With the fall football season only two months away, a major regulatory battle with far-reaching implications for the future of high-profile sports and the National Football League on TV is already well underway.
In what could be considered either a regulatory Hail Mary or a politically savvy power play to strengthen their negotiating position in upcoming NFL talks, broadcasters are pushing for legislative and regulatory changes that aim to reverse the ongoing shift of NFL rights from broadcast to streaming platforms.
“Games from the four major professional leagues are now spread across Amazon Prime [Video], Netflix, YouTube TV and Apple TV,” National Association of Broadcasters President and CEO Curtis LeGeyt told a House subcommittee in June. “Fans increasingly need multiple paid subscriptions to watch their favorite teams, and survey after survey shows fans are confused and frustrated. Some estimates suggest that accessing every NFL game over the course of a season would cost a consumer well over $1,000.”
Last Rallying Cry
How Congress or regulators might change current rules to address those complaints or how well any of the proposed changes might weather court challenges remains open to question. But there is little doubt that a powerful coalition of politicians, regulators and people who rarely agree on anything—President Donald Trump, Congressional Democrats and Republicans, the Federal Communications Commission, the Justice Department and long-suffering fans—are upset with the current system.
With the president and members of Congress openly criticizing the NFL, the FCC’s Media Bureau launched a public inquiry in March seeking public comments on how the changing broadcast and sports-rights landscape is impacting consumers. The DOJ followed in April with an antitrust probe of the league.
In a March interview on Fox News Channel, FCC Chair Brendan Carr said the experience of watching sports “has become frustrating over the last several years…It’s more complex; it’s more costly.”
“We’re all for sports leagues getting fair-market value for their product, but right now, they’re benefiting from a very unique antitrust exemption to pool their bargaining together,” he added. “[W]e’re at a tipping point where these leagues can push it so far [in] putting games behind paywalls that they undermine their ability to claim that antitrust exemption.”
The NFL has so far been keeping a low profile on the controversy. Commissioner Roger Goodell declined to appear in June beside LeGeyt and other witnesses testifying before the House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Administrative State, Regulatory Reform and Antitrust, which is probing the issue.
In a private meeting with FCC staffers in April, NFL executives argued that “100% of NFL games have aired on broadcast television in the home markets of the competing teams” and that their contracts with ABC, CBS, Fox and NBC account for “more than 87% of all NFL games, a number that has varied little in the past two decades,” according to a letter describing the meeting.
In that letter, the NFL also insisted that ending antitrust exemption would mean “higher costs and confusion,” calling its current media distribution policy “good for our fans” and “for local broadcasters.”
Monopoly Money
While much of the consumer debate revolves around the larger issue of sports rights shifting to streaming TV platforms, many of the policy issues and recommendations stem from the 1961 Sports Broadcasting Act. One of its key provisions gave the NFL,
Major League Baseball, the National Basketball Association and the National Hockey League an antitrust exemption when negotiating broadcast rights. That exemption allows the leagues to negotiate deals on behalf of individual teams.
Such exemptions were not unprecedented. Nearly 40 years earlier, a 1922 Supreme Court decision gave MLB an antitrust exemption, and there is little doubt that the NFL’s ability to negotiate deals simplified the process of acquiring broadcast rights, which helped the sport and the networks. In 2025, 89 of the top 100 TV programs in the U.S. were NFL games, according to Nielsen.
Critics, however, argue that much has changed since the SBA was passed. In 1960, TV ad revenue (all of which went to broadcasters) totaled only $1.6 billion; this year, linear TV advertising for broadcast and cable is expected to hit $48 billion, a 2,900% increase, and connected TV ad revenues—which primarily go to streaming platforms—will total another $36.9 billion, according to ad agency Media Architects.
Data on the sports business of the late 1950s and early 1960s isn’t very reliable and estimates can vary widely, but the average NFL salary in 1960 was probably $12,000 to $15,000, and total NFL revenues were believed to be around $1 million, mostly from ticket sales. The league’s first post-SBA network deal with CBS in 1962 produced a massive increase in revenue but brought in only about $4.65 million a year, according to the Associated Press. That is a tiny fraction of the $111 billion in revenue produced by the NFL’s current TV contracts, which run through 2033.
Legislative Action Required
With the NFL pushing to extract many more billions from media outlets by renegotiating its current long-term deals, the league’s wealth has attracted increased political scrutiny. In the June House hearings examining potential changes to the SBA, Republicans and Democrats were united in their concerns about the NFL’s distribution strategy that has shifted more games to streaming.
During the hearing, FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez expressed serious concerns about how the NFL has sold its media rights and handled its distribution strategy. “The economics of how fans actually watch have shifted in ways that deserve serious attention,” she said, praising the FCC’s decision to probe broadcast sports rights. “For a family trying to follow their team through a full season, the cost of piecing together access across multiple platforms adds up quickly.”
But Gomez, a Democrat, also cautioned the FCC has limited authority to change the current system. “The commission can gather information, raise concerns and call out fouls where it sees them, but any meaningful update to the Sports Broadcasting Act will ultimately require legislative action,” she said.
For its part, the NAB doesn’t want to abolish the antitrust exemptions in the SBA, given the confusion and difficulties that would result in having to negotiate separate deals with all the teams.
“NAB is not asking to eliminate the Sports Broadcasting Act,” LeGeyt told Congress in June. “But this Committee should reaffirm that the SBA applies only to league-wide negotiations with media companies that will distribute games through broadcast television, not lock games behind streaming paywalls.”
How that could work in terms of the media business or the legal system isn’t clear. The major media companies that own the Big Four broadcast networks and ESPN—The Walt Disney Co., Comcast, Fox Corp. and Paramount Global—don’t just have the biggest NFL deals; they also have large streaming subscription services that have bought exclusive rights to stream NFL games in recent years. If approved, Fox’s proposed $22 billion acquisition of Roku in June would allow it to move even more games to streaming.
Nor is it clear how the courts will react to legislation that favors one medium (broadcast) or another (streaming). And if the antitrust exemption is changed, the alternative of having teams negotiating deals rather than leagues could easily fragment rights and cause more confusion than the current system.
Either way, as the NFL pushes to renegotiate its current contracts, expect this regulatory battle to last well into 2027 and beyond.
