The NFL may plan to open up its media deals years ahead of schedule, but some terms are set in stone.
NBC Sports president Rick Cordella said in an interview on the Sports Media Watch Podcast that NBC will have rights to Super Bowl 64 in 2030 no matter what the outcome of the league’s upcoming media rights renegotiations. “We will have the 2030 Super Bowl guaranteed no matter what. So if [the NFL] were to open [up the rights], and if the crazy scenario which we don’t renew the NFL happened, we would still have the 2030 Super Bowl. That’s guaranteed to us.”
NBC has the Super Bowl at the end of this current season, which is year three of the NFL’s four-year Super Bowl rotation. ESPN/ABC closes out the rotation with next year’s game, before it restarts with CBS in 2028, FOX in 2029 and NBC again in 2030.
The 2029-30 season is the last before the league can trigger the opt-out clause in most of its contracts — Disney’s opt out is not until after it carries the 2031 Super Bowl a year later — and it has long been expected that the league will return to the negotiating table at that point. But as John Ourand of Puck reported earlier this year, and as NFL commissioner Roger Goodell confirmed last month to Alex Sherman of CNBC, the league is hoping to renegotiate its deals as soon as next year, three years earlier than that contractual opt-out.
The NFL would need the agreement of its media partners to return to the table ahead of schedule.
“If [Goodell] were to come and want to talk to us about extending our deal, of course,” Cordella said. “They’re a fantastic partner. We talk to the NFL daily, maybe every other day. It’s one of these relationships that we have, that it would be no surprise if they want to talk about the future and where things are going. We welcome those conversations and have them. Do we strike a deal prior? Do they have real serious negotiations — that’s really up to the NFL.”
Beyond securing higher rights fees, it is not clear how much the NFL intends to — or is able to — meaningfully change the terms of its existing deals as part of any early renegotiations. The league moving up negotiations is not the same thing as it moving up the opt-out date, after which it could take rights to the open market.
After this season, there are four full NFL seasons before the opt-out. Presumably, the league will either negotiate deals that do not go into effect until after the opt-out, or secure permission from its partners to change terms for seasons already covered by the existing deals.
Either way, based on Cordella’s comments, the networks will ultimately have the final say over the inventory promised them in the current deal. “If there’s a scenario in which NBC were no longer in business with the NFL, we would still be guaranteed that 2030 Super Bowl. We wouldn’t give up the 2030 Super Bowl unless it was part of something longer term. And I don’t know if we’d give it up anyway, if we would have to, but 2030 Super Bowl is guaranteed as part of the first tranche of rights that we have.”
Cordella’s full interview on the Sports Media Watch Podcast will be published Monday.
