FOX Goes All In On the NFL Ahead Of Presumed Disney Merger

With huge declines in its FOX network’s primetime ratings and Wall Street criticism that it overpaid on a $3.3 billion, 5-year deal for the NFL’s Thursday night package, 21st Century Fox presented unbridled optimism over its NFL-heavy future Thursday during its quarterly earnings call with investor analysts.

“Live sports has never been more important than it is today,” 21st Century Fox executive chairman Lachlan Murdoch told the analysts. “Fox Sports enters 2018 as a leader in the most valuable type of programming, the leader in America’s most popular sport, and the dominant brand during the most valuable time of year.”

The NFL’s Thursday Night Football games were split between NBC and CBS during the 2017 season. The NFL Network cable channel simulcast those NBC and CBS games and aired some its own Thursday night games exclusively. The NFL also streamed some of those games on Amazon and is in negotiations now with Amazon and other streamers for rights to the Thursday night games for 2018.

Variety’s Brian Steinberg has reported that NBC and CBS, which paid a combined $450 million for the 2017 Thursday night games, lost money on the package. FOX will reportedly be paying even more — an average of $650 million a year for the next five years. For the 2017 season, the patchwork of broadcast partners and the weak Thursday night matchups fed a perception that NFL games were spread across too many nights and too many networks.

“We think that consolidating Thursday Night Football on one network as opposed to two gives us an opportunity to actually grow the ratings of Thursday Night Football,” Murdoch said. “We’re already seeing good momentum at the network,” he added, citing solid midseason launches for 9-1-1 and The Four. “We finished January as the No. 1 network in television, and we were the only network that had growth in January.”

FOX has been walloped in the primetime ratings this season. According to Nielsen data for the current TV season that began in September, the broadcast network is down 25 percent in the 18-to-49 ratings that are used to determine advertising rates and down 20 percent in total audience.

9-1-1 and The Four were the only two FOX shows among the 15 most-watched programs last week across the five major broadcast networks, and the network has a long list of under-performers this season, including The Gifted (5.0 million viewers), The X-Files (5.8 million), L.A to Vegas (4.5 million) and Ghosted (4.0 million).

If 21st Century Fox gets regulatory approval for its deal to sell the film studio, TV studio, and cable networks to Disney, FOX will still be left with a deep list of NFL, MLB and college sports, programming from Fox Sports and Fox News, and reality programming and animation stalwarts like The Simpsons and Bob’s Burgers to fill out its schedule.

Scott Porch writes about the TV business for Decider, is a contributing writer for Playboy, and hosts a weekly podcast about new digital content called Consumed with Scott Porch. You can follow him on Twitter @ScottPorch.