Perhaps the top story in sports media for 2026 is how the NFL and its current set of broadcast partners go about reworking their media rights contracts.<\/p>\n
It became apparent last year that the NFL, despite being locked into its current contracts until at least 2029 and 2030 when its opt-out clauses hit, will approach its broadcast partners to renegotiate those deals early. The reason is simple: The NFL believes its current set of deals are undervalued.<\/p>\n
But to redo its deals early requires some level of cooperation with its current partners, lest the league risks having a lame duck broadcaster for four years that might divest resources from its NFL coverage and undergo a potential talent brain drain as the network looks towards a post-NFL future.<\/p>\n
Instead, it\u2019s in the best interest of the league to keep networks like CBS, Fox, NBC, and ESPN involved. For one, it prevents the lame duck scenario. But it also keeps these networks in a position of relative strength, insofar as they can be in an era of declining economics for linear television. After all, the NFL would like all four of these networks to be around, and financially stable enough, to bid for rights the\u00a0next time the league renews its deals in the mid-2030s.<\/p>\n
For those reasons, prominent sports media analysts Andrew Marchand and John Ourand don\u2019t foresee wholesale changes to the NFL\u2019s media rights this time around. Appearing on the latest episode of\u00a0The Main Event with Andrew Marchand<\/a>, the duo agreed that the broad strokes of the NFL\u2019s current set of deals would likely remain, but there will likely be some games carved out for the streamers along the way<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m just going to have a really boring prediction about all of this,\u201d Ourand said. \u201cI just think everybody\u2019s going to renew and they\u2019re going to have an added package. YouTube is going to get some of those games and Netflix is going to get some of those games.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m just going to pound on a theme that you and I talk about all the time, Andrew, and that\u2019s ESPN and Fox and CBS and NBC need the NFL. Their entire existence is built on having mass programming that people come and watch and they can sell advertising to and they can get affiliate money from cable and satellite. And these streamers, they like the NFL, but they don\u2019t need the NFL,\u201d Ourand explained earlier in the episode.<\/p>\n \u201cI think Netflix maybe gets a five-game package of marquee stuff and YouTube, [an] international [package], but maybe goes hard for one of these bigger packages,\u201d Marchand predicted, floating the possibility that Netflix would ideally like to have one game per month it could eventize, which would be consistent with its broader sports strategy.<\/p>\n One thing that won\u2019t be the same, of course, is the price. NFL executives, Ourand reports, are peeved that networks like NBC are paying more per year for NBA rights than they are for the NFL\u2019s primetime package. \u201cExecutives at the NFL are irritated. That deal irritated them. The idea that NBC is paying more for Sunday Night Basketball than for Sunday Night Football, these are people and personalities, and it makes the executives at the NFL crazy that that happened.\u201d<\/p>\n NBC currently pays about $2 billion per year to the NFL and $2.45 billion per year to the NBA.<\/p>\n Likely, the NFL\u2019s linear partners will start paying significantly more money and receive fewer games under new agreements. The games the NFL reclaims will likely go to streamers who want a bigger piece of the pie. Then, the league will reevaluate its situation once the early-2030s roll around.<\/p>\n For now, the status quo (or close to it) would seem ideal for fans. The NFL is already one of the most accessible sports leagues for viewers, with the majority of games being broadcast by free-to-air networks. More games on streamers does mean more fragmentation, but not in the extreme sense of putting an entire package behind a Netflix paywall, for instance. And as other sports have only become more confusing<\/a> to watch in recent years, the simplicity of the NFL\u2019s setup is part of why it continues to dominate television viewership in every single metric.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Perhaps the top story in sports media for 2026 is how the NFL and its current set of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":162037,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[66327,150,152,151,66328,66329,66330,66331,66332],"class_list":{"0":"post-162036","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arlington","8":"tag-andrew-marchand","9":"tag-arlington","10":"tag-arlington-headlines","11":"tag-arlington-news","12":"tag-john-ourand","13":"tag-nfl-on-cbs","14":"tag-nfl-on-espn","15":"tag-nfl-on-fox","16":"tag-nfl-on-nbc"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/162036","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=162036"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/162036\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/162037"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=162036"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=162036"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=162036"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}