The NFL’s salary cap for 2024 could take another big leap and exceed $240 million thanks to a number of rich media deals, particularly with streaming services.
The league isn’t expected to provide a projection for the salary cap until after New Year’s Day, but it’s on track for another big jump after this year, according to The Insiders article on NFL.com. The cap was $224.8 million this year, which was already a big gain from 2022’s $208.2 million cap, according to The Insiders.
The article cites lucrative media deals that kicked in this year. Notably, Google’s YouTube TV began airing games via its Sunday Ticket package, which it took over from DIRECTV. Google reportedly paid $2 billion for the rights to that package. Additionally, this was the second year of Amazon carrying Thursday Night Football games on Prime Video, with this season marking the inaugural Black Friday NFL game.
The deals represent the intense interest that streaming services have shown for live sports, which has increasingly become a way for them to draw in new audiences. Once the sole domain of cable, live sports is increasingly playing a bigger role in services like Peacock and Max.
That dynamic is yielding larger and more lucrative media deals, with different leagues able to maximize their revenue by splitting up games between cable and streaming services. The NFL, the most valuable league in the U.S., has had particular success carving out different deals for its games.
The Insider noted that between 2013 to 2020, the salary cap had grown at a pace of $10.74 million a year, but the pandemic and the new media deals have shook things up the last few years.