Fox wants in on the NFL’s five-game standalone package for the 2026 season.
According to Pro Football Talk’s Mike Florio, YouTube, Netflix, and Fox are all in play for the mini-slate, which the NFL has been shopping as it renegotiates its broader media rights landscape. The league has presented bidders with a menu of more than five potential games and allowed each bidder to select which five they want. The options on the table include the Week 1 game in Australia, a Thanksgiving eve game that is not yet official but appears inevitable, a second Black Friday game, and a Christmas Eve game.
When this story first emerged in February, the conventional wisdom going into these negotiations was that the five-game packages would land with streamers — Amazon, YouTube, and Netflix — as part of the NFL’s broader effort to double its annual media rights revenue from roughly $10 billion to closer to $20 billion. The legacy broadcasters were expected to accept fewer games in exchange for more manageable rights fees. Fox bidding on a standalone streaming package doesn’t fit that model, and Florio notes that the company’s interest is likely driven at least in part by the fact that Fox is owned by Australian native Rupert Murdoch, making the Australian game a natural target.
The DOJ opened a formal antitrust investigation into the NFL this week, examining whether the league’s media rights sales practices violate antitrust law, a development that Florio added pretty much complicates the five-game bidding, especially since Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal has joined the chorus of criticism directed at the league’s streaming strategy. FCC chairman Brendan Carr has spent months questioning whether the NFL should retain the antitrust protections it has held since the Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961, arguing that moving games to paid streaming services violates the spirit of an exemption granted on the assumption that games would remain freely accessible to the public.
As Awful Announcing’s Drew Lerner first mentioned, the political pressure on the NFL’s streaming strategy is not arriving in a vacuum. The Murdoch and Ellison families, who control Fox and CBS respectively, are two of Donald Trump’s most prominent billionaire supporters and have more to gain than anyone from a federal government that pushes the NFL to keep games on broadcast television rather than send them to streaming services. Carr’s FCC began making noise about sports fragmentation at almost exactly the moment the NFL started renegotiating its media rights deals in earnest.
Florio writes that the NFL may benefit politically from keeping the five games on broadcast TV, or at a minimum on YouTube as a free stream, rather than behind a paywall. As Drew also argued this week, the NFL’s antitrust exemption is ultimately too important to the league’s own business model for Congress to threaten it seriously. Still, the noise from Washington is loud enough that landing these five games on Fox rather than behind a Netflix paywall could be worth more to the league than the rights fee itself.
The NFL is believed to have recently sold a single regular-season game for around $100 million, which puts a reasonable market value for a five-game package somewhere north of $600 million — and likely higher — given that the options on the table include premium windows like the Week 1 Australia opener, a Thanksgiving eve game, and Christmas Eve, all of which would command top dollar from a streamer trying to build a sports identity.
This is entirely new revenue for the league, inventory that doesn’t exist in the current rights structure. The question is whether the NFL would accept something meaningfully below that number — say, a 20 percent discount — to land these games on Fox rather than behind a Netflix paywall, and in doing so effectively take the antitrust exemption fight off the table. That does appear to be what Fox is actually pursuing here. The NFL has never been an organization that voluntarily leaves money on the table, but when the revenue is new, when Murdoch’s relationship with the Trump administration gives Fox a credible political pressure campaign, and when the alternative is spending the next two years fighting a DOJ investigation while simultaneously renegotiating deals with every one of its broadcast partners. A discounted deal with Fox that quiets Washington and protects the antitrust exemption might cost the league $100 million or more in foregone revenue. Compared to the cost of a prolonged federal fight during the most consequential rights negotiation in league history, that starts to look like a bargain.