Amazon earns rights to Thursday games
The NFL signed new media rights agreements with CBS, NBC, Fox, ESPN and Amazon collectively worth about $110 billion over 11 years, nearly doubling the value of its previous contracts.
The contracts, which will take effect in 2023 and run through the 2033 season, will cement the NFL’s status as the country’s most lucrative sports league. They also will set the stage for the league’s owners to make good on plans to expand the regular season to include a 17th game and charge more for broadcasting rights.
The league’s soaring revenues will aid far-reaching plans for the next decade, a period when team owners hope to expand the NFL’s calendar, make deeper inroads into overseas markets and increase the football audience via streaming services. The NFL is poised to more than recoup the roughly $4 billion in losses wrought by not having maximum capacity attendance at games in 2020.
“Along with our recently completed labor agreement with the NFLPA, these distribution agreements bring an unprecedented era of stability to the League and will permit us to continue to grow and improve our game,” commissioner Roger Goodell said in a statement.
According to four people familiar with the agreements who requested anonymity because they were not authorized by the NFL to speak publicly about the deals, CBS, Fox and NBC will pay more than $2 billion each to hold onto their slots, with NBC paying slightly less than CBS and Fox. ESPN will pay about $2.7 billion a year to continue airing Monday Night Football, but also to be added into the rotation to broadcast the Super Bowl beginning in 2026. The agreement with ESPN starts one year earlier, in 2022, because its current contract expires one year earlier than the others.
Each of the broadcasters’ deals include agreements for their respective streaming platforms, while Amazon will show Thursday night games on its Amazon Prime Video service.
“Over the last five years, we started the migration to streaming. Our fans want this option, and the league understands that streaming is the future,” said Robert K. Kraft, owner of the New England Patriots and chairman of the NFL’s media committee.
The NFL has not yet announced who will broadcast Sunday Ticket, a subscription service that lets fans watch out-of-market weekend games that are not broadcast nationally. DirecTV has the rights to that service through 2022.
The jump in revenue will not initially change the fortunes of players, who are locked into a 10-year collective bargaining agreement narrowly ratified in March 2020. Under the terms of that labor deal, players will see a bump in their share of the NFL’s revenue, up to 48.5 percent from 47 percent, while team owners negotiated the option to add a 17th game to the regular season schedule in 2021, something players had long opposed.
It will be the first major expansion to the NFL season in more than four decades, when teams began playing 16 games, up from 14, in 1978.
NFL team owners are expected to formally approve the additional game at their annual meeting in late March. Once the additional game is approved, players and team owners will work out the calendar logistics, which could include eliminating one of the four preseason games teams are required to play and adding a second bye week to each of the 32 teams’ schedules.
Other competitive issues have have to be resolved, as extending the regular season by one game also could affect other fixtures in the NFL calendar that were adjusted last season because of the coronavirus pandemic. The owners voted on Dec. 16 to make the extra game an interconference matchup so as to not affect playoff tiebreakers. Still unresolved are the timing of offseason workouts, the start dates of training camps and the regular season’s start and end dates.
The league was able to fully complete its 2020 season on schedule in part because it worked hand-inhand with the NFL Players Association to hammer out COVID-19 protocols and a raft of other rules.
The union’s executive director, DeMaurice Smith, has said that no decision would be made “without an eye to what we’ve learned this year.”
The labor deal also included an expanded playoff format, with an extra team added in each conference, more limited training camps and a relaxation of the rules governing the use of marijuana.