The NFL will expand its schedule to include a Black Friday game, possibly starting in the 2023 season, multiple sources told SBJ. Amazon will distribute the game. Neither the NFL nor Amazon would comment for this story. The NFL has considered expanding its schedule to include a game on the Friday after Thanksgiving for years — though the idea has met with resistance within the NFL. Those concerns have since been resolved and the league is moving forward with plans to host a Black Friday game in 2023. It’s possible the league will wait until 2024 to schedule that first game, but all indications point to 2023 for the former.
The idea of organizing a Black Friday game gained momentum earlier this year when Amazon discussed a special “Thursday Night Soccer” package for its Prime service. In April, the league’s owners took another step toward scheduling a Black Friday game when they allowed the league office to “schedule two more teams for a shortened weekend,” NBC’s Peter King reported. report back then. King put the cost per game at between $70-100M, which Amazon will have to pay in addition to the $1B a year it takes out for “TNF.” King wrote, “It’s in the same range as what the network partners paid for the wild card playoffs.”
Holding the game the day after Thanksgiving enables the NFL to continue having a holiday weekend that is already heavily associated with football. The NFL, of course, has three popular Thanksgiving Day games that go along with a Sunday slate of games that tend to be good. Last season, for example, the two Thanksgiving afternoon games on CBS and Fox drew 35.3 million viewers, more than double the league’s regular season average. As a day off for most people, Black Friday seems primed for a major sporting event. Historically, the daytime TV schedule has featured many college football games, only two of which have drawn more than 5 million viewers: the 2020 Notre Dame-North Carolina game on ABC (viewers of 6.1 million) and the 2018 Oklahoma-West Virginia game at. ESPN (5.6 million). The NHL and NBA often have games on Fridays that don’t get large national audiences.
Black Friday is a big day in Amazon’s e-commerce world, too. For the past two years, Amazon has won the highest share of Black Friday, according to statistics from the data / technology company Numerator. Because many consumers already spend time shopping on Amazon, league officials see it as the best media partner to capture the Black Friday audience. Amazon was forced to test the game this year – the first with a special streaming package. But the NFL chose to wait a year to allow Amazon to get its sea legs to produce NFL games.
