For the second time in as many years, the NFL will be playing a Friday night game in Brazil during the first week of the season.
Last year, NBC’s Peacock streaming service exclusively aired the game featuring the Philadelphia Eagles and Green Bay Packers. But this year, the league has taken the game to the open market.
According to a report by Ben Fischer and Austin Karp in Sports Business Journal, the NFL is shopping a mini-package that will include the Brazil game on September 5 and potentially other games that are not yet assigned to a current broadcast partner. Per the report, YouTube TV, Warner Bros. Discovery, and Amazon have all “shown interest” in the rights, with some sources suggesting that YouTube is the favorite.
Of those three contenders, just Amazon has the capabilities to produce its own NFL broadcast at the moment. Should the rights go to YouTube or WBD, they’d either have to assemble their own production and broadcast teams or, more likely, rent teams from a current NFL broadcast partner.
Since 2023, YouTube TV has held exclusive rights to NFL Sunday Ticket, the league’s out-of-market package, but has never produced its own game broadcast. TNT has not aired an NFL game since 1997, the final year of a partial-season package it had with the league.
Last year’s NFL Brazil game drew 14.7 million viewers on Peacock. While it seems unlikely that this year’s Brazil game will also end up on Peacock, the streaming service will still get an exclusive game at some point during the upcoming season.
Adding value to the Brazil game is the likelihood that the Kansas City Chiefs will be the Los Angeles Chargers’ opponents.
Last week, NFL VP of broadcast planning and scheduling Mike North suggested that the full NFL schedule would be released somewhere in the May 13-15 range.