National Football League commissioner Roger Goodell starts his second year on the job with a relatively quiet business docket. The commissioner and his staff will eventually have to deal with the future of Atlanta Falcons quarterback Michael Vick. But Goodell said last Thursday, at the Detroit Lions training camp facility, that he didn’t think Vick was a distraction.

Goodell wants to change the image of NFL players after all of the off-season arrests of players from the Cincinnati Bengals, Pacman Jones’s Las Vegas problems, and Vick’s legal difficulties. Goodell has been handing out suspensions to players who have been in trouble with the law, including Jones and Chris Henry. He also told Vick to stay away from the Falcons training camp facility.

While Goodell has been focusing on discipline with the hope of ending stories about players and coaches’ arrests, his one-year stewardship of the league has produced some positive results for his owners. His staff has gotten a revenue sharing agreement among the owners. On the business side, there are new partnerships, all of which will bring additional revenue to league. There will be a global expansion of the product during late October, when the Giants play Miami in London. The NFL is behind baseball, basketball, and hockey in marketing its product globally, and there is some thought that the NFL could add a 17th game to its schedule beginning in 2008 with each team playing in a game outside of America.

NFL games could take place in Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, or Edmonton in Canada; Mexico City, and in European venues next season. Goodell would have to negotiate an agreement with the executive director of the football players’ association, Gene Upshaw, to add a 17th game, but that might not be a difficult task. Throughout the NFL’s history, the right amount of cash on the barrelhead has been the great facilitator when it comes to getting deals done that benefited the league in the long run.

The only negatives on Goodell’s watch so far are the failures to play a preseason game in Beijing featuring New England and Seattle, which was supposed to have been played on August 9, and the lack of an agreement between the league and three cable companies — Comcast, Time Warner, and Cox — to carry the NFL Network. There are also stadium issues in San Diego, San Francisco, and Minneapolis that need to be addressed.

The NFL may once again try to stage a preseason game in Beijing in 2009, one year after the close of the Beijing Olympics. One of the reasons that the NFL pulled out of the 2007 preseason game was because the game was to be played in an old venue, Workers’ Stadium, which is 48 years old and not up to NFL standards. The NFL is also putting a tremendous amount of resources into its London effort, even though the game at the 83,000-seat Wembley Stadium is already a sellout.

There could be news about delivering the NFL Network to homes soon. The NFL may make the network available on a broadband platform similar to what baseball has on its official Web site. The league still has plenty of time to put together a deal with one of its cable or satellite partners, as the first NFL Network game is on Thanksgiving night.

The stadium issues became more cloudy after the collapse of the I-35W bridge, which linked Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minn., on August 1. Minnesota Vikings owner Zygi Wilf is seeking a more than $1 billion stadium and village complex at the site of the Metrodome, which is blocks away from the bridge. Minnesota taxpayers would heavily subsidize Wilf’s plan, and it received a lukewarm reaction when it was unveiled last spring.

Wilf intends to go before the Minnesota legislature in 2009 looking for money: Funds that may have been allocated for Wilf’s stadium-village concept could now go into building up Minnesota’s aging infrastructure.

In San Diego, not much has changed in since Chargers owner Alex Spanos told this reporter that he was unhappy with his stadium situation 7 1/2 years ago. San Diego has given up on trying to keep the Chargers within city limits. But Spanos is hopeful that he will be able to reach an agreement with one of the city’s suburbs still bidding for a stadium plan, and that local residents in Oceanside or Chula Vista can vote on a financial plan to fund the project in November 2008.

Up the Pacific Coast Highway in Santa Clara, Calif., local politicians are still going through 49ers owner John York’s plan to build a stadium in the city, which is more than 30 miles south of San Francisco. The York family wants to build a new place loaded with luxury boxes, club seats, and other amenities that customers — not fans — expect in the stadium experience, all of which are unavailable at the 49ers home stadium in Candlestick Point.

In 1997, San Francisco voters approved a referendum which would have funded a stadium and mall complex near Candlestick. But the project never got off the ground because 49ers owner Edward DeBartolo gave up control of the franchise to his sister Denise York in 2000, as part of a settlement of various lawsuits over the family’s business. The Yorks abandoned the project and it has only been in the past year that they have revived the hunt for a new stadium. But the family turned down a San Francisco proposal to move into a stadium at the Hunters Point Naval Shipyard earlier this year.

A close eye still needs to be kept on New Orleans. Saints owner Tom Benson is committed to keep his team in the Crescent City until the 2010 season. Benson’s team is heavily subsidized by Louisiana taxpayers as part of a 2001 deal between the franchise and the state, which provided $186.5 million to Benson to keep the team from moving elsewhere. The New Orleans economy is still struggling to recover from Hurricane Katrina, however. Benson is looking for a new stadium with all the toys his fellow owners have, but Louisiana just doesn’t have the money.

Goodell will be involved in all of the stadium projects as a lobbyist when called upon. That is as much a part of the commissioner’s job as handing out the Vince Lombardi Trophy to the winning team of the Super Bowl.

All in all, Goodell had a solid season in 2006, but there is room for global, stadium, and cable improvement. The NFL remains a moneymaking machine, and Goodell has done nothing in his rookie season that would change that fact.

evanjweiner@yahoo.com