The on-again, off-again tension between the National Football League and the nation\u2019s leader has landed on pro football\u2019s pivot to streaming.<\/p>\n
In an interview with Full Measure, President Donald Trump was asked if he thinks the NFL is engaged in \u201cprice gouging\u201d by putting games on paid platforms, and whether the federal government should do something about it.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s tough<\/a>,\u201d Trump said. \u201cYou\u2019ve got people that love football. They\u2019re great people. They don\u2019t make enough money to go and pay this. It\u2019s tough. And they could be killing the golden goose. I mean, they have that stupid kickoff thing that you can\u2019t watch. It\u2019s unwatchable. I hate the games where they, you know, they have the new phony kickoff. I don\u2019t think it\u2019s any safer. I hope college football doesn\u2019t do that.\u201d<\/p>\n It\u2019s no surprise that Trump found a way to bring up the NFL\u2019s two-year-old alternative to the traditional kickoff formation. He often does, even if he doesn\u2019t seem to realize that the new formation leads to far more returns than the prior formation did. <\/p>\n The next question brought the topic back to the migration of games to paid platforms. <\/p>\n \u201cThey have to be careful because, you know, others have tried this, and all of a sudden you don\u2019t have a sport anymore. Probably will. . . . There\u2019s something very sad when they take football away from many, many people. Very sad. I don\u2019t like it.\u201d <\/p>\n So does he think the government will intervene? <\/p>\n \u201cI don\u2019t know,\u201d Trump said. \u201cBut I don\u2019t like it. I don\u2019t like it. They\u2019re making a lot of money. They could make a little bit less. They could let the people see. You have people that live for Sunday. They live \u2014 they can\u2019t think about anything else, and then all of a sudden, they\u2019re gonna have to pay $1,000 a game. It\u2019s crazy. So, I\u2019m not happy about it.\u201d<\/p>\n Obviously, no one is paying $1,000 per game. He likely meant to say that it costs nearly $1,000 per season to watch all games<\/a>.<\/p>\n Either way, the issue is on the President\u2019s radar screen. It comes at a time when the NFL has been attempting to get the free, over-the-air networks to pay more for broadcast contracts that run through 2029. And when the networks, with Fox owner Rupert Murdoch at the helm<\/a>, are pushing back by pulling any and all available levers within the political system.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The on-again, off-again tension between the National Football League and the nation\u2019s leader has landed on pro football\u2019s…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":635099,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[63],"tags":[349,99],"class_list":["post-635098","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nfl","tag-nfl","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/635098","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=635098"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/635098\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/635099"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=635098"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=635098"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=635098"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}