On Monday, Fox CEO Lachlan Murdoch announced during an earnings call that the network will add a pair of nationally-televised games to its existing package for 2026. The limited expansion of the Fox slate comes at a time when Murdoch’s father, Rupert, has been instigating a political pressure campaign against the league over the effort to renegotiate existing broadcast deals.
Via Drew Lerner of Awful Announcing, Lachlan Murdoch nevertheless said “[t]here is no tension really with the NFL.”
If the current situation has resulted in no tension with the league, it’s hard to imagine what it would take to cause tension.
Rupert Murdoch reportedly told President Donald Trump in February that the NFL’s migration of games from broadcast networks to streaming could, if it expands, “kill the networks.” Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal — one of the most widely-read and influential publications in the world — posted an editorial challenging the NFL to justify why it continues to deserve a broadcast antitrust exemption. Even before the article was posted, the league reportedly suspected Murdoch of instigating the multi-layered assault by the federal government on whether the league has exceeded the boundaries of the existing exemption by selling games to for-pay platforms.
It culminated on Sunday with President Trump addressing the issue of the cost of streaming to consumers who “live for” watching pro football. And while his facts, as they almost always are, were not entirely accurate (he claimed fans are paying $1,000 per game to watch the NFL), the point remains. The issue is on the radar screen of the leader of the free world, and he doesn’t like it.
After the dust settled on a Monday chock full of developments regarding the NFL’s relationships with the various broadcast networks, Joe Flint of Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal tweeted this: “I’m sure that there is no correlation between the DOJ probe into Sports Broadcasting Act and grumbling about putting too many games on streamers and today’s NFL news that Fox, NBC got more games and CBS got to move an afternoon game to prime time next season.”
If there is a correlation, it appears to be window dressing. The deeper issue is the attempt (starting with CBS) to get significant increases in annual payments under existing broadcast deals that run through 2029 for CBS, Fox, NBC, Amazon, and YouTube and through 2030 for ESPN/ABC. And if it wasn’t already obvious that the effort was sparked by the magnitude of the NBA’s latest broadcast deals, a recent profile of Commissioner Roger Goodell in Vanity Fair made that point as clear as it could be.
Fox, CBS, and NBC buying extra games for 2026 doesn’t solve the deeper, and more significant, question of whether the league wants more from the networks now with the “or else” being a potential shift of current broadcast packages to streaming companies.
So, yes, there’s obviously tension between the NFL and Fox. A major media mogul has created a significant political problem for the league, one that has put the device that fuels the NFL’s entire economic model in jeopardy.
Without the broadcast antitrust exemption, the teams would have to sell their TV rights individually. Some teams (starting with the Cowboys) would earn dramatically more than others. The biggest source of funds for revenue sharing would collapse. The salary cap would be skewed in favor of the teams earning more, and against the teams making less.
Taken to the extreme, the NFL could fracture into two leagues — one consisting of the teams selling the more attractive TV packages, and one made up of the teams selling the less attractive TV packages.
And it all traces to Fox. How can Fox claim there’s no tension when Fox has deliberately lit the fuse that is burning toward a bomb that could, in theory, blow up the entire house?
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