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Last week, ESPN, Fox and Warner Brothers Discovery announced plans for a joint streaming service that looks a lot like a new-age cable package. The news was not received with enthusiasm by the NFL.
John Ourand of Puck.news reports that the The NFL is “walking through” its contracts with ESPN and Fox to see if the two broadcast partners have the right under NFL agreements to include NFL games in the proposed product. The NFL, according to Ourand, was “surprised” by the move and is looking for “possible loopholes” that could keep NFL games off the new platform.
Even if the NFL cannot find a legal basis to block the move, the situation potentially harms the relationship between the NFL and two of its major broadcast partners. And the NFL has ways of making its displeasure with wayward television networks known, including, but not limited to, giving them less-than-ideal game schedules.
Why does the league care about a partnership between ESPN and Fox? The combination could give the two companies more leverage in future negotiations, preventing the NFL from continuing its streak of making networks pay too much for NFL content. One of the tricks of the trade for the league is to always have one or two more potential bidders than packages.
Falcons owner Arthur Blank recently alluded to that dynamic in comments to Daniel Kaplan of FrontOfficeSports.com about the mega steam.
“There’s a lot of competition for NFL media rights,” Blank told Kaplan. “If you reduce it to such a small number then you don’t have a chance, but I don’t think the league is worried about that right now.”
Blank wisely stopped short of saying after the word “opportunity” something like “to get them to keep doing really bad deals to keep running NFL games.”
Regardless, the league is not happy with this development. It will be interesting to see if the attorneys find a foothold on which to stand, and if not, whether ESPN and/or Fox will consider their 2024 schedules to be a no-go.