Farewell to the Pro Bowl. The NFL is scrapping its All-Star game

A seventy-five-year-old tradition has come to an end. Since 1951, the NFL, the American professional American football league, had, in some way, honoured the best players of the year at the end of the season through a friendly match, the so-called Pro Bowl.

What is (was) this about?

Essentially the NFL equivalent of the All-Star Game held in other American sports: an exhibition match which, in recent editions, has pitted the best players from the AFC (the American Football Conference, one of the two conferences that make up the NFL) against the best from the NFC (the National Football Conference, the other).

The match, which in the past was played as the very last game of the year – that is, after the Super Bowl – has, since 2010, been scheduled for the weekend before the final. Having initially been held in Los Angeles and, from 1980 to 2016, almost always in Honolulu, Hawaii, the Pro Bowl moved to Orlando in 2017, where it was held (with the exception of two editions in Las Vegas) until last year. The 2026 edition, in fact, took place in San Francisco.

In fact, the Pro Bowl as it had originally been conceived had already been replaced from 2022 onwards. Until a year ago, the on-field match had given way to a series of skills challenges involving the selected players, followed by a final flag football match – a discipline set to be an Olympic sport at the upcoming Los Angeles Games (2028) and a means by which the NFL is seeking to promote American football to the rest of the world.

Why was this decision reached? The traditional football match, complete with tackles, was considered too dangerous by both the franchises that own the players and the players themselves. Furthermore, this match effectively added another fixture to a schedule that already includes seventeen matchdays per team.

Above all, the Pro Bowl does not hold much interest for the US public. The most recent edition, held in 2026 (the 2025 season), recorded a viewership of just 1,919,000, a 60 per cent drop compared with the previous year. All these factors, taken together, have sealed the fate of the Pro Bowl.

It must be said that the NFL had already attempted to revamp its All-Star Game in the past, in a bid to revitalise interest in it. In 2013, in fact, the inter-conference match was scrapped and replaced by a mixed-line-up contest featuring two teams, each represented by two former players (Deion Sanders and Jerry Rice that year). This proved so successful that in 2016 the traditional NFC versus AFC format was reinstated.

The end of the season has now been officially declared. But not the end of Pro Bowl selections. The NFL has in fact decided that the eighty-eight players selected in December will be invited to Los Angeles to be honoured as the best of the season just ended. The players were keen to at least retain their selection. The reason is simple: some contracts include bonuses should a player be included on the list of selected players. Business is business