In recent weeks, some politicians have questioned the current viability of the NFL’s broadcast antitrust exemption. As noted by John Ourand of Puck, some NFL executives have suspected that the effort carries the fingerprints of media mogul Rupert Murdoch, who owns NFL partner Fox.
The suspicions were validated on Thursday, when Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal posted an editorial that focuses on whether the NFL still merits a broadcast antitrust exemption.
“[T]oday the NFL is the powerful giant while the broadcasters are weak,” the WSJ editorial board writes. “Commissioner Roger Goodell wants to take advantage of this dominance by renegotiating with the networks. In 2021 the NFL finished a package of broadcast deals, including with CBS, Fox and NBC, that were meant to run through 2033. Rights fee roughly doubled.
“Mr. Goodell is using the threat of an early opt-out provision to change the terms only halfway through the deals. The assumption is that he thinks he can get more money from big tech’s streaming services than he can from his long-time TV partners. That would hurt the networks, especially local stations, that rely on the NFL for ad revenue. Live sports are one of the last drivers of large audiences, and the advertising funds local news and reporting.”
The editorial concludes with this message to Goodell and his 32 constituents, as to the antitrust exemption: “Let’s hear the NFL explain why it still deserves it.”
It’s a very bold move. But it comes as the NFL is making an equally bold effort to get CBS to immediately bump its annual rate for a Sunday afternoon package from $2.1 billion per year to $3 billion. Multiple reports have suggested that, after getting what it wants from CBS, the NFL will move to Fox.
The league’s leverage comes from the streaming companies. With the Thursday night package once held by Fox already shifted to Amazon and with YouTube buying the rights to NFL Sunday Ticket, resistance from the broadcast networks could be futile.
The counter comes from the possibility that the current exemption doesn’t apply to streaming. While that’s a question that would be subject to litigation, a decision by Congress to strip the NFL of its broadcast antitrust exemption would make things much cleaner under the law — and much messier for the league.
Competitive balance flows from the ability of the league to sell its TV rights in one bundle. Without it, each team would sell the rights to its home games to the highest bidder. Some (like the Cowboys) would get billions. Others (do we really need to name them?) would struggle for public-access scraps.
Revenue sharing would implode, and at a minimum the league would fracture into the haves and haves-it-all.
It’s ultimately a high-stakes chess match between the NFL and the traditional networks. (And, yes, our content is exclusively licensed to NBC, one of the NFL’s current network partners.) But if the NFL is thinking about ditching broadcast TV for streaming, the only play for the networks is to reframe the question.
If the NFL isn’t going to make games available on free, over-the-air, FCC-regulated networks, should the NFL continue to enjoy the exemption from antitrust laws that would prevent it from selling packages on an all-or-nothing basis?
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