It is getting more and more expensive to watch NFL games in this day and age and President Donald Trump isn’t happy about it.
The cost of watching NFL football has gone up in recent years because of the league moving some of its games to streaming services.
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Trump did an interview with Sharyl Attkisson of Full Measure News and revealed he takes issue with the league forcing people to invest in streaming services just to watch games.
“[The NFL is] making a lot of money. They could make a little bit less,” Trump said. “You have people that live for Sunday… and then all of a sudden, they’re gonna have to pay $1,000 a game. It’s crazy. So, I’m not happy about it.”
While nobody is paying $1,000 to watch one game, fans could pay that much over the course of a season.
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X user Alex Groberman crunched the numbers and tallied up the total cost for what a fan would have to sign up for to watch every NFL game in 2026.
It came out to around $1,000.
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“NFL fans need 10 different streaming subscriptions to watch every football game next season,” Groberman wrote. “Total cost to watch every game: nearly $1,000.”
“The NFL turned the most popular sport in America into a $935-a-year scavenger hunt across ten different apps,” Groberman added. “The audience did not shrink. The access got more expensive and more fragmented because every platform wanted its cut.”
That’s a hard pill to swallow for NFL fans, especially when you consider the league rakes in the billions and billions of dollars it does every single season.
We’re old enough to remember the good old days, when fans only needed cable to watch NFL games.
The NFL’s streaming explosion
NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell speaks to the media at San Jose Convention Center. Mandatory Credit: Kirby Lee-Imagn Images
Along with needing some form of cable to watch games on CBS, FOX, NBC and ESPN, fans need multiple streaming services, also, including platforms like Amazon’s Prime Video and Netflix, both of which obviously come with a separate subscription cost.
The NFL signed a three-year deal with Netflix in 2024 that will cost the platform about $75 million per game it broadcasts.
Meanwhile, the NFL’s deal with Amazon runs through 2033 and the outlet will be paying approximately $1 billion per year over the course of it.
The league also offers NFL Sunday Ticket through YouTube TV, which allows fans to watch out-of-market Sunday games. That deal cost YouTube a whopping $2 billion.
There are two packages for that service. For new users, they can get the NFL Sunday Ticket alone for $240 per year, or they can opt for the YouTube TV and NFL Sunday Ticket bundle.
With all the money the NFL is pulling in with these deals, it’s not hard to see why the league is moving in the streaming direction.
But it’s no doubt hurting their loyal fans in the process.