The NFL Always Wins | A Column by Michael Beach

Editor's Note

State of the Screens is a syndicated column by Michael Beach — author of Screen Wars and one of the sharpest thought leaders and founders in streaming and TV advertising. This piece maps the brutal economics behind NFL media rights: networks paying $9.2 billion annually while generating only $6 billion in game ad revenue, relying on retransmission fees to survive an escalating scarcity tax ahead of the 2029 opt-out window.

The NFL season kicked off on Wednesday, September 9, 2026.

Not Thursday. Wednesday. Game two was on Netflix, from Melbourne, Australia.

That tells you most of what you need to know about this league in 2026. The NFL no longer fits the schedule. The schedule fits the NFL.

Last season the league averaged 18.7 million viewers a game. That is the most since 1989. 

Here is the part nobody says out loud. Winning is what makes the NFL dangerous to own. Networks now pay $9B a year for the rights. They sell about $6B of advertising inside the games. Fox has to credit almost ⅔ of its retransmission revenue to the NFL to break even.

Let's break it down into 5 big questions:
1) How many people watch NFL games?
2) Which networks are winning?
3) How important is NFL football to the TV networks?
4) How much does the NFL cost TV networks today?
5) Is the NFL a good bargain for networks?

Previous NFL previews: 2025 | 2024 | 2023 | 2022 | 2021

How many people watch NFL games?

Quick answer: 18.7M per game. The most since 1989.

NFL average regular-season viewership (Nielsen):
1) 2010 - 17.9M
2) 2015 - 18.1M (↑ 1%)
3) 2020 - 15.6M (↓ 14%)
4) 2025 - 18.7M (↑ 20%)

The league bottomed out in 2017 at 15M. It has climbed 25% since. The record is 19M, set in 1989. The NFL is now 300K away.

Why this matters: The NFL is the only traditional TV content that grew while cord-cutting gutted the pay-TV base.

Change between 2018-25:
1) Pay-TV subscribers - ↓ 33%
2) NFL regular season viewership - ↑ 18%

Beast mode: The distribution system lost a third of its customers. The product, on top of that, added a fifth of its audience. Nothing else on television did both.

Which networks are winning?

NFL average regular season viewership by network:
1) Netflix - 23.7M
2) NBC - 23.5M
3) CBS - 21.3M
4) Fox - 19.6M
5) Average - 18.7M
6) ESPN/ABC - 16.5M
7) Amazon - 15.3M

Why this matters: A streaming-only package now delivers 93% of what Monday Night Football delivers on broadcast. Five years ago, that idea got people laughed out of the room.

How important is NFL football to the TV networks?

Quick answer: It is not important. It is load-bearing.

NFL share of linear TV time:
1) 2004 - 2.8%
2) 2014 - 3.6%
3) 2024 - 6.6%

One in every 15 hours of linear TV watched in the fourth quarter is now an NFL game. In 2002, it was one in 33.

NFL share of top 100 TV telecasts (Nielsen):
1) 2018 - 61%
2) 2019-  73%
3) 2020 - 72%
4) 2021 - 75%
5) 2022 - 82%
6) 2023 - 93%
7) 2024 - 72%
8) 2025 - 83%

The two dips are 2020 and 2024. Both are presidential election years. Strip those out, and the line only goes up.

Sports account for 20% of all convergent TV advertising. The NFL is 47% of that, which works out to 9% of every TV ad dollar.

Director’s note: Guideline has a lower estimate for NFL ad revenue than eMarketer. It goes back to 2022, so I am using it for the next few comparisons.

NFL ad revenue (Guideline):
1) 2022 - $4.4B
2) 2023 - $5.0B (↑ 14%)
3) 2024 - $5.5B (↑ 10%)
4) 2025 - $5.9B (↑ 7%)
5) 2026P - $6.3B (↑ 7%)

Change between 2022-26:
1) Convergent TV advertising - ↑ 1%
2) NFL TV advertising - ↑ 42%

CAGR between 2022-26:
1) Convergent TV advertising - ↑ 0.2%
2) NFL TV advertising - ↑ 9.2%

Why this matters: Since 2022, the NFL has grown its share of convergent TV advertising by 42%. The rest of the market did not grow at all. The league is not taking a bigger slice of a bigger pie. It is taking a bigger slice of the same pie.

How much does the NFL cost TV networks today?

Quick answer: $9.2B

NFL media rights by network (Kagan):
1) ESPN - $2.8B
2) Fox - $1.8B
3) NBC - $1.7B
4) CBS - $1.7B
5) Amazon - $1.0B
6) Netflix - $150M
7) Total - $9.2B

The average game window costs media companies $81M.

Director’s note: I updated these numbers from a previous version to reflect the actual per-year cost rather than an average over the length of the deal.

Cost per unique game window:
1) ESPN/ABC - $140M
2) NBC - $92M
3) Average - $81M
4) Netflix - $75M
5) Fox - $63M
6) CBS - $62M
7) Amazon - $60M

Why this matters: Look back at question two. Amazon pays $60M a window and delivers 15.3M viewers. ESPN pays $140M and delivers 16.5M. ESPN pays more than twice as much for 8% more audience.

That sets up the last question.

Is the NFL a good bargain for networks?

Quick answer: Not on advertising alone.

Cost per unique viewer per game:
1) CBS - $2.91
2) Netflix - $3.10
3) Fox - $3.20
4) Amazon - $3.89
5) NBC - $3.91
6) Average - $4.12
7) ESPN/ABC - $8.48

CBS reaches an NFL viewer for $2.91. ESPN pays $8.48 for the same viewer, 106% above the league average. That is a 2.9X spread inside one sport.

Now put cost and revenue side by side. Networks pay $9B in rights. They sell about $6B in advertising inside the games. The gap is roughly $3B a year, and it is not an accident. It is the deal.

For this example, we will use Fox as our proxy.

Quick math on Fox ROI in 2026 from the NFL deal:
1) $1.8B in media rights
2) $1.3B in projected NFL ad revenue
3) $500M loss before retransmission revenue
4) $817M in projected retransmission revenue

Bottom line: The deal works only if Fox believes 61% ($500M) of its retransmission revenue can be assigned to the NFL.

Why this matters: The NFL is raising rights fees faster than networks can grow revenue. At some point, these deals go upside down.

“What else could be going on here? I think part of it is your right is that the networks are quickly getting into a place where they're like, we don't really have any other content that people want to watch, We kinda need this no matter what. And that advantage is the NFL and the negotiation where they come in and they say, look, I know you used to be super profitable on buying these rights from us, and then your business on the back end  was selling all these advertisements against it." — Ben Gilbert - Co-Host @ Acquired Podcast

We think you should just compete against each other until your margins are zero, and we're going to accrue all the profit pool now, because there's basically nothing else that you'll put on that people want to watch.”

Reminder: ESPN is the canary in the coal mine for a business built on revenue growth that is being outpaced by media rights increases.

Flashback: Streaming Is ESPN’s Prince Charming

What happens next

The NFL has an out after the 2029 season with every partner except Disney.

By then, three things will be true that are not quite true today. Streaming will reach more homes than broadcast. Netflix, Amazon and YouTube will carry deeper balance sheets than any network. And the NFL will own a piece of ESPN, which it took in February in exchange for NFL Network.

The league will sit on both sides of its own negotiation.

Gilbert's version is not a prediction. It describes the last round.

The bottom line: The NFL is not expensive because it is popular. It is expensive because it is the only one left. Scarcity is the product, and scarcity gets more expensive every year.

In 2029, the networks find out how much more.

Why Subscribe

Because networks pay $9.2 billion a year for NFL rights while pulling in only $6 billion in ad revenue — and the $3 billion deficit funded by retransmission fees is where live sports margins go to die.

Every week, State of the Screens tracks how documented audience behavior becomes enterprise value: the contracts, the balance sheets built on them, and the layer underneath that finance has not learned to read. If you allocate capital, this is where attention-backed credit shows its shape before the first deal prints. If you operate in media, this is where the difference between the visit and the habit gets priced before your next negotiation. If you build audiences, this is the market learning what the relationship you hold is actually worth.