NFL league execs pushed back against President Donald Trump over complaints about how expensive and fragmented it has become to watch games. Fine. That is their right. But let’s make one thing crystal clear before the usual internet idiots pick teams and start chest-thumping: this is not about siding with Trump, and it is not about opposing Trump. This is about siding with reason and the fans. On that front, the NFL is wrong. Dead wrong.
Hans Schroeder, the NFL’s executive vice president of media distribution, said, “We love our model,” and claimed the league has “the most fan-friendly model there is of any sport or entertainment as far as distribution.”
He also argued that the NFL wants to remain on broadcast while putting a limited number of games on platforms where fans already spend time. That sounds polished, corporate, and focus-grouped within an inch of its life. It also ignores the very obvious reality that fans now have to jump through way too many hoops just to keep up with the sport they already pay plenty to support.
That is the part the league keeps trying to dance around. Yes, most games are still on free over-the-air television. Great. Wonderful. Gold star. Still, fans are still being asked to chase the rest of the schedule across a ridiculous collection of services. The NFL’s own “Ways to Watch” page lists NFL+, Sunday Ticket, FOX One, Peacock, Paramount+, ESPN, Amazon Prime, and Netflix as streaming options tied to watching the league. That is not convenience. That is a subscription obstacle course.
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And this is where the league loses the argument. Fans do not experience the NFL through percentage points on a media-distribution slide. They experience it by trying to watch their team, the biggest national windows, the holiday games, the playoff race games, and the random blockbuster matchup the league decides to stick behind yet another paywall because some streaming company backed up a Brinks truck.
Netflix alone has the first regular-season game in Australia on September 10 between the 49ers and Rams, a Thanksgiving Eve game, and a Christmas Day game. So even if the NFL keeps repeating “limited amount,” those limited games somehow keep being pretty meaningful ones. Funny how that works.
That is why this whole thing should not be framed as some Trump culture-war fight. The smarter frame is much simpler: the fans are right, and the NFL is acting exactly like the NFL always acts when money is on the table.
The league is not making these moves because it is deeply worried about your user experience on a Sunday afternoon. It is making them because spreading inventory across more partners creates more leverage, more cash, and more ways to monetize a fan base it already knows will crawl over broken glass for football. The NFL can wrap that in “meeting fans where they are” language all it wants. Most fans know a cash grab when they see one.
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And that is what every one of these decisions keeps proving. The NFL does not really care first about the fans. It cares first about the money, then the partners, then the distribution strategy, and somewhere after that it gets around to pretending this is all being done as a public service.
Nobody is saying the league should never evolve. Nobody is saying streaming should not exist. The point is that the current setup asks too much of the people who actually keep the whole machine alive. When fans need a mental spreadsheet just to remember which app carries which game, the model is not fan friendly. It is bloated.
So no, we do not need Stephen A. style screaming or political tribalism here. We do not need to turn this into “Trump said it, therefore it must be wrong” or “Trump said it, therefore it must be genius.” We can just use our eyes. We can use our bank accounts. We can use the common-sense test. And the common-sense test says the same thing millions of fans have been saying for a while now: the NFL has made watching its product more expensive, more fragmented, and more annoying than it needs to be.
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Spot on! Screw goodell and greedy owners.
When the fans stop watching, like I did 5 years ago, then they will change. Roger Goodall (Sic) is the problem. I left, so can you.
NFL forgot it core fanbase about when the clown running it went after the Saints…been trying to be different from its core watchers ever since. So what to do. Catch a few games but I enjoy more top level HS/college Football live, and watch Rugby and AUS Rules Football and F1. Too many good sport out there to be taken to town by the NFL. The league will only ever listen to $. Minimize your spend if you want it to improve.
This is easy, but the NFL is run by idiots. Stream all you want, but every game MUST be on broadcast TV! The audiences are mutually exclusive so it won’t hurt anyone!
I stopped watching the No Fun League (NFL) a long time ago when it was more and more about money. I get it, the rich want to get richer but it has priced normal people out. I used to live in Denver and the Bronco Games in person became a luxury that I could not afford anymore. Then they started with the other subscription services as Game venues, sorry, I don’t subscribe to those services and I am not going to subscribe to subscription service for one or two games and am stuck with a service I normally would not subscribe to. The NFL has killed my dedication to the teams and the League as a whole, I still have shirts and Jackets for Sports Teams, yes, it is NOT just the NFL but the NBA, MLB and others who are taking the FUN out of Sports and making it all about who can richer faster, well I can richer by dropping those Games out of my life.