The 2024 NFL regular season schedule hasn’t yet been announced — but it already looks thoroughly exhausting for the Kansas City Chiefs and their fans.
The Chiefs’ success has placed it directly inside the league’s spotlight following four Super Bowl appearances — and three wins — in the last five seasons. But future Hall of Fame tight end Travis Kelce’s relationship with pop icon Taylor Swift increased the lumens, pointing a bigger audience toward Kansas City than ever before.
The NFL has no interest in wasting that. That’s why the league is using the Chiefs as a battering ram to force its continued expansion upon the world.
This means combining ideas meant to both line the league’s coffers and make the game more expensive and less accessible to fans. 2023’s Black Friday game is back, but if you want to see Patrick Mahomes take on the Las Vegas Raiders, welp, you’d better have Amazon Prime. The success of last year’s Christmas Day games — which at least made some sense since the holiday fell on a Monday — has led to more Christmas games in 2024… where the holiday falls on a Wednesday.
Kansas City drew that assignment, too. (Aside: nothing about last year’s Christmas Day Chiefs game suggests the world needs another.) Want to watch it? You’re gonna need to pony up for Netflix on top of that Amazon Prime subscription.
Sources: The #Steelers will host the #Chiefs in Week 17 on Christmas Day — a game that will be exclusively on Netflix.🎄🏈 https://t.co/4wDHkurVBS pic.twitter.com/k2eH5tLldY
— Jordan Schultz (@Schultz_Report) May 15, 2024
This comes after the team’s Wild Card playoff game against the Miami Dolphins wound up paywalled being the lagging, pixelated screens of NBC’s Peacock service. That game set national streaming records and showed the NFL there was still meat left to be butchered from this cash cow.
The early leaks of the 2024 schedule suggest the league won’t waste the squeal when it comes to the Chiefs’ ever-expanding fandom. While a steady diet of nationally broadcast primetime games will be available — starting with the traditional reigning champion’s season opener on NBC Thursday night — it’s clear the league sees Kansas City as the tip of the spear. If you want to watch Andy Reid’s team each week, whether that’s to observe Mahomes’ wizardry, appreciate Steve Spagnuolo’s defensive aggression or support Taylor Swift while she supports her new favorite team, you’re going to need Sunday Ticket, Netflix and Amazon Prime at the very least.
That expansion into new, subscription-based markets won’t end there. Amazon’s Thursday Night Football deal begat Peacock’s bid for an exclusive playoff game. Peacock’s streaming success for a frigid Wild Card game that wasn’t particularly competitive drew Netflix into the fold. The NFL is searching for a saturation point it may not hit until it has games five days a week in two continents on three over-the-air networks, two cable ones and six streaming services.
The league’s hypothesis is this limit does not exist. It’s turning Chiefs fans into its guinea pigs for this experiment. Maybe 2024 will be the breaking point that deters commissioner Roger Goodell in his quest for world domination. But more likely it’ll be a season filled with triumphant press releases touting streaming numbers without tacitly mentioning how much extra cash was milked out of fans to get there.
