YouTube is close to acquiring the five-game media rights package being offered by the NFL, Front Office Sports’ Ryan Glasspiegel reported last Thursday. The two parties entered the contractual review phase, considered a prelude to the agreement. Puck’s John Ourand later called YouTube “the favorite.”
The five-game schedule is made up of four schedules that the NFL released as part of (the network broadcasts seven games per season, but as part of this negotiation, four of them will now come from ESPN’s existing catalog) plus the first week’s International Series game in Australia, which the league originally planned to market separately.
As reported by Pro Football Talk’s Mike Florio, the NFL is offering interested parties a “menu” of options to choose from, including the game in Australia, a new matchup on Thanksgiving Eve, a second game on Black Friday and a date on Christmas Eve that had not previously been announced.
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The advancement of negotiations with YouTube comes amid investigations opened by the United States Department of Justice to determine whether the NFL had engaged in anti-competitive practices by selling its media rights as a league, instead of team by team.
This is a provision that extends not just to the NFL, but to all professional sports leagues in the country, as established by the Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961. As part of that legislation, the leagues agreed to sell their programming to broadcast television stations.
Sports Media Watch believes a deal with YouTube would presumably resolve the growing backlash in Washington against sporting events on “paid streaming platforms,” assuming the company made its games available for free, as it did with the opening week match in Brazil last season.
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Sources interviewed by Alexander Sherman, from CNBC Sports, attribute the government’s sudden interest in the NFL directly to Fox, the only media partner that sent a public opinion to the FCC. As the journalist highlighted, the Murdoch family, which controls the channel, has deep and long-standing ties with Republican lawmakers and the Trump administration.
It’s important to remember that the Murdochs made the decision to reduce Fox’s focus to primarily news and sports programming when they sold most of their assets to Disney in 2019 for $71 billion. According to Sherman, Fox CEO Lachlan Murdoch has already said he is prepared to “rebalance” Fox’s sports portfolio to accommodate the NFL.
Fox lobbying isn’t the only behind-the-scenes movement. Meanwhile, a silent war is unfolding around the opt-out decision from 2029 onwards regarding the current US$111 billion contract lasting 11 years.
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The NFL chose to begin negotiations with Paramount’s CBS before any other media partner because a change of control clause (stemming from Skydance Media’s acquisition of Paramount Global) allows the league to terminate the contract by 2027. It was asking for an increase of at least 50% over the current $2.1 billion/year deal.
By September 2024, it could completely reorganize the media landscape from this loophole. At the time, Sherman was betting that the year 2029 could be the end of the modern media era. This rupture, in turn, may come sooner.
According to the journalist in his latest column, the NFL would be looking for an increase in the triple digits, while broadcasters would prefer something around 25%.
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This matches up with their previous reporting, which mentioned a 50% to 60% raise as the “midpoint” between what the league is seeking and what it is being offered in ongoing negotiations with Paramount.
If Fox and CBS give in to this demanded increase, Sherman shows that they will have to pay about $1 billion more per year for the NFL.
“This would result in one of two outcomes: either it would lead to the cancellation of other programs to save money for football, or it would represent a significant loss in profits for media companies. Neither outcome is desirable, but Fox is at particularly high risk.”
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Of the total games broadcast in the season, 81.4% are shown on CBS, FOX and NBC. While the NFL itself makes a point of highlighting that 87% of games are already shown free of charge on open TV.
Bloomberg asked how media companies could reduce the NFL’s bargaining power. The answer may lie in the mirror, or rather, in what the NBA just did.
The effect of the NBA’s $76 billion
The pressure for higher numbers in the new agreement expected by the NFL also stems from what came into force in this 2025/26 season.
Sherman shared data from Guggenheim Securities analysts that reinforces commissioner Roger Goodell’s concerns: the NBA’s broadcast rights negotiation foresees a cost per viewing hour of $3.55, based on 2024 viewership.
This represents almost triple the cost per hour of viewing that the NFL generates ($1.27), despite the league having almost four times the total audience in hours watched.
The NBA now offers games broadcast on national television every day of the week on seven platforms (four TV channels and three streaming services). And that’s not counting local games.
“When Roger Goodell heard the details of the NBA’s new media contracts, he was furious,” reported journalist Hannah Miller.
Netflix also wants to join the party
The Wall Street Journal’s Jessica Toonkel and Joe Flint report that Netflix is interested in expanding its current two-game Christmas deal into a four-game package, including the Thanksgiving Eve and International Series matchups.
This is still theoretically possible if YouTube wins the bid for the five-game package, depending on what it selects from the menu.
Netflix’s desire to expand its operations with the NFL, despite having no interest in acquiring a larger package, plays in the league’s favor. As Sherman pointed out, if broadcasters simply say “no” to the NFL’s desire for more money now and wait until 2030, it can simply hand over its broadcast packages to YouTube and Netflix.
Forecasts from MoffettNathanson suggest that live sports rights will represent 20% to 40%+ of content spending by large traditional media companies. Disney and Fox are the most exposed to the cost of live rights, with 41% and 63% of their content spending, respectively. There is an assumed 50% NFL premium here.
In the words of analyst Simon Lane, it’s not a guaranteed decision, especially given the FCC’s investigation into collective bargaining, but it would have a huge impact on the overall content spending picture, representing about $4 billion of incremental spending going toward the NFL.
The future of the NFL backroom game
By activating the corporate M&A clause to begin negotiations years ahead of schedule, is the NFL proposing a masterstroke to take advantage of rights holders, or does it reveal how dependent both sides now are on each other, making this more of a mutual agreement than a negotiation?
And what would an NFL YouTube package actually look like? Would it represent the most significant entry into the sports rights market since Amazon?
For now, the questions recently asked by Unofficial Partner remain unanswered. The podcast had already projected at the beginning of the year that the future tends less towards a “Netflix of sport” and more towards the incorporation of sport into broad entertainment platforms, essentially pay TV distributed over the internet.
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As I showed here in February, this asymmetry unbalances negotiating power, transferring it from rights holders to platforms. And it reverses decades of competitive dynamics that fueled entitlement inflation.
And again the NFL can intervene, with or without pressure from lawmakers.
