With the Super Bowl just days away, the National Football League is closing in on yet another record-breaking season. Viewership this season has reached levels not seen since 1989, and the league’s revenue is on track to reach $25 billion, a new high.
Now the league is pining for even more.
The N.F.L. is widely expected to open negotiations to revise its broadcast and streaming contracts as soon as a few months from now, according to interviews with league and network executives, even though it is still in the early years of a $120 billion deal that runs until the early 2030s.
The N.F.L. commissioner, Roger Goodell, and the league’s 32 owners are driven by the idea that the current batch of media deals are undervalued, particularly compared with recent deals made by the National Basketball Association and the Ultimate Fighting Championship.
“As we look around at the incredible viewership we had this year, and we look at this sports rights marketplace, we think the value of N.F.L. rights have only increased,” Hans Schroeder, the league’s executive vice president of media distribution, said in an interview.
Mr. Schroeder echoed comments Mr. Goodell made before last year’s Super Bowl. “I always think we’re undervalued, how’s that?” Mr. Goodell said.
One media analyst, Rich Greenfield, believes the league could earn 50 percent more annually from a new package of deals.
The league’s media partners, which include old-line networks like CBS and NBC as well as new players like Netflix and YouTube, will have little choice but to comply with those renegotiations. The N.F.L. is that important to their businesses.
“As soon as they indicate they want to sit down and have a legit conversation about the future, we’ll be excited to sit down and have those conversations and figure out how we can further strengthen the partnership,” David Berson, the president of CBS Sports, said in an interview.
Mr. Goodell and some owners have said their rights deals are undervalued because of major shifts in the media landscape. When the N.F.L. secured its last package of media rights deals in 2021, Netflix was not streaming live sports, YouTube had yet to become a dominant force on Americans’ television screens, and a streaming platform from a legacy player, like NBCUniversal’s Peacock, was barely online.
These streaming services are now firmly in the sports business. Netflix will spend close to $20 billion on content this year, and invests heavily in live sports like the N.F.L., Major League Baseball, World Wrestling Entertainment and boxing. Peacock streams more than 7,500 hours of live sports per year. YouTube pays more than $2 billion a year for the rights to the N.F.L. Sunday Ticket, and it is beginning to get aggressive in landing other major television events: Late last year, it struck a deal to be the exclusive home of the Oscars.
“We’ve all seen the media landscape is changing dramatically,” Mr. Goodell said at a news media conference on Monday in San Jose, Calif., ahead of Super Bowl LX. “New platforms that didn’t exist five years ago — 10 years ago, for sure — exist. That’s where our fans are in many cases, particularly the younger demographics.”
In 2021, entertainment companies were spending tens of billions of dollars on scripted television projects, believing the next big hit could drive subscriptions to their new streaming services. Over the past few years, however, executives have decreased their spending on original scripted shows and invested more on sports.
“Sports are now at the center of every major streamer’s strategy,” said Jonathan Carson, the chief executive of Antenna, a subscription research firm. “They are the No. 1 way to make big subscriber acquisition moments.”
This helps explain why the N.B.A. set records in 2024 when it struck an 11-year, $76 billion media rights deal. League broadcast partners like NBC and Prime Video now pay the N.B.A. more than they do the N.F.L. on an annual basis.
The hunger for sports content gives the N.F.L. a lot of leverage. About half of the league’s revenue comes from media rights deals, and Mr. Goodell and the owners are eager to grow that portion of their business. He and the owners have talked about the need to expand the regular season to 18 games so every team could play one game overseas each season.
Robert Kraft, the 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 $1 billion a year, by some estimates. A digital outlet that reaches global audiences like YouTube could be a viable candidate for such a package.
The league, though, can expand the season only with the consent of the N.F.L. Players Association. The union has been in turmoil 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 union for visits to strip clubs. His replacement has not been chosen. Mr. Goodell said on Monday that there had not been any formal talks with the union about a longer season.
The league could reopen negotiations without expanding the season. One option may be pushing the networks to pay more for their rights for a guarantee that the league will not exercise its option to terminate its media deals three years before they expire. This might cost the legacy networks billions of dollars, but they would gain certainty that they could continue to show N.F.L. games well into the next decade, something that could reassure their shareholders and advertisers.
“The N.F.L. is so important to their existing partners, I can’t see any of them giving up what they have,” Mr. Greenfield, the analyst, said. “It would be catastrophic if anyone lost it. If you woke up tomorrow and CBS lost the N.F.L. or Fox lost the N.F.L., that’s an existential risk.”
One piece of the N.F.L.’s broadcasting puzzle clicked into place last week when government regulators approved the sale of NFL Network and other league media assets to ESPN. The league will take a 10 percent stake in ESPN, which will own and operate NFL Network and have the rights to show the RedZone Channel on linear television. The two sides hope to merge their staffs as soon as April.
In the deal, ESPN will broadcast three additional games, for a total of 28 per season, including several games previously shown on NFL Network.
Whatever the details, the N.F.L. will continue to move incrementally. For instance, it could sell exclusive streaming rights to international games, including those played next year in Melbourne, Australia, and in Paris.
By and large, the league still values the widest possible audiences, and that means sticking primarily with the linear television networks while trying to reach younger audiences, who are more likely to subscribe to streaming services.
“I’m not maximizing short-term dollars,” Mr. Kraft said. “I want to do things that strategically allow us to build long term, and that’s how I think.”
Professional football remains the biggest draw in the country. Regular-season games reached an average audience of 18.7 million viewers, the biggest total since 1989. That has reignited the league’s competitive spirit.
In 2024, a trusted ally of Mr. Goodell’s sent him an email with a graphic that showed that 94 of the top 100 most-watched programs the prior year were N.F.L. games.
Mr. Goodell replied not with an emoji or words of celebration, but with a new goal: “We have a couple of more slots to fill!!”
Ken Belson is a Times reporter covering sports, power and money at the N.F.L. and other professional sports leagues.
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