NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell offers a hint about Cleveland's Super Bowl future
What Roger Goodell needs to see before Cleveland hosts a Super Bowl.
NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell offers a hint about Cleveland's Super Bowl future originally appeared on The Sporting News . Add The Sporting News as a Preferred Source by clicking here . NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell attended the Huntington Bank Field groundbreaking in Brook Park on Thursday alongside Browns owner Jimmy Haslam and Ohio Governor Mike DeWine.
He called the new enclosed stadium "Super Bowl quality" and made clear the league's biggest game is a genuine possibility for Cleveland. Goodell's Super Bowl pitch comes with one specific condition for Cleveland NFL owners vote on Super Bowl sites years in advance, and they have consistently favored cities where the stadium is anchored by a broader entertainment ecosystem. "When you build a state-of-the-art facility like this enclosed Huntington Bank Field here in Brook Park, uh, I've said before that the building is Super Bowl quality.
There's no doubt about that. "But what makes a Super Bowl, what makes a draft, what makes any of these major events successful is the surrounding infrastructure: the hotels, the restaurants, the transportation, the things that allow you to handle not only the 70,000, 75,000 people in the stadium, but potentially up to 200,000 people that come into the region for these big events. "We saw that with the draft back in 2021.
It was during COVID, so it didn't have the full impact. But we know what Cleveland can do. We've had those conversations with Jimmy [Haslam] and others, and we're excited about the opportunity to potentially bring the draft back here in the not-too-distant future.