YouTube, NFL move toward deal for five 2026 games
League plans to take a package of standalone games to streaming, despite ongoing antitrust scrutiny.
Antitrust, shmantitrust. Over the weekend, we reported that the candidates for a five-game 2026 package of standalone games included Netflix, YouTube, and Fox . The apparent winner is YouTube.
Ryan Glasspiegel of Front Office Sports reports that YouTube and the NFL have " entered a long-form contract review " for the slate of games. This means they've reached a consensus as to the major terms, and that they're hammering out the precise language of the contract. The NFL had sent out an RFP that allowed the bidders to select five games from a broader menu of possibilities.
It's not yet known which games YouTube will get. The options were believed to include the Week 1 49ers-Rams game in Australia, a Thanksgiving eve game (which is not official but apparently inevitable), a second Black Friday game, and a Christmas Eve game. The move comes at a time when the NFL is under increased scrutiny on the question of whether its broadcast antitrust exemption allows the league to sell games to streaming companies.
If the games will be available for free on YouTube (as the Week 1 Chiefs-Chargers game from Brazil was), that will take a little steam out of the issue. Still, the Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961 arguably applies only to league-wide rights sales to three-letter, FCC-regulated broadcast networks. The decision to take games that could have been broadcast on Fox and put them on YouTube won't take any steam out of the current assault.