Apple Is 'Likely' To Win The Rights To NFL Sunday Ticket For About $3 BILLION Per Year

Pro Football Talk — Sunday Ticket could end up being the biggest ticket in the NFL’s broadcasting rights portfolio.

Dylan Byers of Puck News reports that the price for the out-of-market package could spike to as much as $3 billion per year.

The report also pegs Apple as the “most likely” winner of the Sunday Ticket rights. Other finalists are Disney and Amazon.

Even in an era when everything else on linear television is in decline, there is nothing better to be selling than live sports rights — especially football. The NFL will reportedly likely sell Sunday Ticket to Apple at a price tag of around $3 billion per season starting in 2023, double the $1.5 billion DirecTV pays for the current deal.

I don't know what the numbers will ever top out at, but televising football games is only going to continue getting more expensive. The Big Ten's current $440 million annual deal with Fox and ESPN is expected to top $1 billion when it's renewed in 2023. The SEC will get $300 million a year from ESPN starting in 2024 for just the 15 football games a season which currently air on CBS, who only pays the conference $55 million annually. Now take the viewership number of a decent college football game, multiply it by 10 and you get the average NFL regular season game.

The point is football ain't getting cheaper anytime soon.

If you were hoping the price of Sunday Ticket might go down for consumers when the deal went away from DirecTV, I wouldn't count on it.