Fox and NFL partnership shows no tension, Lachlan Murdoch says, as network adds historic Sunday to schedule

Lachlan Murdoch, the executive chairman and CEO of Fox, announced on an earnings call Monday morning that Fox will televise an NFL tripleheader this coming season which is a broadcast television first.

The tripleheader will begin with an early morning (on the east coast of the United States) game in Munich that will feature the Detroit Lions and a team that will be announced on Thursday, and proceed with another game in the 1 p.m. window and then another game in the 4 p.m. window.

Yes, that’s a lot of NFL football of Fox in Week 10 of the upcoming season.

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“The NFL has been a key partner with Fox for more than 30 years in what is a mutually beneficial relationship,” Murdoch said on the call. “To underscore this relationship with the NFL, yesterday, Fox acquired rights to two additional NFL games in national windows for this coming season.

‘The first will appear in Week 10. They’re both national games … That’ll give us, I think it’s the overseas game from Munich. That’ll give us a tripleheader that Sunday, which I think will be the first tripleheader on broadcast TV in history.”

Murdoch said the second game Fox has acquired will be telecast on a Saturday in Week 15.

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The additional games for the network speak for themselves, but Murdoch and Chief Financial Officer Steve Tomsic were asked about possible tension between Fox and the NFL and whether the media giant expects the league to try to renegotiate its current contract in the wake of various media reports.

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Murdoch pushed back, saying there have been no “substantive talks” about renegotiating the contract that has four years remaining.

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 “I think the important note to take here, and this goes to your second question, is there is no tension really with the NFL,” he said. “We’re partners for 30 years. We’re looking forward to being partners for the next 30 years. You know, as we’ve noted before, we have four years left on our current deal.

“We’ve read the speculation that the NFL would like to renegotiate and extend the current deal or the current deals that are in the marketplace, but we’ve had no substantive discussions with the NFL about that. It’s hard apart from what we’ve read in the press around speculation around that. I wouldn’t want to add to that speculation at all.”

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Murdoch, indeed, wants the relationship with the NFL to continue to bloom if the environment allows.

“…We’d like to sort of broaden and deepen our relationship with the NFL, but we’ll only do so in a disciplined way,” he said. “You know, really takes some, creates value for a long-term shareholder value for our shareholders.”

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