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ESPN Can’t Afford Monday Night Football Any More

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Re: ESPN Can’t Afford Monday Night Football Any More

#31

Post by kodablah »

brian-armstrong wrote: post #24
kodablah wrote: post #15

This is going to be one of many reasons there might be a lockout in 2020 when it's CBA renewal time. This is going to trickle down to the players. NFL can't continue charging exorbitant access fees which means they will have to request a serious reduction in the salary cap (the owners aren't going to be willing to eat these losses). I think this is great thing as the economics of large sports salaries have been artif…

Given how traumatic the sport and related CTEs are, I wonder if falling salaries will spell the end of football

I do not believe so as I believe the issues are orthogonal. The livelihood of the sport is primarily driven by consumption not production IMO. You lose eyeballs, you lose everything. You lose players, more will fill their place and while the quality may decline, it will not be noticeable since it applies evenly.

Everyone knows the NFL could reduce injuries even more, but not at the cost of eyeballs. In a purely capitalistic view, players are much more expendable/replaceable than viewers. As a side effect, players will have to accept the risk of being injured for less money than they are now. While a couple of high profile NFL players have retired due to CTE concerns, in general there are many humans willing to make that sacrifice for even a fraction of what players are paid today.

Re: ESPN Can’t Afford Monday Night Football Any More

#32

Post by samsolomon »

poulsbohemian wrote: post #18

Long time NFL GamePass subscriber here... no commercials, watch any game I want when I want - it's a completely superior experience to cable / OTA. I get that the NFL wants to maximize its revenue by selling rights, but they could likely provide their own real-time streaming service and every football fan on the planet would be happy to pay for it.

I'm with you on commercials, but I don't believe NFL GamePass includes live games? I'm big on fantasy, so live games are important.

I pay about $30 to Sling TV just for Redzone. I've never watched any of the other channels that come with it. When the regular season ends I just cancel Sling.

I'd be happy handing over the $150/season or so directly to the NFL. Unfortunately, I'm probably worth more to advertisers just because of that.

Re: ESPN Can’t Afford Monday Night Football Any More

#33

Post by Digory »

apendleton wrote: post #22
poulsbohemian wrote: post #18

Long time NFL GamePass subscriber here... no commercials, watch any game I want when I want - it's a completely superior experience to cable / OTA. I get that the NFL wants to maximize its revenue by selling rights, but they could likely provide their own real-time streaming service and every football fan on the planet would be happy to pay for it.

Yes, but nobody else would. Lots of the people paying for ESPN don't do so by choice, they do so because it comes as part of their cable package whether they watch it or not (this was me pre-cord-cutting).

Gamepass is $75 right now.

Back of the envelope, every viewer of MNF would need to pay $200 just to keep MNF and one wildcard game. More to get Sunday, Thursday, the playoffs and the Superbowl. Easily $300 - $400 per viewer a year.

That's a hard sell.

Re: ESPN Can’t Afford Monday Night Football Any More

#35

Post by fotbr »

endtime wrote: post #3
rhino369 wrote: post #2

I think it's a bad assumption to think the NFL will demand more money when ratings and subscriptions are down. ESPN just has to be the highest bidder. Someone has got to air the games.

What happens if the highest bidder can't pay the NFL enough to make it worthwhile? I keep seeing pictures of half-empty stands behind kneeling football players, and ultimately if the NFL destroys its value by alienating too many fans with politics, there's no reason the entire business won't or shouldn't collapse.

As for not paying the NFL enough to make it worthwhile:

Someone will pick up the rights to show the games, or the league will offer their own service, or the games won't be played on Mondays/Thursdays and will go back to just being a Sunday sport.

Regarding losing their audience and destroying their value:

I stopped following the NFL not because of politics (the kneeling thing hadn't yet started), but because their product was no longer worth my time. Thirty+ years as a fan, watching nearly every single game the local team played and I turned it off a couple years ago. It should not take 3+ hours for 60 minutes of "play", the bulk of which involves no action. It became so overloaded with commercials that it hit the point I was no longer interested. For a short while there was hope, they had the "game in 60" replays on the NFL network. That could have been amazing. Unfortunately, they screwed that up too, showing "all the action" in the first half (good!), then a shortened version of the halftime show (why?), then "all the action" in the third quarter (good!), and then they'd jump to the end of the fourth quarter (wtf?). Why did we need a halftime show when the whole thing a) is being condensed down to an hour, b) is a replay, and c) they sacrifice showing comebacks in order to bring us talking heads?

I think they've been losing their audience for a while; the politics is just the latest (and possibly biggest) factor in their decline. If they turn things around, great. If not, I won't feel sorry for them.

Re: ESPN Can’t Afford Monday Night Football Any More

#36

Post by ZoeZoeBee »

rhino369 wrote: post #12
endtime wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What happens if the highest bidder can't pay the NFL enough to make it worthwhile? I keep seeing pictures of half-empty stands behind kneeling football players, and ultimately if the NFL destroys its value by alienating too many fans with politics, there's no reason the entire business won't or shouldn't collapse.

There would have to be a pretty massive drop off for that to be a problem. The biggest costs are player/staff salaries and stadiums. They can just keep the salary cap low and stop paying for new stadiums.

Umm no. NFL took in 15 Billion in 2015, 2/3 of the revenue came from TV, new stadiums over the last 20 years have totaled only $15 Billion of which almost half was financed by tax payers[0].

NFL will not weather well a continued hit to ratings, which were down 8% last year and dropping again this year

[0]https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/19smEPxvpHQE3pByhDDPb...

Re: ESPN Can’t Afford Monday Night Football Any More

#37

Post by judah »

sunsetMurk wrote: post #13
endtime wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What happens if the highest bidder can't pay the NFL enough to make it worthwhile? I keep seeing pictures of half-empty stands behind kneeling football players, and ultimately if the NFL destroys its value by alienating too many fans with politics, there's no reason the entire business won't or shouldn't collapse.

curious - are there any reports/#'s out there that indicate attendance is lower than normal? +correlation w/ kneeling players?

You can look at the raw stats yourself here[0].

I did some quick calculation here, and it looks like attendance is not lower, in fact, it's slightly higher. 2016 average attendance was 66,586, while this year's average attendance so far is 68,925.

(This doesn't account for lower-attended games towards the end of the season for poor-performing teams; end of the season games often don't sell out for such teams, and these stats may be skewed because we haven't reached the end of the season yet. If I were to guess, by year's end attendance will be slightly lower for 2017.)

What is down is ratings. That is well-documented[1].

[0]: http://www.espn.com/nfl/attendance/_/year/2016

[1]: http://money.cnn.com/2017/09/20/media/nfl-tv-ratings-week-2/...

Re: ESPN Can’t Afford Monday Night Football Any More

#39

Post by poulsbohemian »

poulsbohemian wrote: post #18

Long time NFL GamePass subscriber here... no commercials, watch any game I want when I want - it's a completely superior experience to cable / OTA. I get that the NFL wants to maximize its revenue by selling rights, but they could likely provide their own real-time streaming service and every football fan on the planet would be happy to pay for it.

Look friends, all I'm saying is, the NFL has other options. In its current form (IE: non-live except for pre-season) I get that the customer base is small. BUT, if ESPN or other parties drop the ball, the NFL could monetize their games through a direct-to-consumer model, IE: just because the games aren't live today doesn't mean they couldn't be in the future. Would I pay $200/year for every NFL game sans commercials? Heck yes.

Re: ESPN Can’t Afford Monday Night Football Any More

#40

Post by jsmthrowaway »

kodablah wrote: post #21
poulsbohemian wrote: post #18

Long time NFL GamePass subscriber here... no commercials, watch any game I want when I want - it's a completely superior experience to cable / OTA. I get that the NFL wants to maximize its revenue by selling rights, but they could likely provide their own real-time streaming service and every football fan on the planet would be happy to pay for it.

> it's a completely superior experience to cable / OTA Can't watch ALL games live right? That's hardly completely superior. IMO, NFL would make less money on direct sales than they do when they charge networks which charge all cable subscribers (even via retransmission fees for those of us who can't get OTA) AND charge advertisers. That double dip is going to net more money than a specialized service for NFL fans.

> Can't watch ALL games live right? That's hardly completely superior.

You can't on television, either.

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