Mickey Mouse is getting the Super Bowl this season, and somewhere NFL commissioner Roger Goodell is probably wondering how much he can charge Goofy for a sideline pass. Disney announced this week that Super Bowl LXI, scheduled for February 14, 2027, at SoFi Stadium just outside Los Angeles, will stream on Disney+.
ESPN will produce its first Super Bowl. Joe Buck and Troy Aikman will call it, and ABC will carry the game for the first time since 2006. ESPN and ABC are both Disney properties, so adding Disney+ makes perfect corporate sense. Mickey already owns the house. Why not put the biggest party in the living room?
This announcement raises a question considerably less adorable than a mouse wearing football pads. Is this another step toward a Super Bowl you’ll have to pay to watch?
Not next February. ABC will still broadcast the game free over the air, while ESPN and Disney+ offer additional ways to watch. That’s an important distinction. Disney isn’t taking the Super Bowl away from anyone with an antenna.
Yet.
More Options Means More $
I’ve been around sports media long enough to know that when the NFL announces more ways to watch football, another bill often follows. The league has been moving games to paid platforms for years. Why should we assume its biggest game will remain untouchable forever?
Thursday Night Football moved to Amazon Prime Video in 2022. Peacock carried an exclusive playoff game in January 2024, although the participating teams’ local markets could still watch it on broadcast television. Netflix entered the picture with Christmas games in 2024 and has five NFL games on its 2026 schedule.
Fans don’t just follow their teams anymore. They follow their teams across apps, passwords, billing cycles and the occasional frantic search for the remote. USA Today estimated that watching NFL games during the 2026 season can cost more than $600 over six months, depending on the subscriptions you need.
More than $600 to watch football from your own couch. At that price, somebody should come over and refill the chip bowl.
The NFL isn’t exactly scraping together loose change to keep the lights on. Its national media rights agreements are worth nearly $110 billion through 2033, while league-wide shared revenue reached a reported $14.5 billion. The NFL also has options to reopen most of those major television deals after the 2029 season.
Apparently, $110 billion is a nice start.
An NFL Experiment
To be fair, Disney’s announcement isn’t some sinister plot. It already has the rights and wants its biggest event on as many of its platforms as possible. Disney+ will also stream two Monday Night Football games this season that remain available on ESPN and ABC. That’s added distribution, not an exclusive takeover.
Still, I’d be shocked if Disney and the NFL weren’t watching those Disney+ numbers closely. How many fans voluntarily stream the biggest game in America when they can still watch it free on ABC? That’s a pretty interesting experiment, especially for a league that has spent years moving games behind subscription walls.
We’ve seen this movie before. First, streaming is another option. Then, it’s the only option for a Thursday game, a Christmas matchup or a playoff contest. Fans complain, download another app, enter another credit card number and watch anyway.
That’s not a protest. That’s a business model.
There is, of course, a powerful reason not to put the Super Bowl exclusively behind a paywall. Its enormous reach is the whole point. The audience includes serious fans, casual fans and people who show up strictly for commercials and seven-layer dip. Advertisers pay huge money for that kind of access. Limit the audience, and you risk damaging the very product you’re trying to monetize.
Disney has already sold out its Super Bowl advertising inventory, the earliest sellout in the game’s history. Fifty-eight brands across 34 categories have purchased advertising, including nine first-time Super Bowl advertisers. That’s a massive business built around reaching practically everybody. Limit the audience, and you risk damaging the very product you’re trying to monetize.
It’s a legitimate argument and the biggest reason the game remains free today.
Time Changes Things
Viewing habits change, technology changes and, most importantly, the money changes. Streaming companies are spending billions on live sports because football delivers something increasingly rare in television: millions of people watching the same thing at the same time.
Imagine a streaming company offering the NFL an astronomical amount for exclusive Super Bowl rights. Or perhaps the league starts with a premium version featuring alternate announcers, additional cameras and exclusive content while the traditional broadcast survives. Would that eventually lead to charging everybody?
That’s speculation, not an announced NFL plan, but given the league’s history, it’s hardly science fiction.
I’m not suggesting Goodell is sitting in his office building a $99.99 Super Bowl pay-per-view PowerPoint. Although I’d love to see the slide titled “Fan Benefits.”
What I am suggesting is that the NFL has spent years conditioning fans to pay more for access to football, and every successful streaming experiment makes the next one easier.
The Super Bowl has always felt different. It’s the one game that belongs to everybody, including people who couldn’t identify a nickel defense if it tackled them in their living room. I hope it stays that way, but the NFL has spent years teaching us that football access comes with an extra charge, and fans keep paying.
The Super Bowl is still free. Enjoy it while you can. Someday, the most expensive part of your Super Bowl party might not be the beer, the wings or the ridiculous price of guacamole.
It might be turning on the television.
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