NBCUniversal is on the brink of a three-year rights deal with Major League Baseball, but NBC Sports president Rick Cordella has his eye on a longer-term relationship.
“We didn’t get in the business of baseball to do a three-year deal,” Cordella said on the latest edition of the Sports Media Watch Podcast, published Monday. “The hope is that we get in for three years, they re-jigger their packages a bit, and we can assess what content we want to buy in the future — but we’re now an incumbent when those renegotiations happen, as opposed to being [on] the outside.”
NBC has been negotiating this year for a piece of the expiring ESPN MLB package that includes “Sunday Night Baseball,” Wild Card playoff games and a handful of other inventory, but several other properties — including the three main rounds of playoffs — are currently spoken for by incumbents Fox Sports and TNT Sports.
All of the MLB national media rights, and potentially all of the league’s local rights, will come up for bid in 2028.
Last year, NBCU was unable to bid on the NBA Finals, which had already been earmarked for ESPN during the incumbent’s exclusive negotiating window. “The NBA kind of dictated what was available to us, and unfortunately, the NBA Finals was already spoken for, so we never had an opportunity to really bid against that.”
As an incumbent with MLB in 2028, NBCU would presumably have an opportunity to bid on MLB rights before they hit the open market. But when asked whether NBC might have interest in a World Series, Cordella said it was not a possibility to which he had given much thought. “I don’t know if that opportunity will present itself. I don’t know if that opportunity is going to be too expensive or makes sense with where our schedule or our calendar is. So I have not thought one second about acquiring the World Series, but if the opportunity presents itself, I’m sure we’d create a financial model on it and say, ‘does it make sense for NBCUniversal?'”
In the meantime, NBCU is poised to become the home of “Sunday Night Baseball” and Wild Card playoff games starting next season, giving the company a year-round slate of Sunday night sports between the NFL, NBA and Major League Baseball.
“It’s a very easy concept to understand that we’re going to have the NFL, NBA and Major League Baseball — the three biggest professional sports in America — having the best players, the best matchups, great production on Sunday nights,” Cordella said. “You know before the work week begins and you’re a little weary on Sunday night, you can turn your channel to NBC and get a game that’s worthy of your attention. We feel like that’s a concept that consumers and the sports fans can easily understand. So we’re pretty excited about that.”
Cordella confirmed that the MLB games will slot in on NBC between the bookends of “Sunday Night Football” in the fall and “Sunday Night Basketball” and NBA playoff games in the spring. “So if it’s not on Sunday nights on NBC, you’ll probably see those games on Peacock. And there are other games throughout the year that we haven’t announced yet that will be on Peacock as well, and there’ll be other games throughout the year that will be on NBC. So it’s not just Sunday nights on NBC. We’ll try and find other windows for baseball to be on the network.”
That will reportedly include a primetime game on the second night of the season, and could also include the Sunday morning package of games that currently airs on Roku, and which NBCUniversal previously aired from 2022-23.
In the podcast, which was published Monday, Cordella also addressed the relaunch of NBCSN, the return of the NBA on NBC, NFL’s plan to renegotiate its media rights deals ahead of schedule, and additional topics.
