Chances of the NFL renegotiating any of its media rights deals before the season appear slim to none.
The NFL has agreed to pause its media rights negotiations with CBS while the network’s parent company Paramount deals with the multi-state lawsuit challenging its proposed acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery, Hannah Miller of Bloomberg reported Thursday. The league had begun renewal talks with Paramount earlier this year, taking advantage of a change-of-control provision in its contract that allowed it to reopen talks with CBS after Paramount was acquired by Skydance last year.
It has been more than a year since the first reports that the NFL was seeking to renegotiate its media rights deals years ahead of its contractual 2029 opt-out, and in that time, the only known negotiations have been with Paramount. Earlier Thursday, Fox Corporation CEO Lachlan Murdoch said the company will not renegotiate its rights deal before the opt-out period. While no other network has ruled out talks, executives at NBCUniversal and Disney said in recent months that they were not in active negotiations.
NFL commissioner Roger Goodell told Alex Sherman of CNBC last September that the league wanted to renew its deals “as early as” this year, and gave no indication that any pushback was expected. “I think our partners would want to sit down and talk to us at any time,” he said then.
John Ourand of Puck reported in March that the NFL hoped to have its extensions in place by the start of the new season in September, and intended to reach them one-by-one — starting with Paramount and moving on to FOX. The new deals would go into effect immediately, meaning that the networks would be on the hook for rights fee increases that CNBC’s Sherman described as being in the triple-digits. In return, the NFL would drop its 2029 opt-out and allow the networks’ deals to run the length of the originally-negotiated terms.
Even before its announcement Thursday that it will not negotiate ahead of the opt-out, Fox has been the most publicly resistant to the negotiations. Murdoch said in March that the company was already paying a “market price” that was negotiated “only three years ago.” Behind-the-scenes, Fox and its emeritus chairman Rupert Murdoch are believed to have directly brought up the NFL’s deals with streaming companies to federal government officials, as reported by Murdoch’s own Wall Street Journal.
None of the other networks engaged in similar pushback, but there was little in the way of enthusiasm publicly expressed about returning to the negotiating table.
The prospect of the league’s rights partners being immediately owing additional billions in rights fees had significant implications beyond the networks themselves. Murdoch said in February that Fox would have to consider “rebalancing” its portfolio to accommodate an NFL price hike.
The possibility of the NFL soaking up all the networks’ available funds put other leagues in the position of having to weigh whether to rush to the negotiating table early. NHL commissioner Gary Bettman suggested to Ourand in May that the timing of his league’s negotiations could depend on those of the NFL. Bettman, then: “Obviously, the NFL gets to call the shots in this marketplace. … The NFL has a large footprint, to say the least, and in this environment, if they sneeze, we’ll probably get pneumonia.”
Bettman has since changed his tune, sounded fairly unconcerned about the NFL in an interview with CNBC at Sun Valley last month — saying that he does not feel “any time pressure” to get to the negotiating table before the NFL does.
While the early negotiations would appear to be at best on hold, the NFL has still been busy negotiating new deals this year. The league freed up four game windows as part of its deal last year to sell NFL Network to ESPN and used that inventory to form the bulk of a new package it split between Netflix, Fox and NBC. That deal, it should be noted, generated pushback of its own. Google-owned YouTube was reportedly thought to be a leading contender, but is said to have “balked” — per Ourand — after the NFL opted to split the inventory with Netflix.
