As ESPN and Major League Baseball begin warming up for the final season of their 36-year partnership, another legacy network may be taking a closer look at the live-game inventory that will become available at the end of the 2025 season.
Speaking Monday at the Deutsche Bank Media, Internet & Telecom Conference, Fox Corp. COO John Nallen suggested his team may kick the tires on an expanded deal with MLB. “I think what will come to market in some form will be some baseball product, particularly after [MLB] and ESPN announced that after the season their relationship would change,” Nallen said. “So, baseball has been a great product for us, and we’ll probably look at that and look at it in the context of how it makes sense to us overall.”
Fox pays an average annual fee of $729 million for its current package of MLB games, which includes the All-Star Game, a heavy dose of playoff action and the World Series. The value of the terminal ESPN package, which includes the Home Run Derby and the Wild Card round, has been pegged at $550 million per season.
Last year’s World Series, a brisk five-game set between the Yankees and Dodgers, averaged 15.8 million viewers across all platforms, making it the most-watched Fall Classic since 2017. Game 5 averaged 18.2 million viewers on the broadcast flagship, while another 447,000 fans streamed the Dodgers’ 7-6 victory.
While MLB has had conversations with a number of potential ESPN replacements, including Amazon Prime and NBCUniversal, those talks are said to be circling around 2028, when the league’s full suite of rights packages is set to go back on the block.
Nallen’s remarks about the possibility of applying some shoe leather to MLB’s whitewalls was made within the context of the state of the greater sports-rights picture. “There’s really not much available, to be honest,” he said, when asked if Fox might look to add to its already well-stocked larder. “Absent [MLB], there’s not a lot out there that we’d be attracted to at this point.”
Nallen also acknowledged the potential opt-out that the NFL could choose to exercise after the conclusion of the 2029-30 season, although he said he had little information to share on that score. If precedent is anything to go by, discussions pertaining to the last four seasons of the NFL’s current 11-year commitment are unlikely to start heating up until 2028.
“I have no idea whether the NFL will invoke that termination right or change the character, change the games, whatever,” Nallen said. “At this moment, I have no idea. But what I do know is that in any negotiation we’ve had with the NFL, the discussion around it happens well before the termination date. So, in prior pre contracts we’ve had with the NFL, the discussion is two years ahead of time or 18 months ahead.”
Fox’s Sunday afternoon NFL package averaged 18.4 million viewers per week, while its national window—which included the Thanksgiving Day Giants-Cowboys broadcast—averaged 24.6 million viewers. Sixteen of Fox’s NFL games were among the top 100 most-watched broadcasts of 2024, and the network’s biggest draw came courtesy of the NFC Championship Game between the Lions and 49ers (56.3 million).
“I fully expect that any discussion around those option years will happen well in advance of the ‘30 Super Bowl, which is under contract,” Nallen said. “Look, the NFL is vitally important to us. We provide them with great production quality, the ability to do national and regional games. We give them the reach for broadcast that they can’t get elsewhere. So, we’ll evaluate whatever it is, if there is something in those option years.”
Nallen’s comments on the NFL were made a week after Fox Corp. CEO Lachlan Murdoch suggested that the company may look to expand its deal with the league, should it decide to trigger the opt-out option.
“The NFL is our largest partnership. They have an incredible product, and we’ve had a deep relationship with them for a very long time,” Murdoch said during his March 3 appearance at the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media & Telecom Conference. “So, we see this ‘amend and extend’ provision, which is still some years out, as an opportunity for us to frankly deepen our relationship with the NFL.”
