Fox has been an NFL broadcasting partner since 1994, but Mike Florio could see that longstanding relationship coming to an end in the near future.<\/p>\n
On Wednesday, the House Judiciary Committee held a lengthy hearing on the NFL\u2019s broadcast antitrust exemption<\/a> amid concerns that the league has been skirting the exemption\u2019s limits<\/a>, which arguably apply only to league-wide packages sold to broadcast networks.<\/p>\n Advertisement<\/p>\n Like so many of these things during the Donald Trump administration era, the hearing raised the questions of \u201cwhy now?\u201d and \u201cwhat\u2019s the real purpose here?\u201d<\/p>\n It\u2019s not hard to put two and two together and see that Rupert Murdoch, founder and Chairman Emeritus of Fox Corporation and News Corp, has called in some favors to put pressure on the NFL<\/a>. That government pressure has included a\u00a0DOJ investigation into anti-competitive practices<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0public comments from FCC chair Brendan Carr<\/a>. As has been clear from the beginning, the political and business interests of Murdoch, Trump, and the conservative billionaire class are all aligned here in keeping NFL games on Fox at a reasonable price for as long as possible.<\/p>\n As PFT\u2019s Florio noted in his piece<\/a>, it was perhaps no coincidence that Clay Travis, a longtime Fox employee (until this week), testified at Wednesday\u2019s hearing and went fairly hard on the impact of the NFL\u2019s growing relationship with streaming services and how it affects fans.<\/p>\n For the NFL, the whole affair has moved from feeling like an annoying fly buzzing around their head to a tick burrowing into their skin. And it has Florio wondering if the bad blood left behind from all of this will be a catalyst for the NFL to sever ties with Fox when media rights come up for negotiation once more in 2030.<\/p>\n Advertisement<\/p>\n \u201cIt would be a stunning move, if it happens,\u201d writes Florio<\/a>. \u201cFox arrived as a disruptor in 1994, snatching the Sunday afternoon NFC package from CBS and holding it for 32 years and counting. Murdoch doesn\u2019t seem to care. He has drawn a line in the sand, and he has been willing to use everything at his disposal to get the NFL to tread lightly when it comes to the potential sale of more games to streamers.\u201d<\/p>\n It\u2019s a similar thought to what Awful Announcing\u2019s Matt Yoder pondered in May<\/a>, when trying to read the tea leaves on how this whole quagmire could end.<\/p>\n The NFL will have several billion-dollar and trillion-dollar companies\u00a0falling all over themselves<\/a>\u00a0to get a piece of their lucrative, luscious pie.\u00a0And\u00a0all of them\u00a0will have much deeper pockets than Fox. Whether it\u2019s streamers or broadcast networks, everyone wants more NFL games. If the NFL were to put Fox\u2019s current package up for bid, the competition would be fierce.<\/p>\n Regardless of who takes which package, in a game of magical chairs, the most logical seat to remove is Fox. There are myriad realistic scenarios in which Fox is left without a seat at the NFL table come the 2029 opt-out. And it might just be for business\u00a0and\u00a0personal reasons.<\/p>\n Yoder also looked at how Warner Bros. Discovery chairman David Zaslav\u2019s game of chicken with the NBA<\/a> over media rights eventually led the league to look\u00a0elsewhere<\/a>, ending a longstanding relationship. So there is recent precedent for how things can play out.<\/p>\n For now, Murdoch and Fox can play the card of letting Trump and Republicans be their attack dogs, but there will come a day soon when that power is gone. What comes next will likely be more up to the NFL than Fox.<\/p>\n Advertisement<\/p>\n The post Mike Florio wonders if Rupert Murdoch\u2019s political pressure leads NFL to dump Fox<\/a> appeared first on Awful Announcing<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Fox has been an NFL broadcasting partner since 1994, but Mike Florio could see that longstanding relationship coming…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":730742,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[559],"tags":[279813,64,63,2490,1953,89920,305443,238804,58748,92511,593,27067,85],"class_list":["post-730741","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nfl","tag-antitrust-exemption","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-donald-trump","tag-fox","tag-fox-corporation","tag-house-judiciary-committee","tag-longstanding-relationship","tag-mike-florio","tag-news-corp","tag-nfl","tag-rupert-murdoch","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/730741","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=730741"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/730741\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/730742"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=730741"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=730741"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=730741"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}