England beat France 6-4 in a frantic World Cup third-place match on Saturday in Miami, and the result has sports fans asking an obvious question: why doesn’t the NFL have a third-place game of its own? The league actually used to. It’s not coming back, and the reasons say a lot about what motivates players once the only thing left to win is a bronze medal.
England-France Was a Show. The NFL Version Wasn’t.
Saturday’s bronze-medal match delivered ten combined goals and a result nobody saw coming from a “meaningless” game. That’s exactly the pitch soccer fans make for third-place playoffs — even with nothing but pride on the line, teams still show up and swing for it.
Football doesn’t work that way, and the NFL already ran this experiment. From 1961 to 1969, the league staged the Playoff Bowl — officially the Bert Bell Benefit Bowl — pitting the two conference runners-up against each other in Miami’s Orange Bowl the week after the NFL Championship Game. The American Football Database’s history of the game notes the NFL now classifies all ten editions as exhibitions, and none of the stats or the third-place finishes count in the official record book.
The game wasn’t beloved. It was originally nicknamed the “Runner-Up Bowl,” and Vince Lombardi reportedly called it a “losers’ bowl for losers,” according to a history of the Playoff Bowl published by Sports King. Attendance told the same story — the same account notes the first Playoff Bowl drew 34,000 fans, compared with 57,000 for the Pro Bowl the following week.
Why The Playoff Bowl Died — And Stayed Dead
The Playoff Bowl wasn’t really built for competitive integrity. The NFL added it in the early 1960s partly as a response to the rival American Football League, giving fans another game to watch while the two leagues jockeyed for TV money and attention, per the same Sports King history. Once the AFL-NFL merger arrived in 1970, that motivation disappeared, and so did the game. A history of NFL championship formats confirms the final Playoff Bowl was played in January 1970, right as the merger restructured the whole postseason.
The merger also solved the scheduling problem the Playoff Bowl was papering over. The reorganized NFL split into two conferences and added enough real postseason games — seven total, not counting the Pro Bowl — that there was no gap left to fill with a glorified exhibition, according to Sports King’s account of the era.
There was some appetite to keep a third-place game going even after the merger. It didn’t survive contact with a league that suddenly had plenty of meaningful football to sell instead.
The Real Obstacle: Players Have Nothing To Gain
This is where the soccer comparison breaks down. A World Cup bronze medal is a permanent line in a country’s history — England, per Al Jazeera’s explainer on the third-place playoff, hadn’t finished top four at a World Cup in six decades before Saturday, and the two teams were also playing for real money, since Al Jazeera reports the third-place finisher collects $2 million more in prize money than the fourth-place team.
NFL players finishing a season one win short of the Super Bowl have no equivalent payoff waiting for them. A Conference Championship loss already means the year is over in every way that matters for a roster. Asking those players to suit up again, one week before the Super Bowl, for a game with no title, no banner and real injury risk is a tough sell — especially for anyone about to hit free agency.
The Ringer made a version of this same pitch back in 2019, floating a third-place game as a replacement for the Pro Bowl. Even that piece, written to argue in favor of the idea, admitted the obvious flaw: The Ringer conceded teams would likely bench their stars rather than risk injuring franchise players in a game with nothing real on the line.
That’s the same failure mode that hollowed out the Pro Bowl itself. What was once a genuine competition softened over the years into a non-contact showcase, and the NFL eventually rebranded it into skills events and a flag-football-style exhibition rather than a real game. Nobody wants to be the player who tears an ACL in a contest that means nothing on the field and nothing in the standings.
What It Would Take To Bring It Back
Reviving a third-place game would require the NFL Players Association to sign off on adding a game to the calendar, and that’s not a small ask. Every past round of collective bargaining over adding games — including the fight over the 17th regular-season game — has centered on player safety and injury risk as the core objection, not scheduling. The union isn’t likely to trade away a free week for a game that produces nothing more than seeding-adjacent bragging rights.
Even if the league found a way to make it worth the players’ while financially, there’s a real chance it just becomes the Pro Bowl problem all over again: full pads, but not full effort. A third-place game only works if the players treat it like it matters. Nothing about the current incentive structure gives them a reason to.
