With the Super Bowl just days away, the National Football League (NFL) is poised for another record-breaking season. Viewership this season has reached levels not seen since 1989, and league revenue is on track to reach US$25 billion, a new record.
Now, the league aims for even more.
The expectation is that the NFL will begin negotiations to review its broadcasting and streaming contracts in the coming months, according to interviews with executives from the league and broadcasters, even though it is still in the early years of a contract valued at more than US$110 billion (R$576 billion), lasting until the early 2030s.
NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell and the league’s 32 team owners are convinced that current media contracts are undervalued, especially compared to recent contracts signed by the NBA (National Basketball Association) and the UFC (Ultimate Fighting Championship).
“As we look at the incredible viewership we’ve had this year and the sports rights market, we believe the value of NFL rights has only increased,” said Hans Schroeder, the league’s executive vice president of media distribution.
Schroeder echoed comments made by Goodell before last year’s Super Bowl. “I always think we’re undervalued, how about that?” Goodell said.
One media analyst, Rich Greenfield, believes the league could make 50% more annually with a new contract package.
The league’s media partners, which include traditional broadcasters like CBS and NBC as well as new players like Netflix and YouTube, will have little choice but to abide by these renegotiations. The NFL is critical to their business.
“Once they express an interest in sitting down and having a candid conversation about the future, we’ll be happy to participate in those conversations and figure out how we can further strengthen the partnership,” said David Berson, president of CBS Sports. Goodell and some owners have said their broadcast rights contracts are undervalued due to major changes in the media landscape. When the NFL closed its latest media rights package in 2021, Netflix wasn’t streaming live sports, YouTube had yet to become a dominant force on Americans’ television screens, and a streaming platform from a traditional company like NBCUniversal’s Peacock had barely launched.
These streaming services are now firmly embedded in the sports market. Netflix will invest around US$20 billion (R$105 billion) in content this year and makes large investments in live sports, such as NFL, Major League Baseball, World Wrestling Entertainment and boxing. Peacock streams more than 7,500 hours of live sports per year. YouTube pays more than US$2 billion (R$10.5 billion) a year for the rights to NFL Sunday Ticket and is starting to be aggressive in winning other major television events: at the end of last year, it closed a deal to be the exclusive home of the Oscars.
“We’ve all seen that the media landscape is changing drastically,” Goodell said in an interview with reporters Monday in San Jose, Calif., ahead of Super Bowl 50. “New platforms that didn’t exist five years ago — or certainly 10 years ago — do exist. That’s where our fans are, in many cases, particularly younger audiences.”
In 2021, entertainment companies were investing tens of billions of dollars in scripted series projects, believing the next big hit could drive subscriptions to their new streaming services. In recent years, however, executives have reduced their investment in original scripted series and started investing more in sports.
“Sports is now at the heart of every major streaming service’s strategy,” said Jonathan Carson, CEO of Antenna, a subscription research firm. “They’re the number one way to get big subscribers.”
This helps explain why the NBA broke records in 2024 by signing an 11-year media rights deal worth US$76 billion (R$398 billion). The league’s broadcast partners like NBC and Prime Video now pay the NBA more than the NFL annually.
The demand for sports content gives the NFL a lot of leverage. About half of the league’s revenue comes from media rights contracts, and Goodell and the owners are eager to expand that portion of the business. He and the owners discussed the need to expand the regular season to 18 games so that each team could play one game abroad each season.
Robert Kraft, owner of the New England Patriots and longtime chairman of the league’s broadcast committee, said in an interview that the league could then create “one or two more packages.” A package of international games could be sold for more than US$1 billion (R$5.2 billion) per year, according to some estimates. A digital platform that reaches global audiences, like YouTube, could be a viable candidate for such a package.
The league, however, can only extend the season with the consent of the NFLPA (the NFL Players Association). The union has been in crisis since last summer, when its executive director, Lloyd Howell, resigned under pressure after an outside investigator hired by the union received documents showing he had charged the association for nightclub visits. His replacement has not yet been chosen. Goodell said Monday there have been no formal conversations with the union about a longer season.
The league could reopen negotiations without extending the season. One option would be to pressure broadcasters to pay more for broadcast rights in exchange for a guarantee that the league will not exercise its option to terminate media contracts three years before they expire. This could cost traditional broadcasters billions of dollars, but they would have the certainty that they could continue showing NFL games for much of the next decade, something that could reassure their shareholders and advertisers.
“The NFL is so important to its current partners that I can’t imagine any of them giving up what they’ve accomplished,” analyst Greenfield said. “It would be catastrophic if someone lost the broadcast rights. If you woke up tomorrow and found out that CBS or Fox had lost the rights to the NFL, that would pose an existential risk.”
A piece of the NFL broadcasting puzzle fell into place last week when government regulators approved the sale of NFL Network and the league’s other media assets to ESPN. The league will retain a 10% stake in ESPN, which will own and operate the NFL Network and will have the rights to broadcast the RedZone Channel on open television. The two companies hope to integrate their teams as early as April.
Under the deal, ESPN will broadcast three additional games, for a total of 28 per season, including several games that previously aired on NFL Network.
Professional American football remains the most popular sport in the country. Regular season games averaged 18.7 million viewers, the most since 1989. This reignited the league’s competitive spirit.
In 2024, a trusted ally of Goodell emailed him a graph that showed that 94 of the 100 most-watched programs the previous year were NFL games.
Goodell responded not with an emoji or celebratory words, but with a new goal: “We still have some spots to fill!!”
