YouTube wants more NFL games, and the NFL is already laying the groundwork to sell them.
Christian Oestlien, YouTube’s vice president of subscription products, told Bloomberg that the company is interested in bidding on additional NFL rights when the league opens negotiations later this year.
“We really value our partnership with the NFL,” Oestlien informed Bloomberg’s Lucas Shaw in an interview published over the weekend. “Everything we’ve done with them so far has been really successful. And so we’re very excited about the idea that we could be doing more with them.”
Sounds like YouTube will be bidding for an NFL package. pic.twitter.com/RUEzGumALA
— Lucas Shaw (@Lucas_Shaw) February 9, 2026
This past week, NFL Media chief Hans Schroeder confirmed that the league plans to talk with companies outside its traditional broadcast partners about selling them 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 told CNBC on Radio Row ahead of the Super Bowl. “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.”
YouTube already has skin in the game through NFL Sunday Ticket, which it acquired in a seven-year, $14 billion deal that started with the 2023 season. But the company clearly isn’t limiting its ambitions to out-of-market games.
Its first exclusive NFL regular-season broadcast — the Chargers-Chiefs game in Brazil in Week 1 — drew 17.3 million global viewers, including 16.2 million in the United States. For a streaming-only game played outside the country, that’s a strong debut, and it likely reinforced YouTube’s belief that it can handle a larger slice of the NFL schedule.
And the timing could work in its favor.
The NFL’s current media deals run through 2033, but the league holds opt-out clauses after the 2029 season for most partners. Disney’s ESPN agreement runs a year longer, but commissioner Roger Goodell has already signaled that discussions could begin well before those deadlines.
Goodell told CNBC last fall that the league’s broadcast partners are open to talking at any time. Formal negotiations aren’t expected immediately, but the door to earlier discussions is clearly open.
There are obvious reasons the NFL might want to move sooner rather than later. The league can bring new streaming partners into the fold while legacy broadcasters like Fox and CBS are still financially strong enough to compete. By the end of the decade, cord-cutting could erode that leverage, making it harder to drive bidding wars that have fueled the NFL’s record-setting media deals.
The league also has inventory it can move in the near term.
The recently approved ESPN-NFL equity deal freed up four Monday Night Football games, which ESPN returned in exchange for a stake in NFL Network and other assets. Those four games are sitting there waiting for the highest bidder — which, let’s be honest, is probably going to be a streamer.
International games might be the easiest place for that to happen. The league is planning nine of them next season, and Schroeder hinted that some could be packaged for a media partner as early as next year. That seems to be the easiest way to get a streamer — like YouTube — involved without jumping straight into the Sunday afternoon fight.
Suffice to say, when the next round of negotiations arrives, YouTube will be there, checkbook and all.
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.