The NFL is back – not that it ever really left.
The league that rules the media business, Madison Avenue and American culture has managed to turn once-obscure events like the combine in February, the draft in April and the schedule release in May into major events. This week, the actual on-field action begins with a novel kickoff to the regular season.
A rematch of last February’s Super Bowl will feature the Seattle Seahawks and the New England Patriots in NBC’s season opener on Wednesday night. It’s the first time since 2012 the season has started on a Wednesday, one of the remaining rare days of the week that is usually devoid of NFL games. A one-off or a harbinger of future game creep? Read on.
The following night, the Los Angeles Rams will take on the San Francisco 49ers in Australia, the first visit to the continent by the NFL as it continues its international push.
Is all of this empire building, with ratings, revenue and team valuations continuing to notch new records, ever going to hit the wall? Couldn’t the league be nearing its ceiling?
“I’ve learned never to doubt the NFL” Martin Blich, U.S. head of sports partnerships and investment for ad giant WPP Media, told Deadline in an interview.
“There’s always a point of saturation, but we haven’t gotten to the point of saturation,” agreed Mark Conrad, a professor of law and ethics at Fordham University’s business school. “The NFL is only about 20 games a season. It’s not basketball, it’s not baseball.”
While conquest seems to be assured, there still will be a number of intriguing elements this season. Here are five of the biggest:
1. Waiting All Day For Wednesday Night?
Along with the season opener, the new wrinkle for 2026 is a game on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving. Along with the recently created Black Friday window, the game will give the NFL presence over three days in a key holiday window.
With Black Friday and also Christmas Day games on Netflix only becoming a thing over the past couple of years, some have wondered if the NFL has a wandering eye. It planted games on Christmas opposite the long-established NBA slate. Could a Wednesday slot be next?
Hans Schroeder, EVP of media distribution for the NFL, splashed some cold water on that notion during a recent call with the media. “I don’t know if we’re looking at Wednesday night football as a night for regularly scheduled NFL games,” he said. Rather, the growth of Thanksgiving ratings in recent years shows “how core football, food and family” are over that holiday span, he added. Viewership trends “suggested to us that there’s an opportunity to make that bigger, and that Wednesday night of Thanksgiving, as people often are going back to… they’re traveling, they’re back in their hometowns, they’re together, they’re out, and this is a great intersection.”
WPP’s Blich said he is “excited to see” how the Wednesday opener resonates with viewers. He said it remains unclear whether “people are prepared for the Wednesday after Labor Day, versus the Thursday that everybody had been attuned to.”
2. Billion-Dollar Rights Fight
Due to a “change of control” provision in the NFL’s 11-year deals with its current media partners, the league is understood to have the option to revisit those deals. That could mean billions of additional dollars being coughed up by already cost-conscious traditional rightsholders like Fox, NBCUniversal and CBS/Paramount. The 2025 merger of Skydance and Paramount initially triggered the change-of-control clause, and the pending Paramount-Warner Bros. Discovery deal could do likewise.
Fox CEO Lachlan Murdoch put an emphatic stake in the ground recently, declaring on the company’s quarterly earnings call that the company doesn’t plan to alter its timetable. Asked about Murdoch’s comments, Schroeder deflected, as did CBS Sports President David Berson at a recent media preview day in New York.
“That’s really a question for them,” Schroeder said.
“I’m not going to speak to Fox’s comments, obviously,” Berson said. “We have an incredible relationship with the NFL. We talk to them daily on a whole variety of topics. We have lots of intersecting business with them. … We continue to have discussions with them. Nothing to share at this point.”
Berson highlighted the reach of CBS, which has been the No. 1 broadcast network in 17 of last 18 years. He also noted the 11-year duration of the current contract, which will expire in 2032.
“There’s plenty of runway here,” he said, and “no specific timing constraints.”
Schroeder and his league colleagues were pressed by reporters about their approach to rights negotiations, especially given the challenging state of traditional media compared with Big Tech.
“We’re always talking to our partners,” Schroeder said We’re always talking about what we can do better, both in what’s right in front of us and what’s longer term. So, I don’t think anything’s changed on our end. We’re always going to look at opportunities to sort of make sure we have the right model.”
Repeatedly emphasizing the league talking point that 87% of games are available on free, over-the-air broadcast, he said reach would always be important. And yet, six decades after games first lit up on TV, league officials “continue to engage the marketplace, evaluate the marketplace, and continue to talk to our partners and the market more broadly,” Schroeder added. “We’re always going to look for whether those are incremental opportunities” – either with pure-play streamers like Netflix or with additional inventory going to traditional broadcasters.
3. Global Ambitions
The Australia game extends a long push of the NFL to expand globally. In recent seasons, it has widened the scope from an initial slate in the UK to include Mexico, Brazil, Ireland, Spain and Germany.
NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell said over the summer that he expected the league to soon play games in Japan. Schroeder noted “a long history of football in Japan” spanning decades. He called the country “a great market with, you know, a great understanding and love of football already.”
With UK games closing in on two decades as a fixture on the NFL schedule, there has been growing speculation about an NFL franchise potentially being set up outside of the U.S. NFL execs aren’t willing to go there yet, but Schroeder said putting on games in international markets “really energizes a weekend, and you see the strength of football in some of these markets when it all comes together. I think there’s more and more interest from cities around the world about hosting NFL games.”
4. Advertisers Move The Chains
With all but a handful of the top 100 Nielsen-rated programs in a typical year being NFL games, demand from advertisers remains robust.
Blich said the upfront sales process was “really strong.” Over the last five years, he added, “If you’re not placing ads in the upfront, you’re at risk of not having access.” The robust interest helped propel Disney to an early sellout of Super Bowl inventory. ABC will air its first Super Bowl in 20 years next February, with the game simultaneously airing on ESPN for the first time.
Despite boom times in many respect, measurement remains a contentious issue. Nielsen, as ever, remains in the crosshairs as it looks to strike a balance among linear, streaming and out-of-home.
Paul Ballew, the NFL’s chief data and analytics officer, said the league is trying to “make sense” of recent changes at Nielsen, which has expanded its counting of out-of-home viewing. “They’ve rushed in terms of a number of fixes into the market, we don’t have enough impact data to fully assess, we’re still trying to make sense of it, still trying to make sense of some of the logic behind some of the methodological changes.”
Initially, he said, updated Nielsen methodology “looks like a negative for sports. On the other side, co-viewing, or partial co-viewing implementation is a positive.
“So we’re going to have to continue to spend some time pulling this apart and making sense of it. … It’s adding into the amount of homework we have to do. … We do think it’s a misstep on Nielsen’s part, to go do this, the way they’re doing it. And it continues to accelerate our pressure point to pursue ongoing measurement improvements, because it’s so critically important to us, and to everybody else in this space.
Berson of CBS sees the recent changes as largely positive. “We’re pleased that the viewership metrics are finally capturing what we think is the accurate audience,” he said.
5. Stream On, You Crazy Streamer
The big question on many fans’ minds heading into the season is about streaming. Will games keep migrating away from traditional TV and toward Big Tech? YouTube’s acquisition of Sunday Ticket rights and Amazon’s successful takeover of Thursday nights are bringing significant benefits to the league and those stakeholders, but some fans remain wary.
The tension begs a number of questions. What would the biggest sports programming in the U.S. look like if even more of it goes to streaming? Would the league consider a form of equity partnership akin to its 10% stake in ESPN in order to keep broadcasters as primary partners?
“We want to be on the platform screens where our fans are spending their time,” Schroeder said.
Broadcast television, he added, “continues to be the core and the foundation of everything we do.”
At the same time, “we know our fans are there” on streaming platforms. “And we’re going to be selective and judicious with where and how we go onto those platforms.”
