The NFL's next media rights deal will cost nearly double — and change television's economics

Every few years American television stages a negotiation that sets a price for the medium's own future: the renewal of the National Football League's broadcast rights. The current deals are the richest in the history of media — roughly $110bn over eleven seasons through 2033, or about $10bn a year split among Disney, Fox, Paramount, Comcast and Amazon. They do not expire until well into the next decade. Yet the league can walk away from most of them after the 2029 season, and from ESPN's a year later. Roger Goodell, its commissioner, has said the football is underpriced and wants the money now. Every media conglomerate that owns a main channel is bracing for a deal that, on the league's own telling, will look a lot different from today's.

The league holds the bigger bat

The NFL's bargaining power rests on a single, awkward fact: its rights are at once the most valuable and the most under-priced in media. The league's games carry a cost-per-viewer-hour of about $1.20 under the current contracts, against $3.55 an hour for the NBA under its new $77bn, eleven-year package signed in 2024. The gap is the arithmetic of a negotiation that has not reset in a while. The NFL entered its last rights round as the most-watched content in American television and has only widened the gap since, posting its best regular-season ratings since 1989. Analysts consequently project that the next agreements could push annual media revenue to $18bn–20bn, nearly double today's $10bn—and the league's own revenue target runs higher still.

The market references matter as well as the raw numbers. The NBA's 2024 renewal, worth 160% more than its predecessor, handed Mr Goodell a citable benchmark: if a lesser league can ratchet prices like that, a league that still draws the country's largest audiences is entitled to more. Advertisers already pay $500,000 to $1m for a thirty-second spot in a game that ordinary broadcasters would kill for.

A change of structure, not just price

A near-doubling of fees is only half the story; the other half is that the league intends to change how football is paid for and delivered. The trend is visible in the current season. About 16% of NFL ad-spend has already migrated from linear channels to streamers since the last rights round, and the league has added Netflix and YouTube as partners alongside its broadcasters and Amazon. Over time it aims to parcel out a batch of regular-season games among three streamers—YouTube, Netflix and Amazon Prime—five games each, taking some games away from the very networks that have carried them for decades.

The clearest sign of the coming structure, though, is the surprising deal reached last year, in which ESPN acquired the NFL Network and the league's RedZone channel in exchange for a 10% stake in the sports network. Disney now owns 72% of ESPN, Hearst 18% and the NFL 10%—making the seller of the most valuable sports rights a minority owner of one of its biggest buyers. The point is not an incidental shareholding. It binds the league's interests to ESPN's shift to its own direct-to-consumer streaming service, and it gives the NFL a boardroom view of, and a stake in, the economics of the platforms that will carry its games next time.

Trapped in the bundle

The incumbents' problem is that they cannot walk away, because football is the load-bearing wall of the whole broadcast house. It drives roughly 60% of the distribution (retransmission) revenue at CBS, by a former Fox Sports executive's estimate, and it accounts for more than a fifth of Fox's traditional television ad sales. CBS, NBC and Fox each pay more than $2bn a year for their packages; Fox's deal is estimated to be only break-even to slightly profitable on its own. That is the dilemma in miniature: the rights give the networks their last source of mass advertising, yet pay for them only when the ad revenue and carriage fees are counted together, and even then thinly.

The trouble is that each renewal forces the networks to pay more for a product the league is increasingly routing around them. Fox has said it will not renegotiate before 2030, when the league can terminate its contract; the reported 50% fee increase the NFL sought elsewhere would add roughly $1.1bn a year to Fox's bill, swallowing more than a quarter of its sports budget. In-game advertising revenue, meanwhile, covers only about 42% of rights-package costs, and the share of NFL ad-spend flowing to streamers keeps rising. In other words, the networks pay ever more to keep the games that prop up the bundle, and the money funds the league's migration to the streaming services that are dismantling the bundle.

This is not a uniform risk. Disney, through ESPN, is now structurally aligned with the league and can monetise football on its own streaming service. Comcast, the biggest of the four, has a balance sheet and a diversified business that can absorb the repricing. The broadcasters with the thinnest margin for error—Fox, and Paramount's CBS, which is being asked for the largest percentage increase—carry the heaviest exposure. For the investor, the question is not whether NFL rights are valuable; they plainly are, and will only become more so. It is whether the company that holds them still controls the route by which the games reach viewers, and whether it can fund the doubling of a price the seller sets. The next deal will put a number on that. It will be a big one, and it will be earned at the expense of the channels that made the league what it is.