March 2025
Case
HBS Case Collection

YouTube: Bidding for NFL Sunday Ticket

By: Anita Elberse and Crystal Yao

Format:Print
| Language:English
| Pages:10

Abstract

In December 2022, Erin Teague, a senior director and the global head of sports, movies and shows at YouTube, technology giant Alphabet Inc.’s video- sharing platform, received the news that Sundar Pichai, the chief executive officer of Alphabet and its subsidiary Google, had given his approval to bid for the rights to the National Football League (NFL)’s Sunday Ticket package. The video-sharing platform was to date mostly associated with short-form content uploaded by what YouTube’s executives called “endemic creators”—individuals who had built up fanbases of sometimes tens of millions or, as was the case for its true superstars, well over a hundred million followers. Widely expected to be the subject of a bidding war involving other technology heavyweights such as Amazon and Apple, the winning bid for NFL Sunday Ticket was anticipated to have to be well over $1.5 billion, and perhaps closer to $2 billion, a year. Was bidding for NFL Sunday Ticket the right move for YouTube, even if it could be viewed as a departure from the company’s origins? And if so, how should YouTube approach the bid?