The 2026 NFL season opened Wednesday at Lumen Field, with the reigning Super Bowl champion Seattle Seahawks hosting the New England Patriots. Donald Trump used the moment to return to a favourite argument: that the country’s most-watched sport should not be called football at all.
“When you look at what’s happened to football in the United States, soccer in the United States, we seem to never call it that (football) because we have a conflict with another thing that’s called football,” Trump told “Full Measure with Sharyl Attkisson.”
“This is football, there is no question about it. We have to come up with another name for the NFL stuff.”
He wants soccer to inherit the name and the NFL to invent a new one. The demand is not new. He has paired it repeatedly with two others: kill the dynamic kickoff rule, and pull games back from streaming platforms.
Read also: Crawford is retired. Dana White thinks the right offer changes that.
‘Sissy football is bad for America’
In a Truth Social post on 15 September 2025, Trump called the dynamic kickoff format “ridiculous-looking” and wrote: “‘Sissy’ football is bad for America, and bad for the NFL.”
On the “Pat McAfee Show” the previous year he had put it more bluntly.
“I hate the kickoff in football. I think it’s so terrible; I think it’s so demeaning,” he said, arguing that “the pageantry of the game is so badly hurt.”
Owners disagree. At the league’s annual meeting on 1 April 2025 in Palm Beach they voted to make the dynamic kickoff permanent, with touchbacks moved to the 35-yard line to encourage more returns. The rule keeps kicking and receiving players stationary until the ball is fielded.
Read also: Doonbeg's €20m Trump weekend: the Irish state pays, his resort profits
‘Killing the golden goose’
The third demand is about who gets to watch. Speaking to “Full Measure” in May 2026, Trump attacked the shift of games onto streaming platforms including Netflix, Peacock, Amazon Prime Video and YouTube.
“There’s something very sad when they take football away from many, many people,” Trump told the programme.
“You got people that love football. They’re great people. They don’t make enough money to go and pay this. It’s tough. And they could be killing the golden goose.”
The comments landed while the Department of Justice was already scrutinising the league’s media-rights arrangements and antitrust exemption. The NFL has defended its distribution as fan-friendly, pointing out that roughly 87% of its games still air on free broadcast television.
The dynamic kickoff is written into the 2026 rulebook. Streaming partners are receiving bigger packages, not smaller ones. The sport is still called football.
The first Sunday slate of the season is set for 13 September, four days after the Seahawks opened the year against the Patriots in Seattle.
Read also: Trump picks the Pentagon for 9/11's 25th anniversary
