Thirty-two clubs. Every one on the record. Read the connection points.

The league's master plan lists no clubs

The NFL Capital Accumulation Plan is filed as a multiple-employer plan with Schedule MEP attached. The schedule names three league entities. Eleven clubs file a plan with the same name under their own EIN, and five more did so before renaming it in 2023 or 2024. The template is shared. The plans are not.

Read: a league-designed document adopted club by club. Do not read: a single plan with 32 participating employers.

Three clubs had no welfare filing under any name we could find, until the carrier index supplied the name

Panthers Football LLC and Pro-Football LLC (Commanders) file only a 401(k), and the Rams file a plan carrying only dental and vision. Every 5500 name sweep stopped there. The carrier indexes did not: Blue Cross NC lists DT Sports Holding LLC dba Tepper Sports & Entertainment, Aetna lists WFI Group Inc dba Washington Commanders, and Cigna lists Kroenke Sports Holdings. Each of those entities files a health and welfare plan on the 5500 under its own EIN, with 419, 379 and 645 participants in 2024. Kroenke's count then jumps to 2,434 for 2025, so the 2023 and 2024 figures on that filing look like an undercount rather than a shrinking plan.

A missing public filing alone does not establish anything about the plan. Here the likely explanation was the ordinary one, a filing under a name we had not matched, and a second disclosure regime supplied the name. The summary plan description remains the way to confirm.

The league office stopped attaching Schedule C in 2023

The NFL League Office Reciprocal plan attached Schedule C in 2020, 2021 and 2022. It has not since. Cigna's administrative fee for roughly 2,800 covered persons was visible for three years and then was not. The plan did not change; the reporting did.

A large welfare plan may omit Schedule C when no provider is paid $5,000 or more from plan assets. If the employer pays Cigna directly from general assets, the fee is real and off the form.

A carried-forward count that never moves

The Non-Player Insurance Trust reports exactly 5,616 persons covered under its Hartford life contract in every plan year from 2020 through 2025, while the premium rises each year and the Form 5500 participant count climbs from 759 to 867. One of those numbers is being copied from the prior year's filing.

Persons-covered on Schedule A is carrier-supplied and often stale. Treat it as an order of magnitude, never a headcount.

Kraft Group's medical carrier disappeared in 2024, and so did a third of its participants

Through 2023 the Kraft Group Flexible Benefits Plan showed Harvard Pilgrim/UHG medical at roughly $12.9M premium on about 1,770 lives, with Cross Insurance earning around 2% in commissions. In 2024 there is no medical row, no Schedule C, a new UnitedHealthcare ancillary contract, and a participant count that dropped from 2,233 to 1,463.

The medical line moving off Schedule A reads as a move to self-funding. The participant drop is a separate question: a change in counting basis, or an affiliate leaving the plan. The Schedule MEP on the retirement side still lists 22 employers, so the 401(k) did not shrink the same way. Harvard Pilgrim's own index, harvested in September 2026, does not list Kraft, which fits the 2024 exit; the new UnitedHealthcare ancillary contract points to where the medical administration went.

Zero-premium contracts on a master program

Every Reciprocal filer reports Vision Service Plan with persons covered in the thousands and premium of zero. The vision benefit exists. Its cost is either paid outside the plan or reported nowhere.

A $0 contract is one of Calliope's blocking data-quality flags for a reason. On this program it is systematic, not an error on one filing.

The Falcons vanished in 2022

Atlanta Falcons Football Club LLC filed its own 401(k) through 2021 and then stopped. Nothing under the club's EIN appears after that. The coverage did not end; it moved into the Arthur M. Blank family-of-businesses welfare plan and the BFOB 401(k), which sit under a holding-company EIN with a different business code.

A club-level EIN going quiet is usually a parent-company consolidation. The tell is a holding-company plan whose participant count jumps in the same year.

The Titans left the league program, and the filings show the seam

KSA Industries filed the NFL Employee Reciprocal plan for the Titans through 2023 with no broker on the page. From 2023 a second KSA entity files its own health and welfare plan with Gallagher named on Cigna, Delta Dental and Lincoln contracts. One year of overlap, two EINs, and a broker appearing where none was before.

This is what a move out of a league-negotiated program looks like from the outside: the carrier stack breaks pattern and a broker appears.

What Calliope's own labels do with this

The Patriots resolve as a "PEO client" of the Kraft Group. That label is Calliope's reading of Schedule MEP: Kraft files a multiple-employer 401(k) whose adopting employers include the Patriots, the Revolution, Gillette Stadium's operator, and the family's packaging companies. Kraft is not a PEO. It is a controlled group filing one retirement plan. The Patriots' health coverage is in Kraft's welfare plan, which Schedule MEP does not touch.

The league office itself resolves to four separate company records, split by entity type, because it files as a multiple-employer sponsor, a single-employer sponsor, a multiemployer sponsor and a direct filing entity under one EIN. Two 2023 filings exist for the Reciprocal plan, an original and an amendment, and both surface.

Labels describe filing structure, not corporate structure. The mep_type field answers "did this employer appear on a Schedule MEP," nothing more.

The league's own Cigna program is missing from Cigna's index

The league office, the Chiefs, the Giants, the Raiders, NFL Productions and NFL Properties all show Cigna as administrator on their Reciprocal plan filings, and the Player Insurance Trust shows Cigna as claims administrator on $15.5M of fees. None of them appears among the 26,000 plan structures in Cigna's published index. The five clubs Cigna does list are all ordinary group accounts.

Carrier indexes have their own blind spot, and it is the same one on every hub we have tested: national accounts. UnitedHealthcare's per-employer files omit its largest customers the same way. The two disclosure regimes have different holes, which is why reading them together covers more than either one alone.

The Bengals filed three final returns, and nothing has replaced them yet

Cincinnati Bengals Inc has run three separate welfare plans, medical with Medical Mutual of Ohio, dental with Superior Dental, and life with MedMutual Life, all fully insured and all brokered by USI. For the plan year ending June 30, 2025, every one of them is marked as a final return with zero active participants at year end. The three filings, plus amended returns for the prior year, arrived together on March 10, 2026. Calliope's employer profile flags the sponsor as final-return accordingly.

Three simultaneous final returns on plans that each still had 100 to 129 participants at the start of the year is a consolidation, not a termination of coverage. The ordinary explanations are a new wrap plan under a new plan number, a move to self-funding, or a move under a parent entity. The successor plan's first filing, for the year beginning July 2025, is not due until 2027, so the record will show a gap until then. Until it does, the final-return flag is the only trace, and it is the right question to ask the club.