Pete Alonso hitting his first home run in an Orioles uniform. My fantasy league commissioner bugging me for keepers. The WBC right around the corner. Baseball is back, and I’m here for it!
YouTube had its first exclusive NFL game in 2025 and now looks to be seeking more. GETTY IMAGES
YouTube is negotiating with the NFL to acquire rights to the four games the league kept as part of its ESPN equity deal, but a number of parties remain interested in the package, sources tell SBJ. It’s unknown what that mix of games would be. Sources added that there have been “lots of inbound” to the NFL on the four-game package, which could come with a short-term shelf life as the league figures out its broader, long-term media strategy.
Both YouTube and the NFL declined to comment.
YouTube aired its first NFL game last year with the Week 1 Chargers-Chiefs game from Brazil, and the matchup drew 18.5 million viewers in the U.S., with another 1.1 million or so from abroad. NFL Network will likely remain the home for the bulk of the league’s international games, but with nine such contests in 2026, that means opportunity beyond the cable network. The Cowboys’ game in Brazil this year is slated for a 4:25pm ET window, meaning CBS or Fox are the likely candidates. But the NFL also has the Australia game to sell. Sources also tell SBJ that many other NFL media partners haven’t yet discussed this package of four games with the league.
Beyond an international element, other games that could go to YouTube could be for exclusive windows elsewhere on the calendar, such as later in the season when streamers such as Peacock or ESPN+ have picked up games in the past. Other sources have told SBJ that the NFL could be interested in expanding its Black Friday slate, which has been a sole Prime Video game thus far.
Univision was part of a big audience for Game 1 of the 2025 World Series. MLB Photos via Getty Images
It’s easy to just focus on the deep soccer portfolio that TelevisaUnivision has in the U.S., with the likes of Liga MX, UEFA Champions League and Leagues Cup on its airwaves. But don’t sleep on the company’s ambitions with baseball as it heads into the final year of a deal with MLB that includes a number of playoff games.
But it’s not just here in the U.S., as the network also just signed a deal for MLB in Mexico that includes coverage of the World Baseball Classic, which will be popular with Mexico competing in the tournament.
“Out of all the leagues, MLB is one of our best partners,” said Olek Loewenstein, Univision’s global president of sports. “It’s easy to work with them, and it’s very straightforward, and we really have a great out-of-the-box thinking partnership.”
Still ‘crazy’ about soccer
Domestically, the company is enjoying another strong season for Liga MX, which remains the most-watched soccer league on U.S. airwaves, regardless of language. Loewenstein called the numbers “crazy” this season, with Liga MX up 26% on the broadcast TV side and around 70% on cable TV — figures that would lead all soccer leagues on U.S. airwaves in terms of year-over-year growth.
Many of those soccer leagues, like La Liga, the Bundesliga and Premier League, also have rights deals coming up in the U.S., and a squeeze is coming once NFL partners are forced to pony up more to stay in business with The Shield. “Every single non-premium right in the U.S. is going to struggle,” said Loewenstein. “It’s going to be an inflection point for a lot of these rights holders, to a certain extent, in starting to deploy direct-to-consumer options.”
But not every rightsholder is the same, and organizations like U.S. Soccer or La Liga aren’t necessarily ready to invest in a DTC product. “They don’t have the money. They don’t have the expertise — they don’t want to do it. They don’t want to be in that business. There’s too much marketing spend. There’s too much operation,” said Loewenstein. “But I think there’s going to be more flexible packaging in the way things are sold.”
NBC’s Mike Tirico lauded the efforts of Ron Vaccaro (r) and his team in making the NBA-Super Bowl-Olympics journey happen. NBC SPORTS
Mike Tirico has been on a carefully choreographed broadcasting journey these last few weeks. Lakers-Knicks at MSG would be the starting point of his travels that then saw him go across the country to Santa Clara for his first Super Bowl call and back across the country (and the Atlantic Ocean) to Milan to host the Winter Olympics.
Would he do it all again? “I thought that it would be a bit more fatiguing than it has been,” Tirico told me. “But I would sign up and do it all again next week. This has been even better than I could have imagined.”
Tirico has always been the consummate teammate, and when I spoke to him heading into the final days of the Milan Cortina Games, he wanted to recognize those who helped make the journey happen. “Every department, all the way across the board — production teams, logistics, all the planning that’s been done, all of that,” he said.
But Tirico also wanted to single out one person in particular who was with him every step in NBC Sports SVP and Executive Producer Ron Vaccaro (if you went to college in New Haven, you may recognize the name, as Vaccaro was the longtime radio voice of Yale football). “For what we do that reaches people through TV or streaming, it is our research department that is so much of the foundation for how we pull this off, and Ron’s leadership of that group makes them go,” Tirico said.
The planning by Vaccaro’s team, including VP/Research and Editorial John Quartuccio and Olympic Researcher Charlotte Edmonds, goes back over a year to when NBC started mapping out Tirico’s trip. “We were talking then about the ways that we could ‘cheat time,’” Vaccaro half-joked. “It’s the type of thing our entire team relishes, being able to lean in and try and help bring that to life as much as possible.”
In the end, Vaccaro may have actually had the more arduous journey. He was in Milan before the Super Bowl, so he made it to California only to come right back to Italy. “I was on the JV travel level compared to Ron at that point,” Tirico said.
Caitlin Clark and the Indiana Fever could certainly draw an audience for ESPN similar to what “Sunday Night Baseball” was drawing. NBAE via Getty Images
ESPN has a few Sunday night spring/summer windows to fill now that MLB is no longer there, and the network announced it will be putting higher-profile WNBA and NWSL games on many of those Sunday night slots. It’s a big positive for women’s sports, and reflects what ION has been doing for years now with the WNBA and NWSL on Friday and Saturday nights, respectively (dedicated windows for both). But while a good WNBA game may be able to match a normal “Sunday Night Baseball” audience, don’t expect any NWSL game to hit that sort of number.
Netflix is getting into the live MMA space with a matchup that seems to resemble something closer to a celebrity boxing match or Alex Honnold’s recent tower climb vs. a serious sporting event. The Netflix MMA foray will feature Ronda Rousey against Gina Carano on May 16, and the truth is neither has fought in a long, long time. But Netflix certainly loves big events, and this will qualify. I wouldn’t expect this fight to be Nielsen-measured, either.
The leading demo in gains for the Daytona 500 was adults 18-24, with figures up 81%. Getty Images
Top-line data for the Daytona 500 on Fox showed the race’s best audience since 2023, but a deeper dive also indicates some nice gains among younger viewers. The leading demo in gains was adults 18-24, with figures up 81%, while adults 18-34 were up 49% and adults 25-54 were up 36%. Kids also were up 32% in the 2-17 demo. All female demos were up from last year as well. The only demo of note that saw a decline among all adults was 35-49. Meanwhile, NASCAR also saw gains in some core markets for Daytona, including Detroit (+30%), Greenville-Spartanburg (+27%), Norfolk (+23%), Boston (+16%) and Raleigh-Durham (+12%).
Team USA’s win in the women’s hockey gold medal game on USA Network delivered 5.3 million viewers Thursday. For some non-Olympic comps, that’s better than what NBA All-Star Saturday Night delivered on NBC this month (4.5 million) or what ESPN got for the Heisman Trophy Ceremony (4.3 million). It’s right around what ESPN drew for the Illinois-Tennessee Music City Bowl in late December (5.4 million), or what ABC got for the Egg Bowl (Ole Miss-Mississippi State) on Black Friday (5.2 million).