NFL Media chief Hans Schroeder confirmed Friday the league plans to hold discussions with companies outside its traditional broadcast partners about selling them the rights to live games.
“We have other people that are both partners in a smaller sense — maybe not a full package — or people that still are in the media landscape somewhere that would like to be an NFL live game partner,” Schroeder said in an interview with CNBC Sport on Radio Row ahead of Super Bowl LX in San Francisco. “We’re going to have those conversations. We want to understand all our options and how to think about the best model for us, for our fans, for our teams going forward.”
Those conversations could take on added urgency as the league’s international schedule continues to grow. The international slate is expanding to nine games next season, and Schroeder said the league might package some of those games for a media partner as soon as next year. That would give streamers another way to buy NFL rights without competing directly for the league’s core domestic packages.
The NFL’s current media deals run through 2033, but the league can opt out after the 2029-30 season for most partners. Disney’s ESPN deal has an extra year attached. The NFL is widely expected to exercise that option, and recent comments from Roger Goodell suggest talks could start earlier than that.
Goodell told CNBC in September that the league’s broadcast partners would want to sit down and talk at any time. He said it wouldn’t happen this year, but could happen as early as next year.
Negotiating early serves the NFL’s interests. The league can add new streaming partners while legacy broadcasters are still financially strong enough to compete. By 2030, cord-cutting might weaken Fox and CBS so much that they can’t match bids from Amazon, Netflix, and Google. The NBA just signed an 11-year, $76 billion deal. MLB locked in new agreements with ESPN, Netflix, and NBC through 2028. The NFL wants to cash in before those deals eat up the available budgets.
The ESPN-NFL equity deal that was approved last week freed up four games that the league can now sell. ESPN gave back its Monday Night Football doubleheaders in exchange for a 10% stake in the network and ownership of NFL Network. Those four games are sitting there waiting for the highest bidder, probably a streamer.
Media analyst Robert Fishman suggested on Andrew Marchand’s podcast that the NFL could restructure its packages entirely, moving away from the traditional NFC and AFC splits toward a tiered system similar to the Premier League. Under that model, digital platforms might acquire the most desirable games while traditional broadcasters settle for lower-tier matchups.
“The ability of restructuring the packages so it’s not just the NFC package and the AFC package traditionally, or even just a Thursday night package,” Fishman said. “I think that there’s different ways, and we’ve thought about maybe using a similar template that the Premier League has and having maybe the Tier A type of games and the Tier B and the Tier C. How the traditional broadcasters are going to compete against those types of bids, you have to think the NFL is going to look to continue to have them there, but it might just be lower-quality games that they eventually end up with.”
Puck’s John Ourand also indicated that traditional broadcasters don’t have the same leverage they once did because streamers aren’t dependent on the NFL for survival. “If Fox didn’t have the NFL, FS1 goes under, almost,” Ourand said.
Amazon, Netflix, and YouTube can all afford to compete for premium NFL content without needing it to prop up their entire business model. The question is whether traditional broadcasters can match tech companies’ bids or whether they’ll accept diminished roles to remain in the NFL business at all.
Schroeder’s comments suggest the league is preparing for that future. The NFL wants to understand all its options before committing to new deals with its current broadcast partners.
About Sam Neumann
Since the beginning of 2023, Sam has been a staff writer for Awful Announcing and The Comeback. A 2021 graduate of Temple University, Sam is a Charlotte native, who currently calls Greenville, South Carolina his home. He also has a love/hate relationship with the New York Mets and Jets.