President Trump decries rising cost of streaming the NFL
President Trump decries rising cost of streaming the NFL
In a recent interview, the president said viewers are being asked to pay ‘$1,000 per game’ to watch the league.
The NFL’s move to streaming platforms has been a deliberate one, but even at its conservative pace, the shift has drawn some powerful detractors. It was to be expected that current TV partners of the league, like Fox, would be against the shift of games to streamers, but political figures on both sides of the aisle have recently begun to take an interest in the proceedings as well. President Trump is the latest official to weigh in on the issue, bemoaning the rising costs of streaming NFL games.
Key Details:
- Do the math: President Trump complained that viewers are being asked to pay $1,000 per NFL game.
- More streaming games: Netflix and YouTube are both due to get more NFL games in the 2026-27 season.
- Not that expensive: Nearly 90% of NFL games are still made available for free on local broadcast channels.
The president sat down with journalist Sharyl Attkisson last week, who asked him whether leagues are putting sports games behind the streaming paywall at the expense of customers. Before getting into his thoughts on the question at hand, Trump began by diving back into one of his favorite recent tangents about his disdain for the NFL’s newly implemented kickoff rules. Once he got that off his chest, he addressed the issue of the rising costs to consumers.
“There’s something very sad when they take football away from many, many people,” Trump said. “Very sad. I don’t like it… They’re making a lot of money. They could make a little bit less. They could let the people see. You have people that live for Sunday. They live. They can’t think about anything else, and then all of a sudden they’re gonna have to pay $1,000 a game. It’s crazy, so I’m not happy about it.”
On the one hand, the president is correct in that the NFL is the most popular thing on TV in the United States, and it isn’t particularly close. The issue of moving more games that were once available on broadcast TV behind the streaming paywall is an important one, and forcing customers to pay more to access games they once received for free raises serious media ethics questions.
On the other hand, the president’s claim that viewers are paying “$1,000 a game” is simply inaccurate. As NFL commissioner Roger Goodell recently pointed out, the league still plays nearly 90% of its games on free, over-the-air broadcast channels. In the 2025 season, there were 20 streaming-only NFL games: Prime Video with 17, Netflix with two, and Peacock with one. To watch all of these games, viewers would have to keep a Netflix subscription for one month (starting at $9 per month), Peacock for one month ($11 per month), and Prime Video for five months ($9 per month, $45 for the season). While that $65 cost to get the season’s streaming games won’t provide access to games on cable channels ESPN and NFL Network, a fan can get the vast majority of games available in market for $65 plus the cost of an over-the-air antenna.
If you begin to factor in a live TV streaming service to watch locally available broadcast and cable games, and NFL Sunday Ticket to get out-of-market games, the total does absolutely rise, but it still remains far below the president’s claim of $1,000 per game, or even $1,000 per season. So, while streaming NFL games is getting more expensive for the average viewer, no one is paying $1,000 per game for access to the league.
Trump may be wading into the battle over NFL broadcast rights not to aid consumers, but to help his political allies. The loudest resistance to shifting NFL games to streaming platforms has come from Fox, a key NFL broadcast partner. Fox is owned by the right-leaning Murdoch family, who have been staunch allies of Trump. The president is also close with the Ellison family, which now controls another of the NFL’s primary partners, Paramount Skydance, the owners of CBS.
FCC chairman Brendan Carr has threatened to re-examine the NFL’s antitrust exemption if too many games are put on streaming services, appearing on an episode of “Fox & Friends Weekend” to discuss the issue earlier this year. The Trump administration is clearly keeping an eye on how the NFL moves ahead with contract negotiations, though its motives for doing so are, at the very least, debatable.
This is the latest chapter in the president’s decades-long feud with the NFL, dating back to the 1980s, when he attempted to buy the then-Baltimore Colts, and only got worse when, as the owner of the USFL’s New Jersey Generals, he pushed the league to move its games to the fall in order to compete directly with the NFL. That didn’t work out for the USFL, which eventually folded. Then, just one year before launching his first presidential bid, Trump attempted to purchase the Buffalo Bills, but lost out to current owner Terry Pegula, intensifying his animosity toward the league.
The president was also critical of the NFL, Colin Kaepernick, and other players during his first candidacy and early in his first term, when many players were demonstrating and speaking out for civil rights and against police brutality.
Whether President Trump becomes more involved in the NFL’s push toward an increase in streaming-exclusive games or not remains to be seen. However, it does appear that political figures from both major parties are intensifying their attention on the league’s antitrust exemption amidst what they view as anti-consumer practices.
Prime Video
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