Fox has been an NFL broadcasting partner since 1994, but Mike Florio could see that longstanding relationship coming to an end in the near future.
On Wednesday, the House Judiciary Committee held a lengthy hearing on the NFL’s broadcast antitrust exemption amid concerns that the league has been skirting the exemption’s limits, which arguably apply only to league-wide packages sold to broadcast networks.
Like so many of these things during the Donald Trump administration era, the hearing raised the questions of “why now?” and “what’s the real purpose here?”
It’s not hard to put two and two together and see that Rupert Murdoch, founder and Chairman Emeritus of Fox Corporation and News Corp, has called in some favors to put pressure on the NFL. That government pressure has included a DOJ investigation into anti-competitive practices and public comments from FCC chair Brendan Carr. As has been clear from the beginning, the political and business interests of Murdoch, Trump, and the conservative billionaire class are all aligned here in keeping NFL games on Fox at a reasonable price for as long as possible.
As PFT’s Florio noted in his piece, it was perhaps no coincidence that Clay Travis, a longtime Fox employee (until this week), testified at Wednesday’s hearing and went fairly hard on the impact of the NFL’s growing relationship with streaming services and how it affects fans.
For the NFL, the whole affair has moved from feeling like an annoying fly buzzing around their head to a tick burrowing into their skin. And it has Florio wondering if the bad blood left behind from all of this will be a catalyst for the NFL to sever ties with Fox when media rights come up for negotiation once more in 2030.
“It would be a stunning move, if it happens,” writes Florio. “Fox arrived as a disruptor in 1994, snatching the Sunday afternoon NFC package from CBS and holding it for 32 years and counting. Murdoch doesn’t seem to care. He has drawn a line in the sand, and he has been willing to use everything at his disposal to get the NFL to tread lightly when it comes to the potential sale of more games to streamers.”
It’s a similar thought to what Awful Announcing’s Matt Yoder pondered in May, when trying to read the tea leaves on how this whole quagmire could end.
The NFL will have several billion-dollar and trillion-dollar companies falling all over themselves to get a piece of their lucrative, luscious pie. And all of them will have much deeper pockets than Fox. Whether it’s streamers or broadcast networks, everyone wants more NFL games. If the NFL were to put Fox’s current package up for bid, the competition would be fierce.
Regardless of who takes which package, in a game of magical chairs, the most logical seat to remove is Fox. There are myriad realistic scenarios in which Fox is left without a seat at the NFL table come the 2029 opt-out. And it might just be for business and personal reasons.
Yoder also looked at how Warner Bros. Discovery chairman David Zaslav’s game of chicken with the NBA over media rights eventually led the league to look elsewhere, ending a longstanding relationship. So there is recent precedent for how things can play out.
For now, Murdoch and Fox can play the card of letting Trump and Republicans be their attack dogs, but there will come a day soon when that power is gone. What comes next will likely be more up to the NFL than Fox.
