The National Football League signed contract extensions with CBS, Fox and NBC that will give the nation’s most-watched sport a 60 percent rights-fee increase to stay on broadcast television through the 2022 season.
Financial terms weren’t disclosed by NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell or in news releases sent by the three broadcasters. Three people with knowledge of the talks, who were granted anonymity because they weren’t authorized to disclose the terms, said rights fees for all three networks will increase by about 6 percent or 7 percent a year. The NFL currently receives about $4 billion a year in television rights fees from deals that include ESPN and DirecTV.
“It’s an exceptional deal under any economic circumstances, let alone the current climate,” Marc Ganis, president of Chicago-based industry consultant Sportscorp, said in an interview. “It demonstrates the extraordinary power of the NFL, and it doesn’t even look like it’s peaked yet.”
The agreements continue the sport’s flexible-scheduling system and allow the league-owned NFL Network to expand its existing slate of eight Thursday night games. The league’s broadcast committee will decide whether the NFL Network retains exclusive rights to Thursday night games, Goodell told reporters at an NFL owners meeting in Irving, Texas.
Goodell credited the NFL’s new decade-long labor agreement, signed after a four-month offseason lockout, with helping owners negotiate the longest television deals in league history.
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“That adds stability that gave us the ability to get these contract extensions,” Goodell told reporters at a news conference. “The players deserve great credit.”
The 32-team NFL, which has annual revenue exceeding $9 billion, signed a 10-year collective bargaining agreement with its players union in August following the lockout. Under the terms of that accord, the players’ share of broadcast revenue climbs to about 55 percent from around 50 percent under the prior deal, Ganis said.
“Whether they did that intentionally or not, the players have been very smart and the TV deal is phenomenal for them,” Ganis said.
The NFL’s Super Bowl championship game between the Pittsburgh Steelers and the Green Bay Packers in February was the most-watched program in U.S. television history.
The backbone of the television deal will be continuing CBS’s broadcasts of American Football Conference games, with Fox airing the National Football Conference and NBC showing a Sunday night prime-time matchup. Each network will show three Super Bowls.
NBC will continue showing the league’s opening Thursday night game and will add a night game during the Thanksgiving holiday.