Whether the NFL and its current broadcast partners decide to negotiate extensions to their current agreements early, a possibility that has been recently reported, any new agreements will not take NBC out of the Super Bowl rotation in 2030.
NBC Sports president Rick Cordella confirmed as much during an appearance on the Sports Media Watch Podcast, an excerpt of which was published this weekend. “We will have the 2030 Super Bowl guaranteed no matter what. So if [the NFL] were to open [up the rights], and if the crazy scenario, which we don’t renew the NFL, happened, we would still have the 2030 Super Bowl. That’s guaranteed to us,” Cordella said.
Last month, NFL commissioner Roger Goodell told CNBC that the league would look to negotiate new deals with its broadcast partners as early as next year, four years before the NFL can exercise its contractual option to exit the vast majority of its current agreements. Of course, an early negotiation would require cooperation on the part of the league’s broadcast partners.
Cordella says that NBC is all ears when it comes to those talks.
“If [Goodell] were to come and want to talk to us about extending our deal, of course,” the NBC Sports president told SMW. “They’re a fantastic partner. We talk to the NFL daily, maybe every other day. It’s one of these relationships that we have, that it would be no surprise if they want to talk about the future and where things are going. We welcome those conversations and have them. Do we strike a deal prior? Do they have real serious negotiations — that’s really up to the NFL.”
Presumably, the league will come to the table offering its current partners additional years of NFL programming in exchange for those partners increasing their current rights payments to the league. As it stands, the NFL’s current agreements undervalue the league’s media rights inventory. NBC, for instance, will be paying more per year for NBA rights over the course of its new deal with the league than it will be paying for NFL rights under its current agreement.
It’s unlikely any new deals would look dramatically different from the current setup, as any sizeable changes to how inventory is divvied up would need approval from the partner(s) currently allotted that inventory.
However, early negotiations could prove beneficial for both the NFL and the legacy networks that air it. The NFL can secure more media rights revenue four years earlier than it originally expected, and the legacy media companies that rely on NFL programming to demand hefty distribution fees can gain a bit of stability by extending their agreements with the league.
In the end, whether any new deals are mutually beneficial in practice will come down to the agreed-upon price point.
Even if the worst comes to worst for NBC and the network somehow ends up on the outside looking in —which seems unlikely in an early negotiation scenario —the network is guaranteed the 2030 Super Bowl.
“If there’s a scenario in which NBC were no longer in business with the NFL, we would still be guaranteed that 2030 Super Bowl. We wouldn’t give up the 2030 Super Bowl unless it was part of something longer-term. And I don’t know if we’d give it up anyway, if we would have to, but 2030 Super Bowl is guaranteed as part of the first tranche of rights that we have,” Cordella said.
About Drew Lerner
Drew Lerner is a staff writer for Awful Announcing and an aspiring cable subscriber. He previously covered sports media for Sports Media Watch. Future beat writer for the Oasis reunion tour.