How Biff Poggi Turned American Football into the World’s Most Profitable Study-Abroad Scam
Biff Poggi and the New American Gladiator School: A Dispatch from the Global Coliseum
By Our Man in the Cheap Seats, Somewhere Over the Atlantic
The name itself sounds like a minor Marvel villain who never quite made the cut—Biff Poggi, the hedge-fund Midas turned college-football Svengali, now stomping across the Atlantic with the subtlety of a linebacker in tap shoes. While most of the planet argues about which hemisphere gets to keep the last polar bear, Poggi has been quietly franchising the American art of weaponised adolescence from Charlotte to Madrid, and—if the rumor mill in Dubai is accurate—Riyadh is next. Because nothing says “Vision 2030 diversification strategy” quite like importing a sport where grown men in tights ritualistically concuss one another for the entertainment value of 18-year-olds who still believe Spotify royalties are real money.
Let us pause for context. In the grand panoply of global absurdities—crypto archipelagos, AI-generated poetry contests, politicians auctioning themselves on TikTok—Poggi’s project is almost quaint. He takes underfunded American universities, injects them with hedge-fund glucose, and turns them into finishing schools for future NFL linemen. The athletes get a diploma that is roughly as negotiable as a Venezuelan bolívar outside US borders; the universities get a fleeting spike in ESPN mentions; Poggi gets richer. Everyone wins, if by “winning” you mean “accelerating the heat death of Western higher education.”
Europe, as usual, watched from the bleachers with the detached horror of a continent that invented football riots but still clings to the delusion that its own amateurism is morally superior. Then came last summer’s Madrid “study-abroad” pop-up: 110 imported linebackers, one rented stadium, and a mercenary coaching staff flown in like a NATO rapid-reaction force. Local headlines oscillated between “cultural exchange” and “American occupation,” depending on which political party needed a distraction that week. The Spanish sports ministry, ever eager to appear cosmopolitan, issued a press release praising “cross-continental synergy.” Translation: we’ll look the other way while you turn our public fields into a subsidized NFL Europa reboot.
The broader significance? Poggi isn’t merely exporting shoulder pads; he’s exporting the last viable American export that doesn’t require microchips or congressional hearings: spectacle. While China corners the market on batteries and Europe lectures the planet on carbon footprints, the United States still corners the market on turning unpaid labor into prime-time content. Poggi’s genius—if one is feeling charitable—is recognizing that the rest of the world, drowning in its own demographic anxieties, secretly craves the uncomplicated narrative of Friday-night lights. Even the French, who once executed aristocrats for less, now queue politely to watch Louisiana teenagers run a 4.3 forty-yard dash on the Champs-Élysées.
And so we arrive at the geopolitical punch line. Qatar is allegedly negotiating a “student-athlete village” outside Doha—picture a luxury kibbutz with better Wi-Fi—where the sons of oil barons and the sons of Alabama defensive tackles can bond over protein shakes and mutual brand endorsements. The stated goal is “sportswashing.” The unstated goal is the same as it ever was: to launder reputations through the universally accepted detergent of adolescent hope. Meanwhile, the actual laborers building these facilities continue to work in conditions that would make a Victorian coal baron blush, but let’s not let reality intrude on the pep rally.
One could argue, with only mild hyperbole, that Poggi is the logical endpoint of late-stage capitalism: a man who discovered that the fastest way to monetize higher education is to skip the “education” part entirely. In a saner world, this would be satire. In our world, it’s a PowerPoint deck already circulating in five languages, with footnotes on NIL valuation and projected TikTok reach.
Conclusion: Somewhere in the afterlife, Juvenal is updating his bread-and-circuses notes. He always assumed the circus would involve lions. Turns out it involves Biff Poggi, a Visa-sponsored jumbotron, and a generation of global teenagers who measure success in verified check marks and collective bargaining agreements they’ll never actually read. The empire, it seems, is still expanding—only now it does so in HD, with a subscription model and a European data-privacy clause nobody understands. Welcome to the new coliseum. Mind the turf burn; it’s imported.
