The NFL’s TV partners have faced plenty of second-guessing about how they cover a league their business relies on so heavily — the media world’s reigning ratings titan by a country mile. Yet formalizing the marriage between pro football and ESPN raises questions about how fairly the network can document pro football’s failings now that they’re officially on the same team.
After protracted negotiations, the NFL and Disney-owned ESPN finally reached an agreement announced late Tuesday exchanging the league’s media holdings — including NFL Network and its RedZone service — for the NFL gaining a 10% stake in ESPN. Aside from securing its bond with the league, ESPN receives additional benefits, including rights to televise more games, as it prepares to launch a new streaming service.
The deal “combines America’s most popular sporting league and the world’s most innovative sports media leader,” the NFL said.
“Today’s announcement paves the way for the world’s leading sports media brand and America’s most popular sport to deliver an even more compelling experience for NFL fans, in a way that only ESPN and Disney can,” Disney CEO Bob Iger said in the same joint statement.
As logical as the arrangement might be from a business standpoint, it raises significant issues about the “news” part of ESPN’s acronym: Specifically, what can ESPN say about the NFL in terms of warts-and-all reporting? That relationship already has a tumultuous history, one that suggests the journalistic aspects of their union will be even more complicated than the financial terms.
As a multi-billion-dollar enterprise, the NFL has been very good at protecting its image, and almost equally skilled at wringing massive rights commitments from TV networks and now streaming services eager to tap into its unequaled audience reach. Combined, those entities pay the league more than $10 billion annually.
The networks on that list — ABC/ESPN, CBS, NBC and Fox — also operate news divisions, which makes the blurring of the lines between the NFL and the principal sports network an especially thorny endeavor, historically punctuated by pragmatic compromises that at times have bordered on capitulation.
NFL to Buy 10% Stake in ESPN
Ultimately, it all comes down to control. Networks have grappled for years with the perception they are leery of irking the NFL, perhaps never more so than in 2013, when the league reached a $765-million settlement with thousands of former players over the longterm effects of concussions.
As someone (OK, me) wrote at the time: “What’s a fair price to allow millions of fans to watch pro and college football without dwelling on the irrevocable harm it might be doing to the participants? Try $765 million.”
That year, ESPN produced and then withdrew from a collaboration with PBS’ “Frontline” on “League of Denial: The NFL’s Concussion Crisis,” a powerful documentary. Among other things, the film compared the NFL to Big Tobacco in the 1960s seeking to obscure the carcinogenic effects of cigarettes.
In a striking retreat, ESPN pulled its name and logo despite the fact the network’s reporters were prominently featured in the project, prompting speculation that the network was bowing to pressure from the NFL.
In 2018, ESPN did air “Seau,” a look at the life of star linebacker Junior Seau, who committed suicide in 2012 at the age of 43. After spiraling downward near the end of his life, Seau hoped to preserve his brain for future examination about the effects of CTE, or chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a degenerative disease found in many former NFL players. (His family reached a settlement with the league shortly after the “30 for 30” production aired.)
ESPN hasn’t been the only network to balk at reporting that might endanger its NFL ties. Also in 2018, NBC dropped Bob Costas from its Super Bowl team after the veteran broadcaster spoke out forcefully regarding the concussion issue, telling a crowd at the University of Maryland, “The reality is that this game destroys people’s brains – not everyone’s, but a substantial number.”
Addressing why NBC sidelined him on the day of TV’s biggest showcase, Costas told ESPN in a 2019 interview, “I recall the phrase, ‘It’s a six-hour, daylong celebration of football, and you’re not the right person to celebrate football.’ To which my response was not, ‘Oh please, please, change your mind.’ My response was, ‘Yeah, I guess you’re right.’”
Costas also bluntly summed up what he saw as NBC’s motivation — namely, that TV executives cross the league at their peril. “The NFL isn’t just the most important sports property, it’s the single-most important property in all of American television,” he said. “And it isn’t even close.”
Underscoring that point, the NFL accounted for 45 of the 100 most-watched telecasts in calendar-year 2024, based on a list compiled by Variety. (Other sports, including the Olympics, claimed 30 of the remaining slots.)
Controversies remain. In the decade since the concussion settlement was finally approved (having grown to $1 billion by that time), questions have arisen regarding how the NFL is allotting those funds. Last year, the Washington Post reported allegations the league had undermined the landmark case — after saying players and their families would receive “prompt and substantial benefits” — through “loopholes, aggressive reviews and a failed doctors network” to avoid handing out payments.
The effects of CTE haven’t been the only issue. Broadcasters have also had to deal with other uncomfortable stories regarding the NFL, such as Baltimore Ravens star Ray Rice, who was accused of domestic abuse in 2014, evoking debate over whether the league had sought to sweep the matter under the rug and NFL commissioner Roger Goodell’s role in that reaction.
In terms of parallels, the NFL’s investment in ESPN mirrors the relationship with team-controlled regional sports networks that carry games locally, channels where discouraging words are seldom heard regarding the home team.
Granted, the conversation usually doesn’t dig much deeper than wins and losses, but those local broadcasters don’t often seriously second-guess trades and other front-office maneuvers, much less delve into off-field crimes or whether playing the game is potentially crippling those putting their bodies on the line.
The concussion issue also might have quieted, but it certainly hasn’t gone away. Last year, there was much discussion surrounding Miami Dolphins quarterback Tua Tagovailoa, who spent several weeks on injured reserve after experiencing a third concussion, causing some to ask whether he should ever play again.
The bottom line — and with the NFL, almost everything boils down to that — is the league doesn’t want to let anything interfere with people enjoying its product, and ESPN now has even less incentive, not that much was needed, to say anything that would distract from the action on the field.
Nor is the line-blurring deal unique. Just last month, Fox Corp. acquired a one-third stake in racing enterprise Penske Entertainment, securing its IndyCar rights, in a deal the Wall Street Journal valued at $125 million or more.
Financially speaking, the ESPN-NFL hookup makes perfect sense. ESPN cements its ties to the biggest attraction in sports in advance of future rights negotiations, and the NFL further diversifies its revenue stream while aligning itself with a savvy media partner to shepherd those holdings.
Yet now that ESPN and the NFL are truly in bed together, can viewers trust the network to report negative stories about the league accurately and fairly? As veteran sportswriter John Cazano noted in a Substack post after news broke of the pending announcement, “The league was already in a deep partnership with the network, but now the league would have ownership of the entity that aims to cover it? Anyone else wondering how that might manifest itself?”
How indeed. ESPN might be gaining stewardship of RedZone, but the answer to those questions, at best, appears to be a gray area.
