Travis Kelce could reportedly command $15 million per year as ‘studio presence’

Sports media awaits Travis Kelce. The question, now, is whether Travis Kelce awaits sports media.

As the industry writes his post-football chapter for him, Kelce doesn’t seem as inclined to retire as he did a few months ago. He showed obvious signs of decline during his age 36 season and looked like a player contemplating his NFL future as the Kansas City Chiefs missed the playoffs for the first time in 11 years. But Kelce doesn’t seem ready to let go, at least not yet. Even if he might have a $15 million a year contract awaiting him from network bigwigs, writes The Athletic’s Andrew Marchand.

“Travis Kelce appears as if he will try to play another season before potentially trying broadcasting, where he would like to call games, but probably could pick up at least $15 million per year as a studio presence.”

That tracks with what we’ve covered here before. Back in January, Marchand assessed Kelce as someone who would only accept a No. 1 job and pegged his range anywhere from $10 to $20 million. The $15 million studio floor is essentially the low end of that range, and it’s for the role Kelce might not even want.

Kelce wants the booth. He said so last July on Bussin’ With the Boys — unprompted and unambiguously — that he grew up mimicking the guys who called games, that he always imagined what it would feel like actually to be one of them. He saw Tom Brady’s $375 million Fox deal and, by his own admission, “everyone saw it.” If he’s going to do this, he wants to call games, not react to them from a set somewhere.

The one thing giving him pause isn’t the workload or the possibility of ending up on sites like Awful Announcing. It’s reading. His SNL hosting stint — which required table reads — was, in his words, “a f*cked situation” for a guy who, by his own description, “can’t really read that well.” Player names, he admitted, would be where he’d “get f*cking ruined” in a live broadcast setting. Butchering a name or two has never stopped anyone from having a long career in this industry, just ask Christopher “Mad Dog” Russo.

That said, the more substantive question isn’t whether Kelce can do sports media. It’s whether he wants to, and on what timeline. As Ben Axelrod wrote for Awful Announcing back in February 2025, there’s a reasonable argument that Kelce is too famous for sports media, that people who are famous famous tend to have ambitions that reach beyond the broadcast booth. The Rock didn’t become The Rock by working NFL pregame shows. There was a documented plan, reported by the New York Times, to make Kelce exactly that famous.

Kelce has already taken steps in that direction. He hosted Saturday Night Live. He appeared in Ryan Murphy’s Grotesquerie. He starred in “Happy Gilmore 2.” He hosted Are You Smarter Than a Celebrity? on Prime Video. And then last August, he admitted to GQ that those ambitions had measurably affected his on-field production, that his focus on “trying to set myself up” had let his play tail off below his own standards.

Now, Marchand is floating Kelce as a wild card candidate to replace Kirk Herbstreit on Prime Video’s Thursday Night Football, with Herbstreit’s contract running through the 2026 season and Al Michaels, 81, nearing the end of his run. The names Marchand puts ahead of Kelce — Greg Olsen, J.J. Watt — are more experienced broadcasters, which is why Kelce lands in the wild card category rather than the frontrunner one. But wild cards in sports media, especially ones named after famous tight ends engaged to Taylor Swift, have a way of jumping the line.

Marchand’s expectation — along with many others in the industry — is that Kelce plays one more season, which means any broadcasting conversation gets pushed to 2027 at the earliest. By then, Herbstreit’s Prime Video deal will have expired. The landscape might look very different. And Kelce, who turns 37 this October, will have spent another year accumulating credits and cultural relevance in the non-football world.

Sports media wants Travis Kelce. The industry has been telling him so for years.

The answer, for now, appears to be that Kelce hears them and will finish one more football season before deciding whether he wants to listen.