NFL commissioner Roger Goodell is now on the record as seeking to return to the media rights negotiating table a full seven years ahead of schedule — and three to four years before the league is contractually able to opt out of its existing deals.
It is easy to see why the league wants to get back to the negotiating table as soon as possible. The NBA last year was able to secure a whopping $77 billion over 11 years, coming uncomfortably close to the NFL’s $111 billion over the same term length, despite considerably lower television audiences. The NBA benefited from a confluence of circumstances that is not going to last forever, the overlap between the end of linear and the beginning of streaming.
When he was a guest on the Sports Media Watch Podcast in March, Bob Costas said of the 1990s that it was when “the past and future met in a glorious present.” One could make a similar argument about the current state of the media business. Linear is still a powerful enough business to sustain the needs of the leagues, and streaming in its early days is already established enough to seriously compete. But at some point, the future will be the status quo, and all that will be left is streaming.
All of which makes the potential NFL renegotiation an interesting point along that journey. In seeking to take advantage of the opportunities afforded by the transition from linear to streaming, will the NFL accelerate the process?
On its face, a renegotiation allows the linear networks to ensure that they will retain the most important programming in all of television into the next decade. And because the renegotiation requires their approval, they at least theoretically have some say in the matter. Surely the NFL is not going to ask the networks to negotiate new deals and then use that opportunity to remove their rights. Beyond anything else, the networks would never agree to renegotiate if they thought for a second that was possible. The networks are on safer ground renegotiating in 2026 than in 2029, when the NFL can decide for itself whether to head back to the table.
But would the NFL really renegotiate strictly on financial terms? Surely the league would use the opportunity to carve out additional packages and additional windows to shop around. When the NFL expanded its playoffs in 2021, the league awarded rights to the two new games to CBS and NBC. But in the years since, any extra NFL game inventory has been awarded to streamers, whether Wild Card playoff games to Peacock and Prime Video or Christmas Day games to Netflix.
Earlier this year, Netflix chief content officer Bela Bajaria was asked on Puck’s Matthew Bellioni-hosted “The Town” podcast whether Netflix will have a weekly NFL package in the next five years, and if so, which package it would steal from a rival network. She replied that “if the answer is yes,” she would “definitely want the Sunday [afternoon] games.”
There is of course very little likelihood that the NFL would turn over all of its Sunday afternoon games to Netflix or any other streamer. But the prospect of peeling away a few more Sunday games does not seem unrealistic. Why not a Sunday early window that includes games on CBS, FOX and Netflix? There is no rule that says NFL games can only air on two competing networks; when NBC’s Thanksgiving 2020 Ravens-Steelers game was postponed due to COVID, the league’s initial plan was to reschedule it for the Sunday early window opposite the usual regional slate on CBS and FOX. The league already cannibalizes itself two ways at 1 PM, three is a small price to pay for rights fees the league would surely receive.
Perhaps the league could really go for it and spin off its 4:25 PM ET window — the most-watched television program of a given week — into a new package. Earlier this year, MoffettNathanson researcher Robert Fishman suggested to Andrew Marchand that the NFL could carve out a “premium package” for Netflix, tied less to a specific day and time than to the quality of the teams. It is hard to see how that specific idea would be feasible, but a deal for 4:25 PM games would come as close to a “premium package” as the NFL can realistically create, consisting typically of high-quality games involving the league’s highest-profile teams. (And CBS and FOX would still get games in the late window, if only in the 4:05 PM singleheader slot.)
Short of losing rights entirely, it is hard to imagine that there is any sacrifice the NFL could ask of the linear partners that would justify walking away. NFL rights truly are existential for the business of broadcast television, which between falling viewership and the demands of both affiliates and regulators is arguably becoming more trouble than it is worth. If the “Big Four” networks are to continue existing in anything approaching their familiar form, they will have to have NFL games. Which gives the league great latitude to extract more from said linear partners while luring in streamers with increasingly attractive packages.
A renegotiation thus offers a win-win-win scenario. More money for the NFL. Continued survival for the broadcast networks. And higher-profile inventory for the streamers. It may be the last, best bite at the apple the NFL has during television’s transition period.
Now if the linear networks want to hold off the streamers, they could always push back against the NFL’s plan. But by 2029, when the NFL will be free to open up the deals, the linear networks will likely be even weaker than they are today. Perhaps in 2026 they will be able to hold onto most of their inventory, sacrificing a few regional windows here or there. In 2029, they might lose whole packages instead.
Three years may seem like a short amount of time, but it was just three years ago that Amazon was in its infancy airing “Thursday Night Football,” a playoff game on Peacock was unthinkable, and the idea of Netflix airing live sports was still a hypothetical. Better not to risk waiting to see what more changes are in store.
