This originally appeared in Friday’s edition of The A Block, Awful Announcing’s daily newsletter with the latest sports media news, commentary, and analysis. Sign up here and be the first to know everything going on in the sports media world.
At this time last year, it was pretty safe to say there would be a lull in media rights news for the foreseeable future. The NBA had recently finalized its 11-year mega-deals with ESPN, NBC, and Prime Video, the NFL was still four years away from its 2029 opt-outs, college football was spoken for, and the NHL was locked up through 2028. Other than ESPN exiting its Sunday Night Baseball contract, triggering a half-year scramble by MLB to find a set of short-term TV partners, the media rights waters were calm.
As it would turn out, a storm was brewing.
Reports first surfaced last fall that the NFL would likely seek to renegotiate its media rights deals prior to its opt-out options in 2029 (or 2030 for its ESPN contract). There was reason enough to do so. As we all know by now, the NFL felt its rights were vastly undervalued after seeing the NBA secure $76 billion for its deals. NBC and Prime Video, somehow and some way, will end up paying the NBA more on an average annual basis than the NFL, if the current contracts reached the end of their terms.
That, of course, will not be happening on the NFL’s watch. It is, by all metrics, peerless in terms of the most valuable programming on television, except in the one metric that matters to the league: Revenue.
Networks, especially the likes of CBS, Fox, and NBC, will pay whatever they need to retain a piece of the NFL. The plurality of advertising revenue for these networks comes directly from NFL programming, and the value the Shield provides to command higher retransmission fees from pay TV distributors is not quantifiable (read: existential).
There are two clear knock-on effects from the NFL taking its rights to market early. The first is obvious; the league might split its inventory differently, and games that used to be on one broadcaster might end up on another. The second impacts the entire sports rights landscape. Leagues other than the NFL now have to consider how to approach their next set of broadcast agreements knowing that the NFL is about to take considerable money out of the market.
Let’s start with the first point. How will the NFL distribute its games once it locks in new agreements?
First off, we know by way of the NFL renegotiating these deals early that the league will have to engage with its current partners. There’s no early negotiations if, say, CBS or Fox didn’t want to talk. That means, in all likelihood, any deals that the NFL wants to redo before 2029 will include its current partners.
There’s many reasons why this is good for both the NFL and the incumbent broadcasters. For the incumbents, it gives an opportunity to secure NFL rights, and thereby some level of business stability, well into the 2030s. There’s reason to believe the NFL won’t want to apply maximum pressure on the incumbents from a pricing perspective during early negotiations. The league wants to get paid more, yes. But it doesn’t want to price its packages so high that it jeopardizes the already fraught economics networks like CBS and Fox are facing. The NFL stands to benefit from keeping these networks in a strong enough financial position where they could conceivably compete with streaming giants like YouTube and Netflix the next time media rights are up for auction.
Secondly, the NFL is incentivized to reprice its incumbent packages in such a way where a deal actually gets done. If the league were to demand a price that a network saw as outrageous, so outrageous that the network decided to exit negotiations entirely and save the billions of dollars per year it would have spent on NFL rights, the league would then be stuck with a lame duck partner until its 2029 opt-out hit. The NFL does not want one of its broadcasters to divest resources from coverage of the league, or potentially risk a brain drain as talent jumps ship to a broadcaster that will have the NFL long-term.
In order to reach a “fair” price, however, the league will likely have some demands. One would assume that the NFL will ask its incumbents, especially its Sunday afternoon partners in CBS and Fox, to give up a bit of inventory that can in turn be sold as a separate package to streamers. Perhaps it asks ESPN, which now owns NFL Network, to cleave off some of the remaining international games on the channel to create a new package. There are countless possibilities, and the NFL is known to get creative in this regard.
But, assuming both the league and its current partners can settle on a fair price and suitable inventory allotment, it’s a win-win. The NFL gets more money now and sets itself up for advantageous media rights negotiations down the line, and the networks gain stability knowing they’ll have NFL programming into the 2030s.
The losers in this scenario are other leagues. As we’ve seen reported in the last week, both the PGA Tour and NHL are now looking to renegotiate their media rights ahead of schedule to try and avoid a world where the NFL takes too much money out of broadcasters’ coffers and they get left behind. No doubt, other properties like the Premier League and MLB, both of which have deals that expire in 2028, are just as worried.
Will any broadcasters take the bait? Well, it’s a calculated risk that likely depends on just how much these other leagues that are looking to jump the NFL in line value stability versus maximizing media revenue. If any prospective broadcaster were to take a deal with one of these smaller (relative to the NFL) leagues before re-upping their NFL rights, it’d have to be at a rate that they perceive as a discount. No one is going to overextend to secure rights for a non-NFL entity, only to realize that there’s not enough left in the bank to match what the NFL is asking for.
For these leagues, it’s either discount your media rights enough to where a broadcaster is willing to pay you before the NFL deals get done, or risk waiting until the NFL deals are finalized and fighting for what’s left. Neither option is good, but it does open up opportunities for companies that aren’t in the NFL bidding war; think Warner Bros. Discovery (or future spinoff Discovery Global), Versant, or Nexstar. They could be next in line to compete for some of these leagues that inevitably get boxed out by the NFL.
Fox CEO Lachlan Murdoch has already alluded to this reality. During a quarterly earnings call last week, Murdoch talked about a “rebalancing” in Fox’s rights portfolio to accommodate for more expensive NFL rights. That means some of Fox’s other properties, namely the World Cup (which expires after this year anyway) and MLB, could be on the chopping block.
The NFL’s decision to renegotiate its deals early will have a ripple effect on the entire industry. Leagues that aren’t the NFL will face an uphill battle to secure the rights increases they expect, while networks will need to evaluate what’s core to their sports strategy and what isn’t.
What’s clear is that 2026 will be anything but sleepy for the media rights news cycle, as both leagues and networks jockey to secure their futures.