The NFL does not have a television problem. It has a television partner problem: the companies that show the games are the same companies that cover the league, and they are paying a fortune for the privilege.
The Deal
In March 2021 the league announced new media-rights agreements running through 2033, starting with the 2023 season. Reports put the total at about $110 billion, and NPR relayed a figure of $113 billion over 11 years from an unnamed source, an 80 percent increase over the previous deals.
Nobody published the contracts, so the per-network numbers are reported estimates. ESPN/ABC sits at the top, at about $2.7 to $2.8 billion a year, with Fox, NBC and CBS each reported at roughly $2 billion or more. Amazon reportedly pays $1.2 billion a year for Thursday Night Football.
What the NFL’s TV partners reportedly pay per year
The Audience Is Still There
The league is not overpaying for nothing. Super Bowl LIX drew more than 127 million viewers, a record, according to Nielsen. Football is the one thing on television that still brings everyone to the same screen at the same time, and the league knows exactly what that is worth.
Who Is Covering Whom
Here is the part that gets less airtime. ESPN, CBS Sports, Fox Sports and NBC Sports are not independent observers that happen to show football. Each belongs to a company that pays the league billions of dollars a year, and each has a news and studio operation that has to talk about the league’s problems on the air.
That is not a conspiracy. It is a business arrangement, and the viewer deserves to know which side of the table the person on the screen sits on. Every time a broadcast treats a league controversy as a two-minute segment, ask what the company behind it has riding on the relationship.
Vince Douglas Gregory is the ‘petulant puppet master’ of a sports media landscape addicted to scripted rage and performance art. As the architect of VDG Sports, he bypasses the corporate talking heads to expose the unfiltered truth behind the narratives.
An unstable thinker and astute scholar, Vince thrives on dismantling the mediocre click-bait addicts who trade reality for engagement. If you want boring stats, go elsewhere. If you want the raw reality of the game, you’re in the right place. Consider yourself warned.