Back in 1993, Fox paid $1.58 billion to air NFC football games for the next four years. It was a staggering deal that helped solidify the NFL’s cultural dominance, and it changed the very nature of sports and television. Thirty-one years later, on Christmas Day a couple of weeks ago, Netflix showed its first-ever NFL games, two very dull blowouts. It paid $150 million for the right to stream them exclusively. Yes, we’re at the point where it costs $150 million to air two NFL games. The importance of these games to both the streaming giant and the league was clear from the seemingly infinite number of analysts and entertainers Netflix hired to cover them, including employees of competing networks (CBS’s Nate Burleson, ESPN’s Mina Kimes, Fox’s Greg Olson, and NFL Network’s Scott Hanson). This gave the proceedings the flouting-traditional-corporate-licensing feel of seeing Donald Duck and Daffy Duck play piano together in Who Framed Roger Rabbit?
Netflix’s broadcast was visually unappealing — as Defector’s David Roth put it, Netflix made “live sports look and feel exactly as uncanny and washed out as everything else on Netflix does” — but it avoided most of the bugs that plagued the Jake Paul–Mike Tyson fight in November. It was also a clear smash ratings hit, so it will surely not be the last Netflix-NFL experiment moving forward. Which means if you are an NFL fan and you want access to every game (as most NFL fans do), you better have Netflix. Also: You better have Amazon Prime, which saw a 13 percent ratings uptick in its second year showing NFL games and will exclusively air this weekend’s playoff game between the Pittsburgh Steelers and the Baltimore Ravens. You’ll also need Peacock, which last year paid $110 million to air a playoff game exclusively. And then there’s ESPN+, which aired four Monday Night Football games this year, none of which were available on traditional ESPN. You can’t really go without any of them.
The age of cord-cutting has meant dramatically diminishing fortunes for the traditional broadcast networks. Sports, and especially football, have been one of the few things keeping those networks afloat. A young consumer might not even know what channel CBS or Fox is, but if they want to watch Patrick Mahomes or Josh Allen, they still have to pay for cable (or YouTube TV, or Hulu TV, or whatever their provider is). But now the league, in yet another flex of its power, is double-dipping: It is getting its traditional provider package money and money from streamers. This is great for the NFL — which is the wealthiest sports league in the world — and the 32 billionaires who own its 32 teams, but increasingly insane for the sports fans asked to foot an ever-increasing bill for their viewing habits. And that’s not even accounting for, you know, other sports. Sports fandom has never been more expensive than it is right now. It’s never even been close.
How expensive? Let’s take a hypothetical sports fan — we’ll call him Will L. (A quite handsome hypothetical name, if you ask me.) Like most sports fans, Will L. watches sports far more than he watches anything else on traditional TV, which is to say he’s like most of the rest of the country. (The NFL was responsible for 72 of the 100 highest-rated television shows in 2024, only down from the year before because of the presidential election.) Will L. writes about sports professionally, but if he’s being honest, he would watch all these sports even if no one paid him to do so; he’s as much of a sucker as the rest of us. There are three things Will L. absolutely cannot miss:
• NFL games
• St. Louis Cardinals games
• New York Knicks games
Fifteen years ago, if Will L. wanted to watch all of these things, he simply needed a cable subscription (current value: roughly $90 a month from Spectrum), and a willingness to pay $150 a year for the MLB.tv All Teams package to watch the Cardinals. It was more difficult if he wanted to watch every NFL game, because it required DirectTV, which exclusively held the rights to the NFL Sunday Ticket package until 2023 (a deal that cost the NFL $4.7 billion in an antitrust lawsuit, which it is appealing). Let’s say Will L. splurged on the package, which cost $293 a year. He doesn’t have to pay any extra for Knicks games because he lives in New York and gets those games through the cable package.
So, how much did it cost Will L. to get every NFL game, every Cardinals game, and every NFL game in a pre-streaming age? Roughly $1,523 a year. That’s a lot! But it was worth it. He couldn’t live without those games.
But in the age of streaming? Buckle up.
First off, he still needs a cable package to watch all the NFL games on Fox, ESPN, NBC, and CBS. YouTube TV (a far better service than DirectTV, which he no longer needs) just raised its price to $83 a month, which is cheaper than Spectrum, but just barely. Now that the Sunday Ticket package isn’t exclusive to DirectTV, he can get it through YouTube TV … except now it costs $489 a year. The MLB.tv package is still $150 a year for his Cardinals. For the sake of argument, we’ll pretend that Will L. still lives in New York and gets Knicks games locally, though if he has Optimum rather than YouTube TV, he actually can’t at the moment.
So we’re already at $1,635 before we even add all the other services. But there are so many other services to add!
Will L. needs Amazon Prime to watch Thursday Night Football. That’s currently $139 a year, though there are rumblings that Amazon might someday strip its sports package from the rest of its video offerings and charge more for it.
He also needs Peacock, particularly if it is going to land another playoff game, as is widely expected. There’s another $80 a year. And ESPN+, which he’ll require for those Monday night games — and which doesn’t even get him access to reading Zach Lowe anymore — is $120 a year. Oh, right, he’s also already paying Netflix $186 a year for the right to pretend that filmed entertainment didn’t exist before 1980.
So where are we? We’re at $2,040 a year, a full $500 more just to watch what his YouTubeTV subscription — a premium tier subscription, supposedly optimized for watching sports — doesn’t cover. Two thousand bucks a year.
(If Will L. were being entirely truthful, he would even include the fact that he loves his alma mater, the University of Illinois, so much that he even subscribes to the dreadful Big Ten Network-Plus for $12.99 a month just so he can watch replays of volleyball, tennis, and basketball games. Fortunately, he’s not being entirely truthful, so we don’t have to include that.)
The financial piece is bad enough, but also: Is this supposed to be so damned hard? Wasn’t part of the appeal of cable in the first place is that we could just subscribe to one thing and be done with it? You need a spreadsheet just to remember what you’re subscribing to. And if you don’t have a spreadsheet, you’ll surely forget. Which is probably part of the point.
And it’s all just getting more extreme. The NFL has been explicit that adding more streaming deals is key to its “global” brand, and other leagues are following suit. One of the more interesting — if that’s the word you want to use — developments in Major League Baseball is the league’s attempts to wrench back control of each individual team’s broadcasts, many of which are currently held by regional networks (including those owned by the barely-surviving-as-a-business Diamond Sports Group) and auction them off, individually or as packages, to streamers. So the rights to all Cardinals games could go to Netflix, the rights to Cubs games could end up with Amazon Prime, the Royals games with Peacock, and so on. Getting the most loyal fans to flit from streamer to streamer simply to watch games that were once more or less in one place — this, unfortunately, is the wave of the future. We’re just getting started. Will L. better save up his pennies.
