The NFL and ESPN effectively merged earlier this week.
The NFL, the football league, now owns 10 percent of ESPN. ESPN, the sports network, acquired several key assets in return, including NFL Network and the ownership of the RedZone brand.
As lots of other people have written before me, it’s a pretty big move for the NFL, which is still technically a football league, but more of a media empire that happens to run a football competition.
This is pretty common in sports, particularly in global soccer, where power brands like Barcelona, PSG, and Real Madrid, have grown to a spot where they are more so content and media companies that happen to play sports, too. Formula 1, too, I would argue, is now more of a media and content empire that happens to run races on Sundays.
The NHL has dabbled here, there have been steps, but at its core the hockey league still remains more of a hockey league than a media/content enterprise. Hockey isn’t popular enough nor does it have the same reach as those other behemoths, and trying to compare it to those other sports, frankly, is disingenuous.
All that being said, this ESPN-NFL deal could be notable for hockey fans.
As a reminder, ESPN is the NHL’s primary rights holder in the United States, holding the “A Package” and the out-of-market rights, which live on ESPN+. And the NFL, through this new deal, is now technically a stakeholder in the NHL’s success as a brand.
And even before this deal, the NHL schedule has been adjusted because of football and ESPN, albeit for the NCAA. One of the reasons the NHL season doesn’t start earlier, and therefore the Stanley Cup is awarded in late June, is because ESPN wants to delay the start of the season as long as possible so there’s less crossover with it’s college football properties.
That, of course, could feel a bit scary for hockey fans. Football always held power over hockey — many teams in the sunbelt areas, for example, ask for less home games in the first half of the season to avoid football — and now that power was given a formal additional boost with the top American broadcast partner.
But, I do think, and maybe this is the optimist in me, that there’s a nice potential silver lining here if the NHL is smart about understanding how the RedZone brand could be pitched to boost NHL viewership.
With ESPN now owning the branding rights to RedZone, the NFL has agreed that the name and format can officially be used for other properties and leagues. The first thought, of course, is college football even if that one might be messy with ESPN not holding Big 10 rights.
ESPN, does, however own all NHL out-of-market rights. It’s also used its position before to manipulate the NHL schedule with the “Frozen Frenzy” the past two seasons, where there were 16 games a day with no identical start times.
Putting aside logistical questions for a moment, ESPN as soon as this season, now has the ability to launch an “NHL RedZone” channel with full whip-around coverage highlights, live look-ins, and whatnot.
This is where it’s important to talk about the power of the “RedZone” name and brand. The NHL Network, for example, has full whip-around coverage and does this, but it’s very hard to find NHL Network on most television providers and it’s a very niche network.
Also launching something called “NHL power play” or “NHL goal zone” or something, is really only marketing to the diehard hockey fans, it’s not really a “meet people where they are at,” strategy.
Hockey’s problem is two-fold. It’s both niche and tribal. Most hockey fans are fans of their team and their team only, for many fans the season ends with their team, which is why the Stanley Cup Final often has diminishing returns of viewership unless a major market is in play to help with ratings.
An “NHL RedZone” could help with both hockey’s internal and external fan problem.
Internally, it would create a bit more of the normalcy of watching other teams and games, creating a bit of the default for fans to flip to when their team isn’t playing.
Externally the “RedZone” brand is well known, honestly, it’s probably better known than any NHL team or player. Go ask a random person, not a hockey fan, I would argue in America that RedZone host Scott Hanson is more well-known and recognizable to the average person than Sidney Crosby or Connor McDavid.
So for the NHL a channel with “RedZone,” even if it’s a football term, brings more instant legitimacy and curiosity. It’s an outreach to fans that are used to consuming sports in that fashion, and also checks the box for the multi-screen/TikTok viewership habits that are forming with most viewers under the age of 35.
It wouldn’t be as clean as the NFL product, hockey is too free-flowing for that, but it’s a setup that if, done correctly, with a production team that actually understands the sport could become a default channel for sports fans.
Again, there are major logistical hurdles to this, and maybe the NFL is going to do everything in its power to keep RedZone as a football-only brand. But if the NHL is smart about this and pushes for a seat at the RedZone table, there’s a major opportunity.
Curios of your thoughts on this. Also curios how you think an optimal format would work for something like this. Let me know what you think and we can chat about it in the comments.
