A month after commissioner Roger Goodell told reporters that the NFL’s option to exit its current media rights contracts in 2029 presents an “incredibly valuable” opportunity for the league, the chief executive at one of its biggest broadcast partners said he sees the clause as a means to make an even deeper commitment to pro football.
Speaking Monday afternoon at the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media & Telecom Conference, Fox Corp. CEO Lachlan Murdoch said the company would seek to revise its $22.3 billion Sunday-afternoon package, should the NFL elect 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. “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.”
While the league is expected to try to supersize its rights deals in the wake of the NBA’s own 11-year, $77 billion blockbuster, Goodell stopped short of confirming that the NFL will exercise its opt-outs when the option becomes available. Speaking to a huddle of reporters before Super Bowl LIX, Goodell cracked, “I always think we’re undervalued—how ‘bout that?” before reiterating his longstanding belief that the league in large part owes its outsized success to the big reach of broadcast TV.
Per Goodell’s estimate, 88% of all NFL games are still available via free, over-the-air TV, despite the recent flurry of deals that have been made with the likes of Netflix and Amazon Prime Video.
Goodell last month did not confirm or deny that the league would look to call its current partners back to the table in four years’ time, saying only that the opt-outs “give us a significant opportunity to look at what the best options for the NFL are as we get to that stage.”
Fox’s NFC-heavy slate averaged 18.4 million viewers per week across the two afternoon windows, while its marquee “America’s Game of the Week” slot scared up 23.9 million viewers per broadcast. According to estimates from EDO Ad EnGage, Fox booked approximately $773.3 million in national in-game ad sales revenue over the course of the regular season, or slightly less than what the company generated during the Eagles’ Feb. 9 blowout of the Chiefs. (Three days after the Big Game, Fox issued a statement claiming that it had sold “over $800 million” in inventory across the flagship network and Tubi.)
Murdoch went on to suggest that the wide net cast by Fox’s broadcast operations should give the company a leg up over its deep-pocketed streaming rivals, should push come to shove. “I think reach is still key,” he said. “Obviously [the NFL is] driving for a financial outcome, which is understandable and completely fair, but reach is important if you’re going to be—if you are—the national sport. And it’s reach not just through broadcast, but how you can increase that reach through other services, and Tubi is a good example of that.”
Of the 125.8 million viewers who watched the Super Bowl, about 12%, or 15.5 million, took in the game via Tubi.
While streaming services are all the rage, they have yet to supplant the legacy TV networks as the primary delivery system of sports. As much as Netflix’s Christmas doubleheader was well received, with the platform averaging 24.2 million viewers over the course of the two games, those deliveries fell well shy of the year-ago Yuletide performance from Fox and CBS. Both networks averaged over 29 million viewers with their holiday broadcasts in 2023.
Murdoch went on to say that Fox expects to launch its new direct-to-consumer service before the start of the fall football season. The CEO emphasized that his team would take great care to ensure that there would be no cannibalization of Fox’s lucrative linear-TV business, which generated $12.8 billion in advertising and affiliate revenue during the latest fiscal year.
“We are going to keep very focused on the [cord-cutter/-never] universe,” Murdoch said. “If you ever see us marketing DTC on broadcast TV … my head would explode. You’re not going to see Tom Brady marketing DTC on the halftime show.”
The DTC service is being spearheaded by former Apple exec Pete Distad, who had previously served as the CEO of the now-shuttered Venu Sports initiative.
