The NFL’s effort to pump up the money received from its broadcast partners apparently traces to the 11-year, $76 billion collection of TV deals the NBA did in 2024. Another deal quite possibly made the NFL even more determined to get more.
Via Drew Lerner of Awful Announcing, UFC CEO Dana White believes the NFL wasn’t thrilled to learn that his cage-fighting operation finagled a seven-year, $7.7 billion deal from Paramount in 2025.
“I don’t know this to be true, but I fucking guarantee you it is,” White said. “The day we announced that we did a $7.7 billion deal, the executives at the NFL said, ‘How the fuck did we not get this money, and how did we not know that kind of money was sitting over [there]?’”
White’s comments came in connection with his claim that the UFC is now competing not with other fighting operations but with the premier American sports — “the NFL, the NBA, Major League Baseball, and the NHL.”
Of course, the UFC isn’t exactly competing with the NFL, despite the braindead notion that more people watched UFC Freedom 250 than watched the Super Bowl. (The event fell short by only 117.4 million viewers.)
But that’s all the more reason for the NFL to be saying WTF!?! If the UFC is worth $1.1 billion annually to Paramount, how is Paramount paying only $2.1 billion per year for the NFL package on CBS?
The NFL went back to the table with CBS earlier this year, following the sale of Paramount to Skydance. To date, no new deal has been done. John Ourand of Puck recently reported that “nothing is imminent” in that regard.
The NFL could have pulled the plug on the CBS deal and re-bid the remaining years, given the ownership change. But who would buy the CBS package? Fox already has a bundle of Sunday afternoon games, and NBC, ESPN/ABC, and Prime Video have their own prime-time packages. Unless an existing partner would be inclined to double up, the NFL would have to find someone else.
That’s where the hot-button topic of the broadcast antitrust exemption comes into play. The CBS package would have to go to a streamer, which would make the political pressure on the NFL even greater by removing key Sunday afternoon windows from free TV.
Regardless, White’s point is valid. The NFL is much bigger than the UFC. With Paramount paying the NFL not even twice the amount it’s paying for the UFC, the NFL has left a lot of meat on the broadcast-rights bone.
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