The NFL and CBS are getting down to numbers.
According to CNBC’s Alex Sherman — the same reporter who sat down with Roger Goodell last September when the commissioner first said publicly that early renegotiations could happen “as early as next year” — the two sides are negotiating a price increase with a bid-ask spread midpoint around 50 to 60 percent. CBS currently pays $2.1 billion per season for its Sunday afternoon package under an 11-year deal that began in 2023. A 50 percent jump would push the annual fee past $3 billion. In exchange, the NFL would eliminate the opt-out clause it reserved after the 2029-30 season, giving CBS a clear runway through the end of the 2033-34 season. The new rate would kick in as soon as next season.
Goodell’s September interview with Sherman was the first time the commissioner publicly said early renegotiations could happen, though John Ourand had been reporting the possibility at Puck for months beforehand. NFL media executive Hans Schroeder walked the comments back slightly when asked about them — Goodell had been “misconstrued,” he said — but didn’t do anything to suggest the league wasn’t actively talking to its partners. Then came Super Bowl LX. Puck’s Dylan Byers reported that Goodell’s suite hosted the CEOs of Google, YouTube, Netflix, and Paramount, along with incoming Disney CEO Josh D’Amaro. Conspicuously absent were Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Fox’s Lachlan Murdoch, and Comcast’s Brian Roberts. If there was any doubt the league was already taking stock of its partners, the seating chart settled it.
Ourand confirmed as much in early March, reporting that the league wants every deal in place before September, announced one at a time, with Paramount Skydance and CBS going first.
The reason the NFL is pushing so hard to renegotiate early comes down to one thing: the NBA. As Awful Announcing’s Drew Lerner wrote in February, NFL executives have been irritated ever since NBC signed a deal paying the NBA $2.45 billion per year for Sunday Night Basketball, compared to the $2 billion NBC pays the NFL for Sunday Night Football. The league that drives more television viewership than anything else on American TV was somehow getting paid less than basketball. Goodell said as much at his Super Bowl press conference last year when The Athletic’s Andrew Marchand asked him directly whether the current deals were undervalued. “I always think we’re undervalued, how’s that?”
Paramount Skydance’s position entering these talks is complicated by its own ambitions. Paramount Skydance president Jeff Shell struck a confident tone on the company’s earnings call in February, saying CBS had “properly accounted” for a renewal and felt “pretty confident” it would stay in business with the NFL for a long time, while in the same breath reporting a $573 million quarterly loss. The company is in the middle of a bid to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery, a deal that would push Paramount’s streaming subscriber base past 200 million and give it a much more credible long-term argument for holding the NFL. CEO David Ellison told CNBC last week that the company had “planned accordingly” to afford a renewal, language that, as Drew Lerner noted at the time, almost certainly means cutting elsewhere. TNT Sports properties like MLB and NHL, whose deals expire in 2028, are the obvious targets. Versant, the NBCUniversal spinoff, is among those being discussed as a potential beneficiary of any rights that come loose in the shuffle.
CBS is also not expected to hold onto its full current game inventory under any new deal. Per Ourand’s reporting earlier this month, the working assumption on Wall Street is that legacy broadcasters pay more while surrendering games to fund new five-game streamer packages for Netflix, Amazon, and YouTube. That structure would take nine games currently allocated to linear television and redistribute them to platforms that have been steadily building their NFL footprints, from Amazon’s Thursday Night Football to Netflix’s Christmas doubleheader to YouTube’s Sunday Ticket.
CBS is essentially being asked to pay more for a smaller slice of the pie, and if the rest of the league’s partners follow at a similar rate, the NFL would be well on its way toward the $15-20 billion annual media revenue target Wall Street analysts have projected. Fox is expected to be next, and whatever CBS agrees to will set the price they’re negotiating against.