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Here's a riddle: Some of the most valuable programming in TV has been for sale for years. How come no one has bought it?
Spoiler: I have a theory, but not an answer.
But we can at least tease it out: The NFL — the league that creates the most popular programming on television, hands-down — owns the NFL Network — a 24-7 TV channel dedicated to its own product.
The NFL has also been trying to sell the NFL network for several years. It formally hung a for-sale sign on the property in 2021, when it hired Goldman Sachs to shop around a stake in the company.
The NFL Network, which has been around for a couple of decades, is a mish-mash of NFL-related content. It has round-the-clock coverage of the league — primarily highlights and analysis, though it does have the exclusive rights to at least seven games a year, including this weekend's matchup between the Minnesota Vikings and the New York Jets. And while the NFL season starts in September and ends in February, the NFL Network plays all year long: its coverage of the NFL draft, for instance, draws millions of viewers every spring.
So you'd think that someone out there in media land — a conventional TV programmer, or a conventional TV distributor, or a digital newcomer — would be interested.
Nope! Or, more accurately, not yet.
At one point the NFL was hoping to tie the sale of the NFL Network to Sunday Ticket, its popular all-the-games-you-can-watch subscription service. But Google's YouTube ended up buying Sunday Ticket rights — for some $2 billion a year — and passing on the other stuff.
More recently, reports have suggested Disney's ESPN would do a deal with the NFL that would include the NFL Network, but that hasn't materialized, either. Now Bloomberg reports that the league is talking to Larry and David Ellison's Skydance, which is about to buy Paramount, which already has a deal to show NFL games.
Reps for the NFL and Skydance declined to comment.
Again, it's impossible to overstate the importance of the NFL to TV programmers: the ones who have it will pay just about anything to keep it, and the ones who don't have it will pay a lot to land it. Amazon, for instance, is paying $1 billion a year to show a single NFL game a week.
And while the NFL Network generally doesn't have the most in-demand games — that Vikings/Jets game, for instance, is being played in London, which means it will start at 6:30 a.m. this Sunday on the West Coast — even a mediocre matchup draws many millions of eyeballs. Plus a grab bag of other stuff. Surely someone is going to bite, no?
The only logical answer, then, is that the NFL — a co-operative jointly owned by the league's 32 team owners — is simply asking too much.
Which, if true, is sort of stunning: Every other NFL rights package is now sewn up for years to come, and the NFL is the only thing on TV that isn't losing viewers. If you can't find a buyer for that, you're doing it wrong.
