“According to an operational study of National Football League teams prepared for The Wall Street Journal by Boston Consulting Group, the typical NFL season requires 514,000 hours of labor per team. That’s about eight times the effort it took to conceptualize, build and market Apple’s iPod, according to BCG, and enough time to build 25 America’s Cup yachts. If both Super Bowl teams dedicated themselves to construction rather than football, their members could have built the Empire State Building in seven seasons.”
(Source: WSJ, 2/5/10)
More Factoid: The original building cost was $40,958,900 and required 7 million man hours. At the current NFL average salary of $770,000, the labor cost of the building today would be about $2.58 Billion.
The Burj Khalifa, the world’s tallest building (completed in 2009), had a total construction cost of $1.5 Billion.