The NFL and YouTube are in advanced talks for a five-game package, per Front Office Sports’ Ryan Glasspiegel, with a long-form contract review underway that typically signals a deal is likely to happen.
When ESPN absorbed NFL Network earlier this year, the math on game inventory shifted. ESPN took on the games that had been airing on the league channel — mostly international windows — but gave back its Monday Night Football doubleheaders to the NFL in the process. That created a block of games the league now needed to place, and YouTube appears to be where those games are heading.
While the exact contents of the five-game package is not certain, likely candidates include the Week 1 game in Australia, a Thanksgiving Eve game that is not yet official but appears inevitable, a second Black Friday game, and a Christmas Eve game.
As was reported in February, the working model for the NFL’s broader rights renegotiation has always envisioned five-game standalone packages going to streamers — YouTube, Netflix, and Amazon — as the league pushes to double its annual media rights revenue. YouTube getting the first crack at it makes sense, given the relationship the two sides have already built.
Google’s YouTube became the home of NFL Sunday Ticket in 2023 in a seven-year deal worth roughly $2 billion annually — taking over a package that DirecTV had held since 1994 — and the NFL has been pleased with the results, with Sunday Ticket subscriptions at their highest level in five years. Last year, YouTube also aired a primetime Week 1 matchup between the Chargers and Chiefs in Brazil, its first-ever live exclusive NFL game.
The deal also matters in the context of everything happening around the NFL’s renegotiations. Fox, Netflix, and YouTube were all reportedly in play for this five-game package. And Fox’s reported interest carried political weight given the DOJ’s ongoing antitrust investigation into the NFL’s media rights practices was seemingly spurred by Fox.
YouTube landing this package keeps five games on what amounts to a free stream — YouTube games are accessible without a subscription — which gives the league political cover at a moment when it is under pressure to demonstrate that its expanding portfolio of streaming rights hasn’t walled games off from the general public. Considering the political pressure on the NFL from many different corners of government right now, that could’ve significantly factored into the equation.
About Sam Neumann
Since the beginning of 2023, Sam has been a staff writer for Awful Announcing and The Comeback. A 2021 graduate of Temple University, Sam is a Charlotte native, who currently calls Greenville, South Carolina his home. He also has a love/hate relationship with the New York Mets and Jets.