After moving around the dial for the past four years, Thursday Night Football now has a long-term home.
Fox Sports announced Wednesday that it has acquired Thursday Night Football rights under a five-year deal through the 2022 season. Fox replaces incumbents CBS and NBC and becomes the third over-the-air TNF partner in the past five years.
The rights fee is higher than the $450 million CBS and NBC paid under the previous deal, though there were some significant discrepancies in the reported numbers. Sports Business Daily is reporting $550 million, while Variety and ESPN are reporting more than $650 million.
The particulars of the deal are unchanged from last season. Fox will produce the entire 18-game schedule, which consists of 11 over-the-air simulcasts on the FOX broadcast network and seven exclusive games on NFL Network.
Next season, the FOX Thursday Night Football games will run consecutively from Week 4 to Week 15 (not counting Thanksgiving). In the two years when CBS and NBC split rights, the simulcasts were broken up into separate five-week runs.
The new deal is a marked change of strategy for the NFL. Previous TNF contracts were one-year deals with an option for a second. The five-year length brings TNF in line with the other NFL TV contracts, which expire at the end of the 2022 season (ESPN’s Monday Night Football deal is an exception, ending after the 2021 season).
Fox, which is already paying $1.1 billion for its NFC contract, will now pay more for Thursday Night Football rights than for Major League Baseball ($525M), NASCAR ($380M) and the Big Ten ($240M).
Fox did not have much competition for the rights. CBS and NBC were clearly unenthusiastic. ESPN/ABC flirted with a surprise bid but decided not to bother. The NFL did, for the first time, accept bids from digital outlets, but it may still be too early for a marquee package to go to the likes of Amazon.
[News from Fox Sports, Sports Business Daily 1.31, ESPN.com 1.31, Variety 1.31]
