In what would be Netflix‘s first move into big-league sports streaming, the company is reportedly poised to win the rights to two NFL games on Christmas Day 2024.
Netflix will be the “likely winner” of media rights to the pair of NFL games scheduled for Dec. 25 for the upcoming football season, Puck’s John Ourand reported, citing anonymous sources. The report added the caveat that no deal has been signed yet and Netflix and the NFL “still have to clear some hurdles before any deal is announced.”
The NFL declined to comment. Reps for Netflix didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Per the Puck report, the NFL delayed the release of its 2024-25 schedule until May 15, and one of the main reasons is that the league has been “in the middle of a high-stakes negotiation with Netflix over its planned Christmas Day games.”
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Netflix execs have repeatedly said the streamer isn’t interested in shelling out big bucks for massive sports-rights deals — while it also has been steadily upping its lineup of live sports content as well as sports-adjacent programming.
In its biggest deal to date in this area, Netflix is set to become the exclusive home of WWE’s “Monday Night Raw”beginning in 2025, under a deal valued at $500 million per year for 10 years. In January, co-CEO Ted Sarandos said on Netflix’s earnings call about the WWE deal, “I would not look at this as a signal to any other change, or a change to our sports strategy,” calling the WWE programming “sports entertainment” rather than sports in the conventional sense.
Last month, Sarandos reiterated comments he’s made before about Netflix’s approach to sports rights. The company “is not anti-sports, but pro-profitable growth,” he said on the Q1 2024 earnings call. “And I think that’s the core of everything we do in all kinds of programming, including sports. So, our North Star is to grow engagement, revenue and profit.”
Among other live sports content, Netflix has a deal to livestream a boxing match between Jake Pauland former heavyweight championMike Tyson in July 2024. It also recently carried “The Netflix Slam,” a tennis matchup in Las Vegas between Rafael Nadal and Carlos Alcaraz, and a golf event, “The Netflix Cup.”
