June 19, 2026, 3:00 PM EDT
Are you ready for some football? Sure hope so! ’Cause that may be virtually the only thing left on television after the NFL negotiates rich new media rights deals ahead of the season.
The cost of live sports rights is ballooning — and draining the budgets of media companies for other kinds of programming, from their late-night shows and scripted dramas to comedies and reality shows.
At the forefront is the NFL, which is trying to strike new deals with studios and streamers years ahead of their expirations, in a sign of the outsize value of America’s most-watched sport in a rapidly changing media landscape.
As more and more money migrates to live sports, shows that feel like creative gambles, because either the subject matter is original or the talent involved is lesser-known, are getting harder to make.
“The leagues know that they’ve got these media companies over a barrel,” said Michael Beach, CEO of Cross Screen Media, a marketing analytics company. “Because if they took the NFL away or the NBA away, the companies would have no mass-reach event to talk about. The idea is that if you lose this one big thing, everything else will fall apart.”
For people trying to sell the “everything else,” it’s becoming increasingly apparent how little money media companies have left to spend.
“The sports money has to come from somewhere,” one agency source said to me recently, speaking anonymously to talk freely. “Is there going to be a point where there’s no money left for original programming? There’s a real trickle-down effect.”
It’s easy to understand why sports have become so valuable to media companies: Last year, live sports events were 96 of the 100 most-watched telecasts, and sports are among the last remaining cultural events that attract the mass audiences that advertisers covet.
Just take a look at the breadth and intensity of live sports events from this past week: The most-watched NBA Finals in 28 years and the most-watched Stanley Cup Final in seven years both aired on ABC, a bombastic and historic UFC event at the White House streamed on Paramount+, and the globally engaging World Cup games are airing in the U.S. via Fox Sports for English-language broadcasts and NBCUniversal for Spanish-language coverage. (NBCUniversal is the parent company of NBC News.)
In addition to their appeal for advertisers, live sports are major drivers of streaming service subscriptions.
According to the market intelligence firm Sensor Media, downloads of Paramount+ ahead of Sunday’s UFC Freedom 250 event nearly quadrupled from the app’s previous 30-day average. Downloads of the Fox Sports app were up 181% from the first day of the World Cup compared with the day before. And downloads of NBCUniversal’s Peacock platform, which streams the World Cup games in Spanish, increased 35% during that time frame.
It’s clear that sports leagues know their rising value: In 2024, the NBA signed $77 billion in 11-year streaming and TV deals with NBC, ESPN and Amazon. In 2025, UFC owner TKO signed a seven-year, $7.7 billion media rights agreement with Paramount.
After those deals closed, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell said he believes his league’s media rights are now undervalued.
“We’ve all seen the media landscape is changing dramatically,” Goodell said at a news conference before the Super Bowl in February. “New platforms that didn’t exist five years ago — 10 years ago, for sure — exist. That’s where our fans are in many cases, particularly the younger demographics.”
NFL rights cost about $10 billion a year today, divided across multiple networks and streamers and representing about 8% of media companies’ total content spends, according to Beach’s analysis. He estimates the NFL will get that number up to $16 billion a year by 2028. That money, industry sources say, will come from scripted TV and film.
Some media companies have begun to tell dealmakers they’re not going to close other sports deals until they know just how much of their budgets the new NFL rights will require, multiple industry sources told me.
“This next round of NFL rights coming up is so impactful,” said Ryan Hayden, partner and co-head of both the news media and sports media departments at United Talent Agency. “It’s not just a sports rights issue; it’s an all-content issue. What happens with the NFL is going to determine what money is left over for everything else.”
The number of original series on networks and streaming services (excluding live sports and news programming) has already shrunk by a third since 2022, according to Luminate, as media companies have retreated from the Peak TV-era volume driven by the streaming wars.
And as companies buy fewer shows, increasingly the ones that do sell are based on pre-existing intellectual properties or from A-list producers like “Yellowstone” creator Taylor Sheridan or “Grey’s Anatomy” and “Bridgerton” creator Shonda Rhimes.
“When you can buy fewer and fewer projects, the goal is to make every project as broadly consumable as possible,” the agency source said. “To sell right now, shows have to be big, loud and buzzy.”
The math has gotten so skewed toward sports that, if you’re a person with subscriptions to several streaming services who doesn’t watch sports, “without a doubt you are subsidizing sports fan viewership,” said Brandon Katz, director of insights and content strategy at Greenlight Analytics, a data-tracking firm focused on the entertainment industry. “Because the rising cost of sports broadcast rights has directly led to rising streaming subscription costs.”
It’s the streaming-era equivalent of how some non-sports watchers felt about their cable bundles several years ago — that they were paying a premium each month for channels like ESPN and games they don’t watch.
Looking ahead, entertainment industry sources said they only see the trend accelerating and eventually expanding to include other sports with growth potential, including women’s sports, college sports and sports with international followings that want to reach a U.S. market.
One small silver lining for people who make actual TV shows is that sports teams and leagues do occasionally fuel programs besides their live games, from AppleTV’s soccer comedy “Ted Lasso” and HBO’s nostalgic Lakers program “Winning Time” to Netflix’s cheerleading docuseries “America’s Sweethearts: Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders” and A24 and HBO’s just-announced Knicks documentary directed by Ben Stiller.
“America’s Sweethearts,” which just dropped its third season, emerged from the Dallas Cowboys’ wanting to extend their brand to reach new audiences outside the Cowboys fan base. For many in Hollywood right now, football has become an existential issue. But “America’s Sweethearts” executive producer Greg Whiteley said he often hears from fans of his show who don’t even watch NFL games.
“For us,” Whiteley said, “the football is completely incidental.”