Lachlan Murdoch: “There Is No Tension, Really, With the NFL”
As Fox Corp unveiled its latest earnings report shortly before hosting its New York upfront bash for advertisers, the Lachlan Murdoch-led media empire signaled how dependent it is on the NFL to boost the fortunes of its news and entertainment portfolio.
In its latest quarter, the company saw advertising revenue decline to $1.56 billion from $2.04 billion in the comparable quarter last year when it hosted Super Bowl LIX (the Big Game was televised by NBC this year).
The eldest son of Rupert Murdoch found himself being asked by Wall Street analysts about his father’s purported pressure campaign against the NFL and his appeal to the White House on the topic of ever-richer rights deals. Lachlan may have been less likely to swat down the speculation given that it was Rupert’s own paper, The Wall Street Journal, that took a broad, front-page look at the influence campaign over the weekend.
“There is no tension, really, with the NFL,” Lachlan replied on an earnings call. “We were partners for 30 years, we were looking forward to being partners for the next 30 years. And, as we’ve noted before, we have four years left on our current deal. We’ve read the speculation that the NFL would like to renegotiate and extend the current deals that are in the marketplace, but we’ve had no substantive discussions with the NFL about that. So it’s hard apart from what we’ve read and in the press around speculation around that.”
Murdoch added, “Having said that, we’d like to sort of broaden and deepen our relationship with the NFL, but we’ll only do so in a disciplined way.”
To that point, Fox said on Monday that it acquired the rights to two more games, including one that will be played in Munich, Germany next season. The company inked an 11-year media rights deal in 2023 for Fox Sports but that deal is subject to the league’s one-time termination right after the 2029 season.
Since the $71.3 billion sale of most of 21st Century Fox assets to Disney in 2019, the newly built Fox Corp has bet its business on sports (the NFL, as well as MLB, FIFA, NASCAR and college football and basketball) serving as a powerful lead-in for its entertainment programming (like, say, 17 unscripted shows it just renewed and its Baywatch reboot).
The juggernaut Fox News and its loyal fan base serves as the other pillar of the company while the ad-supported, free streaming platform Tubi (and its nearly 100 million monthly active users) is an emerging asset, as is its bundled subscription service Fox One (where over half of the viewership is for news). But Fox is much smaller than, say, Amazon, Netflix and YouTube, which are all eyeing ways to get more NFL games, too, driving up the price for the rights.
More chess moves are quietly (for now) playing out in the background as the Federal Communications Commission opened a review of the sports broadcasting landscape earlier this year and Trump’s Department of Justice is reportedly, per the Journal, looking in to whether the NFL is engaging in anticompetitive practices. In April, an NFL rep replied to the federal inquiries by retorting: “The NFL’s media distribution model is the most fan and broadcaster-friendly in the entire sports and entertainment industry.”
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