Lachlan Murdoch announced Fox will not renegotiate its NFL media rights deal until 2030. That's when the opt-out clause expires. Not 2029. Not 2028. 2030.
This counts as news because a CEO said his company will honor a contract it already signed. Groundbreaking stuff. Fox will continue paying whatever ungodly sum they agreed to pay until the exact moment they're legally allowed to renegotiate. Truly visionary leadership from the Murdoch family.
The best part? Retail traders now have six years to convince themselves this matters. Six full years to chart Fox's stock price against NFL viewership data and pretend they've discovered alpha. They'll build spreadsheets. They'll calculate projected ad revenue per touchdown. They'll post about it in Discord servers with names like Bills Mafia Capital Partners.
None of it will matter because Fox already locked in the price years ago and Murdoch just confirmed they're not touching it early. The trade already happened. You missed it. You were probably buying GameStop at the time.
What's particularly funny is that 2030 might as well be the heat death of the universe in media rights terms. Streaming could collapse. Linear TV could be fully dead. The NFL could relocate to Mars. Doesn't matter. Fox will keep writing checks because that's what the contract says and Murdoch decided reading contracts is easier than renegotiating them.
Somewhere right now a day trader is calculating Fox's enterprise value divided by total NFL Sunday viewers multiplied by average household income in markets with NFC teams and thinks he's Warren Buffett. He's not Warren Buffett. He's a guy who's about to learn that major media companies don't restructure billion-dollar sports deals because his technical indicator formed a bullish wedge.
Leave a Comment