In 2024, Peacock ponied up $110 million for the rights to a 2024 wild-card matchup between the defending Super Bowl champion Kansas City Chiefs and the Miami Dolphins, marking the first-ever playoff game to be broadcast on a streaming service. A whopping 27.6 million tuned in. For context, the 2024 World Series between the two most popular franchises in baseball, the Los Angeles Dodgers and New York Yankees, averaged 15.8 million viewers.

For the 2026-27 season, Amazon Prime Video has been awarded 15 NFL games in the regular season alone for most of Thursday Night Football. Netflix gets five, including one game on Thanksgiving eve and two on Christmas, and Peacock gets one game in primetime on Dec. 27.

With the advent of legalized sports gambling and the explosion of fantasy football, the demand to watch not just your favorite team but all NFL games is at a fever pitch. Overall, according to the American Gaming Association, approximately $30 billion was wagered on NFL games legally over the 2025-26 season. There are 95 countries on the planet that don’t have a gross domestic product higher than $30 billion. 

On NBC for the Super Bowl in February, 127.7 million people tuned in to watch. In 2015, 114.4 million watched, which set a record at the time. The beast only gets hungrier the more you feed it. 

Even the NFL draft registered 13.2 million viewers on ESPN in April. 

One of the first things taught in Economics 101 is the basic principle of supply and demand. In the NFL’s case, supply keeps growing. Back in the old days, NFL football was only played on Sundays. In 1970, ABC’s Monday Night Football was born, then in 1987 came Sunday Night Football and in 2006 Thursday Night Football. 

In 2023, the NFL broke its long-standing tradition of not playing on Fridays and instituted Black Friday football. And coming up this season, the league will offer up a matchup on a Wednesday night as part of its new Thanksgiving eve game. 

Because why not? As James Earl Jones said in the baseball classic Field of Dreams, “People will come. People will most definitely come.” 

In the case of the NFL, people will not only come to stadiums, but they will come to their television sets, even if there are games on potentially six days a week. 

Add it all up, to watch every NFL game this upcoming season, the cost is over $1,000. You read that correctly: It could cost more than $1,000 to take in NFL games not at a stadium but from the comfort of your own home. 

The average cost of an NFL game ticket in 1996 was $35. To see all eight home games, the total cost was $280. Throw in parking and concessions, and it’s still below the cost to watch all games on TV in 2026. 

So is this legal from an antitrust perspective? Congressional hearings were held earlier this week to explore that very question. 

“Every single day, sports fans are getting gouged now for the opportunity of watching their favorite teams,” Outkick founder and national radio host Clay Travis argued. “Fans now pay far more money every year for something that, by law in 1961, you all guaranteed for them should be free.”

The law Travis is referring to is the Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961, which called for keeping all games available on TV for free. Obviously, that isn’t happening in the age of streaming, especially in the NFL. 

“Sixty-five years later, however, it is fair for this body to ask whether the professional sports leagues have kept up their end of the bargain,” Rep. Scott Fitzgerald (R-WI) said on Wednesday. “In my opinion, they have not, and sports fans are paying the price because of it.”

“Because they do not follow America’s antitrust laws for television agreements, they can charge consumers inflated prices that would otherwise be illegal,” the lawmaker added. 

“There’s a live question at this point about whether putting games on Netflix or YouTube TV or other entities like that … is that a sponsored telecast or is that something else?” Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr told the New York Post in March. “And if it’s something else, then it’s not clear that the antitrust exemption applies.”

NFL Sunday Ticket, which allows fans to watch all Sunday games regardless of location, was seen as one such example of the league selling out-of-market games at inflated prices (up to $480/season) through DirecTV, all while not allowing competition offering a similar deal for consumers. A lawsuit was filed in U.S. district court in Los Angeles in 2024, with the jury ruling against the NFL to the tune of $4.8 billion in damages, with a potential payout of $14.4 billion in liability under federal treble damages. But later that year, U.S. District Judge Philip S. Gutierrez overturned the verdict. 

Antitrust suits against the league date back most famously to 1985, when the USFL, led by then-New Jersey Generals owner Donald Trump, sued the NFL, arguing it “willfully acquired and maintained monopoly power in major league professional football in the United States.” 

Good news for Trump and the USFL: The jury found the NFL liable. Bad news: The judge awarded the USFL $1 in damages, or $3 overall under federal treble damages. The league folded soon after.

The bottom line is that the NFL truly is a beast. One could easily argue that outside of Amazon, Google, and Apple, it is among the most successful businesses in the modern era.

And with that success comes resources, especially those of the legal services variety. If Congress wants a fight, they’ll be facing a legal army.

A WIN FOR FAMILIES: THE FCC IS MAKING TV RATINGS MATTER AGAIN

That doesn’t mean members of Congress from both sides of the aisle don’t make excellent arguments. The NFL may be pricing out some of its massive customer base. And it may be illegal. But no one is forcing these fans to purchase streaming services to watch games or to buy NFL Sunday Ticket. 

The laws of supply and demand absolutely apply here. And right now and moving forward, supply and demand is very, very good.