NFL’s billionaire touchdown
Madrid, Mar 26 (efe-epa).- In the era of fragmented TV, the NFL just score huge with a batch of television contracts for the 2023-2033 period that will generate $110 billion as Amazon joins as a major addition to the mix.
The figure, released by US media, doubles what the league was receiving until now for TV rights. The sport dominates TV screens in the US — 32 of the 50 most-watched shows in 2020 were NFL games, according to data from Nielsen, a data measurement firm.
The roughly $10 billion per season that the NFL will receive starting in 2023 far exceeds the $2.66 billion the NBA receives per year from ESPN and Turner through 2024; the 2.4 billion euros that UEFA got for the 2018/19 Champions League and the 1.9 billion euros Spain’s LaLiga took the same year.
One of the notable takeaways from the agreement, in which the different packages are distributed between CBS, Fox and NBC (Sundays), Disney-ABC-ESPN (Monday), is the greater involvement of Amazon.
Having already secured the rights to some Thursday games since 2017, the platform’s Prime service will now offer that slot exclusively.
In a context in which large audiences are disintegrating due to the strength of digital platforms, the fact that the US championship has obtained this economic push shows that live events have become a key element for large television networks.
“This shows not only that great live content is valid, but that it is the only aspirin to fight against the dispersion of audiences,” said Vicente de Pablo, an expert in sports management and professor at the ESIC business school. EFE-EPA
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