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When YouTube C.E.O. Neal Mohan talks to big-time sports commissioners, he often invokes a familiar refrain that few in the industry could ever disavow: Live sports are, to steal ESPN chairman Jimmy Pitaro’s phrase, needle-movers. And what commissioner, pray tell, wouldn’t want to hear that love language from arguably the most significant C.E.O. in the media industry, who controls the largest video platform and feeds from Alphabet’s $4.4 trillion market cap?
For a while it seemed like Mohan really was going to throw around his weight. YouTube shelled out $2 billion per year for Sunday Ticket through 2029. The platform paid around $100 million to carry one NFL regular-season game last season. Meanwhile, Mohan entrusted YouTube’s sports division to some of the most respected sports executives in the business: ESPN veteran Justin Connolly, whose departure ignited a nasty legal dispute, and former NBA executive Jen Chun.
But YouTube has also lost out on rights, or at least has been more disciplined than other bidders, leading some industry insiders to speculate that Mohan’s live sports strategy is more nuanced than many once perceived. Back in 2024, YouTube made a serious, ultimately unsuccessful bid to get one of the NBA’s national media packages that ultimately went to Amazon, ESPN, and NBC. Just last month, Mohan failed to land an NFL package that many observers thought was destined for YouTube. In the end, Netflix swooped in and took the five games.
All of this has been the cause of some angst in the industry as many league executives have begun to second-guess a seemingly no-brainer bidder for their content. This week, nearly a dozen well-placed sources voiced their increasing doubts about Mohan’s infatuation with live sports rights packages—or perhaps put more adroitly, some wondered if the platform remains more focused on capturing the obsessive fandom around live sports without having to pay the costly rights fees for live games. “I have a hard time understanding if YouTube is trying to be the community to other people’s live sports, which is a great business in itself,” said one insider who deals with the company. “Or do they actually want to be the rights-holder? The truth is, I don’t think YouTube has made up its mind on that, which is why you see these timid bids from them so far.”
His comment reminded me of YouTube’s World Cup partnership with FIFA. On July 12, the two parties are staging a soccer tournament in Central Park, featuring a bunch of influencers, all streamed on YouTube, demonstrating precisely the sort of relatively inexpensive ancillary content around pricey live sports that has worked so well for the platform. Indeed, it is YouTube, rather than the NFL or the NBA, that seems like it can do whatever it wants.
The Shot Clock
YouTube executives counter that they are still very serious about obtaining live sports rights. In fact, sources said that they are currently engaged with both the NBA and MLB in conversations around packages of local and out-of-market games. But according to people I spoke to at various entities that have negotiated with YouTube, the company operates with hyperscaler tendencies—and bureaucracy—that have delayed its foray into the deeper circles of the sports world.
Several rights-holders described their negotiations with YouTube in a similar fashion: Once company executives have demonstrated interest in a property, even relatively small ones, they still take two to three months to hold internal meetings and run the numbers and analytics before they can proffer a bid. Their competitors turn those decisions around in a matter of weeks—or even days. That lugubrious time frame has kept YouTube from completing several deals with rights-holders who were intrigued by the platform’s reach, demos, and relationships with content creators, but frustrated by the company’s slow pace. “It’s such a laborious process whenever I pitch them,” one rights-holder told me. “I really do believe that they’re genuinely just trying to figure out if they want to be in the live rights game or not.”
Part of the issue comes down to strategy and cost. To wit: YouTube put its NFL game from Brazil in front of a paywall, which meant its sole path to profit on the $100 million deal was through ad sales. Sources said that YouTube’s bid for an NBA package also would have put the games in front of any paywall. Meanwhile, every one of YouTube’s competitors have a second revenue stream to defray the high cost of sports rights: Amazon and Netflix depend on subscription revenue; legacy media companies still make a ton of money from affiliate fees.
But the primary observation that worries sports business executives, of course, is that Mohan may want live sports but doesn’t need them—there’s a reason why those internal meetings take months to convince stakeholders. Amazon invested deeply in live sports only after moving into premium content; Netflix bit as it launched its live tier; meanwhile, deep in the recesses of Mohan’s financial models is likely some data point suggesting that he has a better R.O.I. on sportsfluencers than the live games themselves.
That’s been a letdown for the leagues, and a hard reality to stomach. After the Super Bowl, YouTube was considered the odds-on favorite to land a package of five NFL games, which included the Week 1 season kickoff in Australia. But during the negotiations, the NFL took that game out of YouTube’s package. The league had expected that YouTube would still be interested in splitting the five-game package with Netflix. But several sources said that YouTube executives were so upset at losing the Australia game that they walked. The message was clear: YouTube wanted those rights. But it didn’t need them.
And maybe, in the end, that’s the position that most distinguishes YouTube from its competitors. Hours after a marquee NFL game or World Cup match airs, a significant amount of the action is going to wind up on YouTube anyway. Indeed, the silver lining here is that YouTube’s posture may allow legacy players one less competitor to compete with as live sports become existential for their balance sheets—until, of course, Mohan changes his mind.