Simply the best?

The big global sporting battle is often thought to pitch European football against US basketball, certainly the case in South-East Asian markets such as China. However, according to Forbes magazine, it is the American NFL that has more commercial clout than the NBA despite the former essentially being focused only on the North American market. Forbes has also recently noted that European football is actually second only to the NFL in commercial terms. Surely this leaves European football standing alone as the world's leading and mostly commercially lucrative sport, with extensive domestic, international and global appeal/success? The problem is though, that as with other league tables of performance, Forbes considers only commercial revenues. Hence, if one was to factor costs into a comparison of European football and the NFL, would the same relative position of both sports still hold?