With September fast approaching comes my favorite season — football. It’s an excuse to open a fresh bag of chips, hang out with my friends and family, and scream at a TV for a couple of hours each week. It’s a time for community building, from fan tailgates to Super Bowl watch parties. But the classic game-watching experience is jeopardized as the National Football League increasingly prioritizes viewership at the expense of fans’ wallets. It’s a priority that threatens the very community fans flocked to the NFL for in the first place.
There’s no doubt of the cultural significance the NFL and football hold in America. Football has stolen the title of “America’s Sport” from baseball as the NFL far surpassed the MLB in minutes watched in 2023. The same year, the NFL was responsible for 93 of the 100 most-watched TV broadcasts, a statistic that has been on the rise over the last few years.
With this heightened viewership comes massive media deals — and subsequently massive revenue. In 2021, the league announced that it had signed long-term agreements with Amazon, CBS, ESPN/ABC, FOX, and NBC through 2033 for broadcasting rights, agreements that are estimated to be worth over $100 billion.
These deals don’t just carry a large dollar value — they are also evidence of the league’s attempt to adapt to a changing digital landscape. In the NFL’s deal with Amazon, Amazon Prime Video acquired the exclusive rights to “Thursday Night Football,” making it the league’s first-ever all-digital package. The other partners have secured the rights to stream games on their streaming services, including Paramount+, ESPN+, Tubi, and Peacock.
Digital options have helped the NFL expand their viewer base, especially amongst younger viewers who are more likely to watch entertainment on streaming platforms instead of traditional TV channels. However, under the guise of expanded access lies an inherent problem: Alternate viewing methods do not necessarily provide the same experience to fans as traditional broadcast.
For instance, on June 27, a federal jury found the NFL to have violated antitrust laws when distributing out-of-market Sunday afternoon games on the premium streaming subscription service “NFL Sunday Ticket.” Created in 1994, NFL Sunday Ticket gives fans access to all games played on Sunday afternoons, even if the game is only broadcast live over the air in the local region of the two teams playing.
The program has become an important source of revenue for the NFL as it is targeted toward restaurant and bar owners who show multiple games at once, in addition to fans living in different areas as their favorite team. DirecTV exclusively distributed the package from 1994 to 2023, paying the league $1.5 billion a year from 2014 to 2023 to continue the deal. Despite paying such a high amount per year, DirecTV was losing tens of millions of dollars yearly due to the introduction of Thursday Night Football, special games played on Fridays or Saturdays, and the rise of streaming. As a result, YouTube TV acquired the exclusive rights to NFL Sunday Ticket in 2023 for roughly $2 billion a year after DirecTV chose not to continue the deal.
Subscribers to the service allege that the NFL was involved in a conspiracy with DirecTV and other broadcasters to exclusively host the service on DirecTV, limiting competition and inflating prices. When compared to similar services in other sports leagues, like NBA League Pass or MLB.TV — which are provided on multiple platforms — NFL Sunday Ticket is offered at a much higher rate and without cheaper single-team and single-game options.
Historically, the NFL Sunday Ticket case is not the first time the league faced antitrust litigation over its viewership tactics. When the NFL decided to bundle all its games and sell the broadcasting rights to CBS in 1961 to retain a competitive edge over the newer, meteorically rising American Football League, it ran into antitrust restrictions from the courts. Instead, the NFL turned to Congress to pass the 1961 Sports Broadcasting Act and circumvent the court order, allowing professional leagues to sell TV rights as a package to over-the-air broadcasters.
Although the NFL claimed that the NFL Sunday Ticket model fell under the 1961 Sports Broadcasting Act, it’s important to note the act was never updated to include distribution by satellite, internet, or paid cable.
While it may seem that the jury in this NFL Sunday Ticket case dealt a clear blow to one of the league’s predatory business practices, the verdict did not stand for long. On Aug. 1, the judge presiding over the case overturned the decision and granted judgment to the NFL. The judge found that the methodologies used by plaintiff’s witnesses were speculative and simply assumed a different business model would’ve been cheaper for consumers. When it comes to justice decided by the courts, the economic potential and freedom of businesses like the NFL will outweigh the harmful side effects imposed on the consumer. The NFL embraced this concept and uses it to make changes to the fan viewing experience in other facets.
Take the NFL International Series for example. Starting in 2005, the International Series expanded the NFL’s reach across borders by hosting several games each year abroad. In an attempt to engage international fans, the NFL effectively ignored the voices of domestic fans. When agreeing to play an international game, a team potentially replaces one of its home games in the U.S. with an abroad game. Such scheduling results in fewer opportunities for domestic fans to cheer on their home team, demonstrating the NFL’s prioritization of profit over fan communities. Considering that American taxpayers are subsidizing and paying millions of dollars for the new NFL stadiums in their cities, fans should be able to benefit from it.
Even though the International Series has been around for almost two decades, it has slowly expanded in recent years as the NFL continues to look for new ways to secure its dominance. In December 2023, the club owners approved an expansion in the series that will allow up to eight international games to be scheduled.
Similarly, the concept of flex scheduling — created in 2006 — has undergone significant expansion recently, bringing more views and, you guessed it, more money to the NFL. According to the NFL, flex scheduling “ensures quality matchups on Sunday night in all weeks and gives surprise teams a chance to play their way onto primetime.”
While this might seem good for fans at first glance — more exciting games in more accessible slots — flex scheduling can turn into a nightmare for fans who are ticket holders. A game that gets flexed from a Sunday afternoon to Sunday night or vice versa, the original flexing introduced in 2006, is not as disruptive as say, a Sunday afternoon game flexed into the Thursday night slot, as the NFL introduced in 2023.
Even though Thursday night flexes require a 28-day notice — as opposed to the 12-day notice for a Sunday or Monday night flex — they still create a host of logistical headaches: Players and staff will have less time to recover from the previous week’s matchup, fans will have to adjust their travel and accommodations or sell their tickets, and stadiums need to staff an entirely different day. The league knows that even if a game isn’t flexed to a primetime slot, fans will still tune in the next week — making flex scheduling a short-term benefit for fans but a long-term asset for the NFL.
So, what does this mean for the future of football amidst the NFL’s quest for hegemonic dominance over our attention? After the NFL’s successful streaming-only Peacock exclusive of the Dolphins-Chiefs game in the Wild Card playoff round during the 2023 season — which attracted 23 million viewers and became the most streamed NFL game ever — it is clear that the league will continue to promote streaming-exclusive games. Unfortunately, this might mean fans shelling out money for a different streaming service every game.
Football is meant to be a communal sport, something that streaming doesn’t foster. Sure, you can take the games on the go with you and watch wherever you are, but that means there’s a decreased incentive for fans to huddle together around a TV or cheer collectively at a bar or restaurant. Football becomes reduced to just a game one can watch, and not a shared event that celebrates the community that it once was.
At the end of the day, fans need to recognize the NFL operates as a monopoly. While some of these changes have seen fan support, they were not implemented on behalf of a better fan viewing experience. Without any competition, the NFL is free to conduct its viewership experiments. The NFL counts on the fact that no past, present, or future league has the same level of fan loyalty to the teams, franchises, and branding as the NFL.
Fundamentally, there’s a difference in values between the NFL and its fans — a difference between money and a community with a great love for the sport. The way our government is set up favors economic activity, favoring the NFL in antitrust lawsuits and legislative acts like the 1961 Sports Broadcasting Act. Therefore government actions become a predictable tactic in the NFL’s formula for our attention. However, the biggest factor in the formula is the fans themselves and their views.
While the NFL can influence our viewing and spending habits with new subscriptions, paywalls, and policies, they cannot directly control how we watch. For every fan to individually pay for every streaming service to watch every game is the NFL’s dream scenario. But the NFL’s envisioned model falls apart if we simply refuse to take part in it. We can go back to watching games collectively, breaking the influence of streaming. We can reduce our views by sharing our games with friends. We can host tailgates and attend watch parties in sports bars. Ultimately, the NFL will follow the views. So by changing our viewing habits, fans can rewrite the NFL’s business model.
