LONDON — It’s strange to be in a country where ESPN is barely an afterthought. Near the London Eye, hard on the South Bank of the River Thames, there are billboards featuring images of soccer stars Kylian Mbappe and Erling Haaland promoting the many sports properties of TNT Sports, which here is a pay-TV joint venture between BT Group and Warner Bros. Discovery. TNT Sports airs Champions League, the Olympics, some Premier League matches, rugby union, tennis and many other properties. It’s a sports broadcasting juggernaut on this side of the pond — and the promotional campaign is the kind of advert you might see for ESPN at a bus shelter in the United States.

The Worldwide Leader in Sports slogan has always been a misnomer once you leave the American border, but ESPN made it clear this week that it is the king of American sports broadcasting at the moment. This week has become one of the most momentous in the 46-year history of company. Five years from now, we might be calling it the most impactful week in modern ESPN history.

The transactions include:

•The network acquiring the league’s NFL Network and substantial rights to RedZone, along with other content assets, in exchange for the NFL getting a 10 percent ownership stake in ESPN. The news was first reported by my colleague Andrew Marchand. On Wednesday, colleague Dan Shanoff examined key questions around the transaction. 

•The announcement of a launch date —Thursday, Aug. 21 — for ESPN’s new direct-to-consumer (DTC) streaming service, called “ESPN,” a product that is intrinsically linked to the item above, given the most valuable piece of content for any media company today is NFL live game inventory. It is not a coincidence that the launch of ESPN DTC coincides with the start of the college football and NFL seasons.

• A rights agreement for ESPN DTC to become the exclusive U.S. domestic home of all WWE Premium Live Events (PLEs), including WrestleMania, starting in 2026. The deal is for five years and Disney will pay WWE $325 million a year for the rights, as first reported by The Wall Street Journal. The Athletic has confirmed the length of the deal and dollar figures, per sources briefed on the agreement.

• ESPN also announced another content agreement with the NFL, extending ESPN’s rights to cover the NFL Draft through 2030 and expanding the Disney networks where the draft can air from ESPN and ABC to include streaming platforms Disney+ and Hulu. It is a valuable piece of content. The first round of this year’s NFL Draft averaged 13.6 million viewers. That marked the second-most watched first round on record. It was an 11 percent increase over 2023, which averaged 12.3 million viewers. 

In a brief interview on Wednesday, ESPN chairman Jimmy Pitaro described the moment as a “very important week” for his company. The NFL deal was one that had been negotiated over many years. In many ways, it represents the culmination of perhaps Pitaro’s biggest objective when he replaced former president John Skipper in 2018 — improve his company’s crumbling relations with the NFL. Upon arriving in 2018, the ESPN-NFL relationship was fractious, to put it mildly, and that was evident when ESPN executives learned of the “Monday Night Football” schedule that year. League officials privately grumbled about negative stories on ESPN.com and “Outside the Lines.”

“I’ve never worked on a deal for this long,” Pitaro said. “This is my eighth year at ESPN, and the conversation with the league actually predate(s) my arrival at ESPN. It really picked up steam I’d say about four years ago. Then we started to see some light at the end of the tunnel maybe a year ago. We have always been focused on identifying ways to expand that partnership.”

“When I joined ESPN and started to dive in on the NFL media assets, including NFL Network, I saw a pretty obvious way for us to expand our relationship in that way,” Pitaro continued. “I made that clear to the league very early on in my tenure at ESPN. From day one, they’ve been clear with me that they were very interested in getting this done with us. I guess that’s a long way of saying that what has resonated most with me during these conversations is how much the league respected the quality of our coverage. We cover the league seven days a week, 365 days a year, nonstop across studio, across digital, across social. I have always felt in these conversations that the league really appreciates what we do for them.”

No doubt, NFL owners also appreciate now owning 10 percent of ESPN and what that potentially means financially as far as the valuation of that equity now and into the future. Hanging over all of this is government regulatory approval — and that is a massive wild card.

Viewers have already had plenty of questions about how ESPN will run NFL Network. Pitaro said ESPN as a company has years of experience with college conference-specific networks. He described NFL Network as one of ESPN’s “marquee networks.” With the transaction, NFL Network will report to ESPN president of content Burke Magnus, and he’ll have a major role in the editorial shape of the network.

You have a right to be skeptical on what the deal means for ESPN as far as its journalism coverage of the NFL. The company still employs fantastic reporters, including Don Van Natta Jr., a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter with a specialty in NFL reporting. But this is also a company that shuttered “Outside The Lines” and has let go of a ton of journalists over the last 10 years. The company’s front-facing identity is now defined by opinionists. Never forget the first letter of ESPN stands for “Entertainment.”

Asked about this, Pitaro said the charter on covering the NFL will not change.

“We’ve been very clear with the NFL from day one that nothing is changing in terms of how we cover the league,” Pitaro said. “Nothing is changing in terms of our journalistic principles. To be clear, they (the NFL) never once asked us to change our approach in terms of how we cover them. We are the place of record. A huge part of our DNA is how we cover sports objectively and fairly. They understand as do all leagues that that’s going to continue, hard stop.”

In the time I had with Pitaro, I asked him to address a number of issues on consumers’ minds. He provided insight on how ESPN’s newly acquired NFL games will be scheduled. He also provided news on WWE fans getting some early matches during premium live events that you could see on linear TV (like cable systems or bundled streaming networks), as ESPN has done with UFC. ESPN will also increase its coverage of WWE in various content areas.

On the NFL Network

“Look, we have a ton of experience here running sports-specific, league-specific, conference specific networks,” Pitaro said. “The best examples are SEC Network and ACC Network. So NFL Network will be one of our marquee networks that that we’re distributing at ESPN. Once it closes, the network will report to Burke Magnus. He needs to start thinking about his plans there, but I will tell you the NFL commissioner and team have done a fantastic job building out NFL Network. We’ve been partnered with these folks for years on the NFL Draft, and we are starting to think about ways that we can expand the partnership. We are fans of NFL Network programming. What you see today on the NFL Network, we intend to continue. We appreciate the quality of their studio programming, and we’re excited to add that into our arsenal. We will continue to distribute it linearly (via traditional cable or satellite) so the fan that wants the network linearly will continue be able to access it that way. But we’re adding another option for the fan, which is building it into ESPN direct-to-consumer.”

On the RedZone brand

(Note: ESPN would own broad rights to the RedZone brand and distribute the NFL RedZone Channel to pay TV operators for continued inclusion into their sports packages.)

“The Red Zone is of vital importance to hardcore NFL fans. We are acquiring linear rights but on the digital side, we’ve agreed to bundle ESPN direct-to-consumer with NFL+ Premium which includes RedZone. From our perspective, that is how our fans and customers is going to be able to access all of ESPN, plus RedZone in the NFL+ Premium app.”

On NFL game inventory

“Obviously we like the fact that we’re getting the additional games. We’re licensing three new games and then we’re going to move four games from the ESPN networks. There are currently three side-by-side games, meaning games on ABC and ESPN. Those three games, once the deal closes, we’ll move over to the NFL Network. Then the game that we have on ESPN+ will move over to the NFL Network. So we’ll maintain seven games within the network. As a part of that, we will have more exclusive windows, meaning three new games with exclusive windows. We’re getting out of this side-by-side business and moving those three games over. So you’re going from 22 clean windows to now 28 clean windows for NFL games across ESPN networks.”

On how he will judge the direct-to-consumer launch on August 21

“Our number one priority at ESPN is direct-to-consumer, but it’s not the direct-to-consumer opening weekend. This launch will not be a movie opening, where we evaluate ourselves based on performance for opening weekend. This is a marathon, not a sprint. We’re not gonna launch with all of the features and functionality that will be available a year from now or two years from now. Our product teams are excited, but they’ve been very clear that there will be gradual and regular enhancements to the ESPN experience. I’m not trying to minimize the importance of the launch. I’m just emphasizing the fact that there will be regular updates to the product.”

On the WWE acquisition

“The WWE premium level events will help us expand our audience. It’s a younger, more diverse audience, which is really interesting to us. These are marquee events, quality storytelling. It’s a good fit for us from a churn perspective. One of the biggest challenges we have with the direct-to-consumer business and what anyone has with a direct-to-consumer business is churn and seasonality. We’re going to work closely with the WWE in terms of minimizing churn and having these events throughout the calendar year.”

“This will also be an opportunity to expand the audience for ESPN and WWE. One of the levers that we can pull is with Disney+. This is family-friendly entertainment, and so we’re starting to think about whether we leverage the Disney+ platform. I know there’s some interest from our Disney+ colleagues. Also, we’re going to be including some of these events on our linear networks, at least some of the opening windows to some of the events each year. So we might show the pre-show event and then maybe a couple matches on linear. What’s important is that we have a clean break. We’ve started to speak with the WWE about how we can create a clean break to drive the fan from the linear experience to direct-to-consumer.”

(Photo: Denny Medley / Imagn Images)