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The NFL isn’t your friend, and their rejection of a Sunday Ticket plan shows it.
The NFL continues to have no idea how fans want to consume its games. This week the standalone Sunday Ticket app hit the App Store at the ludicrous price of $679.99, the version on YouTube is $585.96, and neither contains NFL Red Zone, which is a further premium charge on top of it.
It’s getting more and more expensive for the bulks of a service that the vast majority of football fans don’t want or need. There are very few people who want access to every NFL game, with most fans simply accepting that Sunday Ticket is a brutal yearly payment to ensure they can see their favorite out-of-market team play each week.
The discussion of Sunday Ticket’s value proposition is especially bleak this week with reports ESPN had pitched the NFL on the single best idea for viewing ever, and it was promptly rejected. Their idea wasn’t just dropping the price of Sunday ticket to $70 in order to get as many consumers as possible, but to add an even lower-priced option to watch every out of market game for a single team.
This would have been a godsend for consumers. Sure, there are some people who would still want access to every game (like maniacal sportswriters like us who need to track everything), but the vast majority of people have moved outside of their home state or simply follow a team outside of their local broadcast area and want to watch them.
The core issue is that the NFL wants to keep Sunday Ticket as a premium option. It doesn’t want as many people to have the service as possible, and would sooner have 10 million subscribers at $600 than 100 million subscribers at $70. The biggest sport in the country is happy to flex its FOMO muscle at a time where prices are affecting every part of people’s monthly spending.
Patriots owner Robert Kraft essentially said as much:
First, Apple’s bid for Sunday Ticket suggested it could add 15 to 20 million new customers. Patriots owner Robert Kraft reportedly said in deposition testimony that was played for the jury last Friday: “We’re not looking to get lots of people. We want to keep it as a premium offering.”
To compare, NBA League Pass is $99 for a full season, providing the opportunity to watch 40 out-of-market games a week, over the course of a far longer season. Meanwhile Sunday Ticket only offers 12 total games a week after you strip out Thursday Night Football, Sunday Night Football, Monday Night Football and the local blackout game, all of which aren’t part of the service.
Considering the NFL loves to say it’s in touch with what it fans want, either they’re woefully out of touch with what football fans are looking for or lying. There simply isn’t a middle ground. Even the most die-hard football fan has no desire to watch all 16 games a week in totality, and the fact the NFL wants to charge a premium for Red Zone shows they want to make it even more of a barrier for normal and casual fans to enjoy the game.
In the end they don’t care. The NFL is perfectly happy to sit back and force fans to pony up damn-near $600 a year or more, and if they’re not willing then tough luck. We’re left wondering what could have been if the ESPN plan had happened, and how amazing it could have been.
