The NFL announced weeks ago the Philadelphia Eagles’ Friday night opener to the 2024 season wouldn’t just compete with local high school games, but also be stashed behind a paywall on NBC’s Peacock streaming service. On Wednesday, the league told us who they’d be playing: the Green Bay Packers.
Just because we knew it was coming doesn’t mean we have to like it.
Make no mistake, this is a power move on multiple fronts. It’s an attempt to break into a new market with two of the game’s most popular teams. The Packers enjoy recogition that spans beyond the borders of Wisconsin, a historically great franchise that has spurred bars across the globe to don green and yellow for Sunday broadcasts akin to the Pittsburgh Steelers or Dallas Cowboys. The Eagles have a recent Super Bowl win under their belts, another appearance and hail from one of America’s greatest and most memeable cities.
More than that, both teams have legitimate Super Bowl hopes. That’s great news for fans in Sao Paolo. They are being given prime rib dinners after the NFL maintained its International Series with the equivalent of cat food by dropping the mid-2010s Jacksonville Jaguars into Wembley Stadium year after year. They get to see whether Jordan Love’s rise or the Eagles’ late season slide were legit.
It’s terrible news for fans elsewhere. Playing overseas helps the NFL avoid the antitrust issues of competing against local broadcasts of high school games, which won’t affect a ton of folks but will be a problem for some of the game’s most passionate fans. Locking this game, one of 2024’s best matchups on paper, behind a streaming paywall, stinks.
Moving one of Week 1’s biggest games is the NFL’s latest experiment to prove a hypothesis that the limit to how much football its loyalists will watch does not exist. This season will test the boundaries of a sport that was once relegated to Sundays and a single game on Monday. September brings Friday night football. December will mean Wednesday afternoon games as the league tries to wrest Christmas from the NBA. And if this year’s Peacock experiment works out, it’ll mean a rising tide of subscription-only games for a league thoroughly skilled at wringing every possible cent from its fans.
It will work. Amazon Prime’s Thursday Night Football games have been a legitimizing force for the platform, combining often lackluster matchups with innovative broadcast ideas. Peacock has had the easier road, but its laggy, occasionally blurry camera work at last year’s frozen open Wild Card game between the Kansas City Chiefs and Miami Dolphins was the most streamed live event in the history of the internet.
The NFL will continue to expand its profit centers until they stop being profitable. That’s meant chipping away at the fan experience, whether by jacking up the price of Red Zone in a move to YouTubeTV or partnering with the cardboard-and-thread quality of Fanatics apparel or, perhaps one day, making Monday Night Football and the AFC title game exclusive to Apple TV+.
If you want to watch the season opener between two of the NFL’s most popular teams, you’ll have to pay for a Peacock subscription. If enough people pay for a Peacock subscription (again), the league will bake this feature into a sales point worth hundreds of millions of dollars during the next round of media rights negotiations. And on and on it will go, this thing of the NFL’s.
Because, at its core, the NFL is a league that laughs when a butcher, presented with a pig, wastes the squeal.