—building 100 wells in Africa to own the “charity influencers” while still racking up ad revenue—was suspiciously close to the NFL’s own charitable branding. Another noted that the league’s new emphasis on flag-football clinics in Mexico City, São Paulo, and Lagos looked suspiciously like a MrBeast thumbnail waiting to happen: “I Gave Football to the Entire Southern Hemisphere (They Cried).” Within six hours, Indian tech-support scammers were WhatsApping their cousins, “Bhai, free Super Bowl tickets if you subscribe now.”
Globally, the panic revealed more about us than about MrBeast. In Europe, where football still involves feet, sportswriters smirked at the idea that American gladiator cosplay could be reduced to yet another content vertical. “At least when Qatar bought the World Cup they pretended to care about the offside rule,” Le Monde sighed. Meanwhile, Chinese social media platform Weibo lit up with nationalist glee: if the NFL becomes a content farm, maybe the NBA will follow, and then the West can finally admit that sports are just soap operas for people who like statistics.
The real punch line, however, is that MrBeast doesn’t need to buy the NFL; the NFL is already buying *him*. Commissioner Roger Goodell—whose face increasingly resembles a deepfake of himself—has reportedly pitched a “Creator Combine” where TikTok stars run the 40-yard dash for charity. Imagine the spectacle: a generation raised on eight-second dopamine loops suddenly asked to understand pass interference. Picture a lineman from TikTok University explaining to 200 million followers why holding penalties matter while a drone drops Red Bull from the sky.
And yet, the rumor persists because it feels inevitable. The same financial alchemy that turned bored apes into blue-chip assets has primed us to believe anything can be tokenized, gamified, and monetized until the last ember of meaning is extinguished. In Nigeria, where the NFL’s African outreach program is busily discovering the next generation of genetic miracles, teenagers already refer to the league as “MrBall.” In South Korea, esports broadcasters joked that the Seoul Dynasty could merge with the Seoul Seahawks and finally give parents a unified reason to be disappointed in their children.
What does it say about our species that the most outrageous part of the rumor isn’t the price tag, but the notion that MrBeast might *improve* the product? Instead of another crypto.com halftime show, we’d get 100 cancer survivors catching passes from Tom Brady while a drone counts down the remaining ad revenue in real time. Touchdown celebrations would be replaced by instant giveaways: every score triggers a random subscriber winning a Tesla, a kidney transplant, or an NFT of the kidney transplant.
When the rumor was finally debunked by MrBeast himself—via a 47-second Shorts video titled “I Didn’t Buy the NFL… Yet (Shocking Ending)”—the world exhaled a collective meh. By then, the French were back to arguing about baguette prices, the Nigerians had found a new WhatsApp pyramid scheme, and the NFL had quietly trademarked “Creator Bowl” just in case. Somewhere in Silicon Valley, a venture capitalist updated his pitch deck: “Uber, but for sports leagues.”
And so civilization spins on, its axis slightly more lubricated by irony. The NFL remains unsold, MrBeast remains undeniably rich, and we remain the same gullible apes who once traded tulips for houses and houses for NFTs. The only thing left to purchase is our attention span—and judging by the rumor’s half-life, that IPO already happened.
