Fox Corporation’s campaign against the NFL’s streaming deals reached the highest levels of the company and the government, according to a report from one of its corporate siblings.
Several Fox Corporation executives, including chairman emeritus Rupert Murdoch, have raised concerns about the NFL’s rights deals with streaming companies directly to White House officials, including the president, Joe Flint of the Murdoch-controlled Wall Street Journal reported Thursday night. Murdoch in particular argued during a White House dinner in February that the prospect of streamers acquiring more NFL games had the potential to “kill broadcast networks,” per Flint.
WSJ did not address whether Murdoch or any other Fox officials may have specifically requested federal intervention, but the FCC began soliciting public comment on the issue of sports rights moving to streaming services in late February, and the U.S. justice department was reported last month to have opened an investigation.
Details have yet to be officially confirmed or announced, but the investigation is believed to concern whether rights deals with streamers comply with the antitrust exemption the NFL was granted by Congress in the Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961 — which allowed the NFL (and other similarly organized leagues) to negotiate the collective sale of individual teams’ media rights.
Flint cited sources Thursday as saying the investigation is “unlikely” to result in the government taking any legal action against the leagues.
Fox has been conspicuous in advocating for federal scrutiny of whether the NFL’s deals with streamers comply with the SBA. The company submitted a public comment to the FCC in March questioning whether the antitrust exemption “should apply to negotiations with businesses — such as paywalled streamers — that benefit significantly already from a lack of a similar regulatory framework, or from any public interest obligations.”
Thursday’s report — which to reiterate was published in a Murdoch-owned publication — would seem to indicate that Fox did not merely take an interest in a cause taken up by the government, but that it may have encouraged the government to take up the cause.
According to Flint, the motivation for Fox was NFL’s desire to renegotiate its media rights deals years ahead of its contractual opt-out in 2029. In exchange for substantial increases in rights fees — the league is seeking a triple-digit percentage increase, according to Alex Sherman of CNBC — the league would drop the opt-out from its contracts, allowing those deals to run for the entirety of the terms that were originally agreed to in 2021.
Fox is not the only network to have “bristled” at the league, and per Flint, some or all of those rightsholders would want to extend their deals beyond those 2021 terms if they agree to negotiate now.
There is no obvious precedent for an active network partner encouraging federal scrutiny of any league, much less one on the level of the NFL. As such it is difficult to forecast exactly how the events of the past few months will impact the NFL’s three-decade relationship with Fox, if at all. Note that the NFL made decisions on both scheduling and media rights that were widely seen as detrimental to ESPN in the late 2010s, a period in which the relationship between the league and network was particularly strained.
