The NFL is widely expected to begin negotiations for a new set of media rights deals as early as this year, and we’re now getting some details as to how those negotiations might play out.
What’s already known is that the league will have to court all of its current broadcast partners. The NFL’s active contracts allow the league to opt out in 2029 at the earliest. That means in order to get new deals done before then, the league needs its current partners in CBS, Fox, NBC, ESPN, and Prime Video to be on board.
The goal, of course, is to meaningfully increase the revenue the league earns from its media rights. Currently, the NFL makes about $10 billion per year selling broadcast rights to networks and streamers. But according to a recent report by Puck’s sports correspondent John Ourand, Wall Street analysts anticipate the league could double the average annual value of its media deals, bringing its annual media revenue closer to $20 billion.
That’s a tough bill for legacy broadcasters to afford. CBS, Fox, NBC, and ESPN are still reliant on the terminally declining pay-TV bundle to keep their businesses afloat. Asking these networks to double their NFL payments would put them on the fast track to bankruptcy.
As such, the conventional wisdom is that these networks will modestly increase their yearly payment to the NFL, but give up some of their current game inventory in the process. And where would that inventory go? You guessed it, the streamers.
Per Ourand’s report, the “consensus” among Wall Street analysts is that the NFL will carve out separate packages of games for Netflix, Amazon, and YouTube. Each of these streamers already has a partnership with the NFL in some form or fashion. Amazon, of course, airs Thursday Night Football on Prime Video. Netflix has the NFL’s Christmas Day doubleheader. And YouTube is the exclusive provider of NFL Sunday Ticket.
Perhaps the most interesting detail of Ourand’s report is how many games the NFL wants to carve out for each streamer. Per Ourand, “That model would likely include five games each, including the four international games the league took back from NFL Network and the two Christmas Day games that Netflix currently has for one more year.”
If that is the case, the NFL would be taking nine games currently allocated to its linear television partners (CBS, Fox, NBC, ESPN), and redistributing them to streamers. (Three streamers getting five games each equals 15 games total. The four international games are not currently allocated to a broadcaster, and Netflix’s Christmas doubleheader is already included in the count, which leaves nine games to take from current partners.)
While that may not seem like much on the surface, one would expect the NFL to extract those nine games wisely. Maybe NBC no longer gets Opening Night or the primetime Thanksgiving game. Maybe a pair of those late-season Saturday games move from network television to a streamer. That’s four games right there that would command serious money if included in a streamer’s package. And the broadcast networks don’t necessarily have the financial might to prevent it.
From the NFL’s perspective, it’s the perfect hybrid model. The vast majority of games are still available on broadcast television, which remains the most accessible method for fans. The league can command more money from the networks without putting them in a position that could be financially ruinous. With the extra games it carved out from the broadcast networks, it can go to the streamers and command billions more for a package of games that didn’t exist before.
For fans, it means more fragmentation. It means needing to have multiple streaming services for multiple months if you want to watch all the games.
But if the past few years have proven anything, it’s that wherever the NFL goes, fans will follow. And so, further fragmenting games is a risk the league is likely willing to take as it tries to maximize the value of its media rights.