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- NFL would have ten broadcast windows across six days during Thanksgiving week
- League has expanded into Christmas Day and Black Friday over recent years
The National Football League (NFL) is considering playing a game on the day before Thanksgiving as soon as next season, according to ESPN.
The league already schedules three matchups on the holiday itself, with another matchup slated for Black Friday. The addition of a Wednesday game would strengthen the NFL’s stranglehold on the holiday and extract more revenue from broadcasters.
The Thanksgiving slate, held since 1934, is one of the most-watched days on the NFL calendar, with last year’s fixture between the Kansas City Chiefs and the Dallas Cowboys averaging 57.23 million viewers on CBS. When combined, the three matches averaged a Thanksgiving record of 44.7 million viewers, a 30 per cent increase from 2024.
Amazon has broadcast a game on Black Friday since 2023, with the NFL used as a subscriber acquisition tool and advertising platform on the busiest shopping day of the year in the US.
Should the league indeed add a game on Thanksgiving Eve, it would expand its schedule that week to ten broadcast windows across six days. NFL commissioner Roger Goodell has also previously opened the door to a second Black Friday game.
“Every offseason we look for new opportunities to best serve our fans in the schedule-making process,” the league said in a statement to The Associated Press.
“As commissioner Goodell has said, Thanksgiving and NFL football have become synonymous and given the continued growth of fan interest around our games on Thanksgiving and Black Friday, looking for additional opportunities tied to this special holiday is exciting for us to explore.”
The NFL now also regularly schedules matches on Christmas Day, with Netflix owning the rights to air at least one match each year until 2026, in a bid to draw significant audiences. Goodell has suggested that three-game slates will be a permanent fixture moving forward.
The league is also currently selling four games that it retained as part of the sale of its media division to ESPN, with YouTube understood to be the frontrunner.
Most of these tentpole matchups are separate to the league’s 11-year US$110 billion deals with Amazon, CBS, ESPN, Fox and NBC. The contracts are due to expire in 2032, but the NFL has an opt-out clause that comes into effect in 2029 and is widely expected to begin negotiations later this year. The revised deals could be in place for the 2026 campaign.
SportsPro says…
The NFL’s appetite for growth is insatiable, and it sees holiday games as a way to secure huge live audiences at a time when many people are at home with their families and keen for something to watch.
By expanding into Thanksgiving Eve, the NFL will once again come into conflict with the National Basketball Association (NBA), which previously had a clear run on Christmas day.
The NBA typically schedules games on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, attracting above-average viewership, and may be forced to innovate with alternative scheduling should it wish to avoid competition.
However, the knock-on effect will be dictated by how a game the NFL is able to offer to the market.
The NFL’s recent genius has been carving out new packages of games from its existing inventory that are attractive enough to streaming services and viewers that they generate more revenue but also don’t alienate its existing partners.
So far it has achieved this delicate balancing act, and there are no signs that viewers are suffering from NFL fatigue.
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