Entertainment

Why Sports Broadcast Rights Keep Getting More Expensive

The NFL's current media deals are worth roughly $110 billion over eleven seasons, the Premier League's latest cycle is worth £13.2 billion, and streaming platforms are now

By The BB Report November 1, 2026

Why Sports Broadcast Rights Keep Getting More Expensive — A reporter with notes and a camera crew on the sideline of an American football game, as players walk past. Photo: Ken Lund from Reno, Nevada, USA / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Key takeaways

The NFL’s current media agreements pay close to $10 billion a year across Amazon, CBS, ESPN/ABC, Fox, and NBC, which makes the package the most valuable sports broadcast deal in the world.
The Premier League’s 2025–29 broadcast cycle is worth roughly £13.2 billion ($16.7 billion) in combined domestic and international rights, and its international rights revenue has grown around tenfold since 2007.
Streaming platforms, Amazon and Netflix among them, are now bidding for live sports rights. The bet is that churn reduction and acquisition efficiency make the math work over a multi-year horizon.

Amazon’s Thursday Night Football deal, an 11-year arrangement worth about $13 billion, is the foundational sports streaming rights arrangement that established the template for what followed.

The streaming platforms competing for sports rights in 2026 are doing so with the conviction that live sports is among the most valuable content in media.

The Scale of the Market

No sports property in the world commands the kind of broadcast money the National Football League collects. The league’s current media agreements pay close to $10 billion a year, with Amazon, CBS, ESPN/ABC, Fox and NBC among the buyers. Amazon’s Thursday Night Football deal, which runs 11 years and is valued at approximately $13 billion in total, was the first all-digital package in the league’s current deals. NFL broadcasts have accounted for 24 of the top 25 most-watched television programs in the United States and 77 of the top 100 over a recent five-year period, the highest audience concentration of any sport in American television.

In Europe, the English Premier League generates more broadcast revenue than La Liga, Bundesliga and Serie A combined. The 2025–29 broadcast cycle is valued at approximately £13.2 billion ($16.7 billion) in combined domestic and international rights. Sky Sports pays the most for Premier League rights in the UK, £6.4 billion for 215 matches per season, with TNT Sports taking 52 matches per season and the BBC keeping Match of the Day highlights for £75 million a year. NBC Sports pays roughly £378 million per year for US rights through the 2027/28 season, making it the most expensive international market. The league’s total annual broadcast revenue from rights fees is between £3.84 billion and £3.97 billion per season.

The NBA’s new rights structure, which took effect in 2025-26, includes Amazon Prime Video, ESPN and NBC. Amazon Prime Video secured a package of games in its first major NBA deal. The 11-year arrangement is worth $76 billion through the 2035-36 season, replacing the previous nine-year, $24 billion deal with ESPN/ABC and TNT. TNT did not retain rights: Warner Bros. Discovery, which owns TNT, is not part of the new NBA broadcasting deal.

Sports Broadcast Rights: Key Numbers

The NFL’s current media agreements are worth roughly $110 billion across eleven seasons, close to $10 billion a year. The Premier League’s 2025–29 rights cycle is worth approximately £13.2 billion ($16.7 billion). The NBA’s new rights structure, which took effect in 2025-26, includes Amazon Prime Video, ESPN and NBC. Amazon’s Thursday Night Football deal is valued at approximately $13 billion in total over 11 years.

Why Leagues Have Such Leverage

Unlike on-demand content that amortizes over time, live matches air once. That is what makes live sports useful for retention: a subscriber who watches NFL games on Thursday nights churns at a rate meaningfully below the platform average.

Scarcity gives leagues leverage. Only 380 Premier League matches exist per season. As the vaasblock.com analysis puts it, every platform that wants the content ‘pays the ask or loses the rights to a competitor who will.’ That analysis notes that the NFL ‘set the distribution terms, the broadcast rules, the advertising load, and the window exclusivity conditions’. Amazon got the distribution rights and the association.

International rights have grown faster than domestic rights. For the first time in league history, international broadcast revenue exceeded domestic income. The Premier League’s international rights revenue has grown approximately tenfold since 2007. The 2025–29 domestic deal shows only 2.3% annual growth, barely ahead of inflation, while international rights rose 23% in the 2025–28 cycle. The growth story in rights fees is increasingly global.

What Streaming Platforms Are Buying

Netflix has moved into live sports with NFL Christmas Day games at about $150 million per year, a multi-year WWE Raw deal, boxing events and a Formula 1 deal. It is in active discussions for additional NFL packages. For 15 years, Netflix built its content strategy on the explicit premise that live sports was someone else’s problem: too expensive, too complicated to produce, and incompatible with on-demand viewing.

Amazon has used Thursday Night Football to drive Prime membership acquisition and retention, and the advertising revenue that comes with a large live audience has contributed to its advertising business. Amazon has also been in discussions for international rights packages in cricket, through Amazon India.

The sports rights fee escalation cannot continue indefinitely. The consolidation of streaming could reduce the number of bidders for major sports rights and slow the escalation. Several analysts considered the NBA’s new fees at or near the ceiling for what the sport can justify economically. The NFL is probably not yet at its ceiling. The Premier League’s broadcast rights trajectory faces its first serious plateau. Amazon’s decision not to bid for the 2025-29 Premier League cycle signals ROI concerns.

The Premier League’s international rights revenue has grown approximately tenfold since 2007.

How League Payouts Work

In the Premier League, broadcast income is split into three parts: 50% divided equally among all 20 clubs, 25% based on league position, and 25% based on matches broadcast. In the 2024/25 season, the champions collected £176.4 million from television rights, while last-placed Southampton received £106.7 million, a difference of about 65%.

In the UK, the BBC’s share of Premier League coverage is highlights on Match of the Day.

By contrast, the NFL remains the only major league that keeps all of its games, regular season and playoffs alike, available on free over-the-air television. The current NFL package is split among several major partners.