The NFL’s push to maximize exposure during the 2025 season is bringing in a new, but familiar, partner.

The league is closing in on an agreement to have the Google-owned YouTube, distributors of the residential version of NFL Sunday Ticket, carry the Sept. 5 game in Brazil involving the Chargers as the home team. The deal, according to sources, will see the opening-week game from São Paulo include the Chiefs, the NFL’s top viewership draw, as the visiting team.

By placing the game for free on YouTube, which boasts more than 2.5 billion monthly active users around the world, the audience is likely to challenge—if not surpass—the league’s streaming record of an average of 24.3 million viewers in the U.S., set last year in the nightcap of a Christmas Day doubleheader on Netflix. Production details for the Brazil game, however, remain unknown, and like other streamers, YouTube does not have the in-house capabilities to produce an NFL broadcast.

The Brazil contest, shown last year on NBCUniversal’s Peacock, is additionally a centerpiece of the NFL’s expanding international strategy. 

While YouTube prepares for its third season of carrying out-of-market games, the move sees the NFL continue to grow its relationship with streamers—in turn helping the league attract younger viewers. Amazon is beginning its fourth season of exclusive Thursday Night Football coverage in 2025, as it draws ever closer to linear-type audiences and is poised for a further boost this year as measurement methodologies expand. 

Netflix is also a critical part of the NFL’s rights holder mix, and the league in turn is a pillar of the company’s rising sports presence. 

Schedule Watching

The NFL, meanwhile, is poised for a blockbuster run of publicity next week with the release of the 2025 regular-season schedule, which will feature a number of critical changes from last year. 

The full unveiling of the schedule will happen during the evening of May 14, but be preceded by a series of individual network announcements of key games between May 12 and earlier on the 14th. Those announcements will coincide with those networks’ upfront presentations to advertisers of their programming plans for the coming year, and reinforce the NFL’s status as the top content in U.S. television, regardless of genre. 

Within that, the league will release its international schedule on May 13, including the Brazil game. 

The placement of the Chiefs in the second game of the 2025 season, while the Eagles will host the kickoff contest as defending Super Bowl champions, inverts the start of the 2024 schedule that had Philadelphia playing in Brazil following a season opener in Kansas City. The move also keeps both of those top-drawing teams squarely in the national limelight. 

Roku will begin its second season of airing MLB games on Sunday, extending a unique position as both a streamer of original content and a curator of other networks’ programming.

The company will begin the 2025 season of MLB Sunday Leadoff on May 11 with a Cubs-Mets game. Like last year, the early Sunday afternoon games are designed to be a lead-in to the rest of the day’s action across other MLB rights holders. The broadcasts will be produced by the league and air for free on Roku, as well as on MLB.TV.

The MLB games are a centerpiece of Roku’s strategy, recently detailed during a press event, to help solve the fragmentation problem common across sports media. 

“This is a critical way to demonstrate the power of our platform and the sports experience that we’ve built,” Roku Media head of sports Joe Franzetta tells Front Office Sports. “It’s about bringing something to the table that’s complementary to the rest of sports.”

The MLB Sunday Leadoff games, meanwhile, are the subject of some confusion and frustration among some league rights holders. ESPN recently cited Roku’s annual $10 million rights fee, far below ESPN’s own package carrying a $550 million annual cost, as a sign of MLB devaluing its content and part of its justification for walking away from its deal three years early.

The league also monetizes MLB Sunday Leadoff with its own advertising sales, and Roku’s agreement is not a media-rights deal in the traditional sense but rather more of a hybrid arrangement also including a series of marketing components.

Roku City

The streamer, meanwhile, is also working with the league to include MLB logos and player images within Roku City, the company’s highly popular television screensaver and virtual metropolis that reaches more than 40 million U.S. households.

The league will extend its existing, anime-themed “Heroes of the Game” marketing campaign—one that includes stars such as the Dodgers’ Shohei Ohtani, Yankees’ Aaron Judge, Mets’ Juan Soto, and Pirates’ Paul Skenes—into Roku City. That screensaver already has included a wide range of pop culture easter eggs, and the latest move represents a new level of involvement there by a major sports league. 

“This is about putting MLB stars front and center wherever we can, and tapping into Roku’s big reach,” MLB director of global brand management Steven Tyler tells FOS. “We see this as a huge opportunity to position these games as must-watch events.”

The saga between Bill Belichick, Jordon Hudson, and the University of North Carolina continued to unfurl Friday as reports suggested the legendary coach’s 24-year-old girlfriend was banned from the school’s football facilities.

On Friday morning, journalist Pablo Torre reported on his podcast Pablo Torre Finds Out that Hudson had been banned from UNC’s football facility. He cited two sources at the school saying that officials in the athletic department decided Hudson would not be allowed in the football facility or on the field, quoting one of them as saying, “Don’t think you’ll be hearing much from Jordon moving forward.”

Belichick has been in a public PR crisis, peaking with a tense interview to promote his new book with CBS News Sunday Morning. Hudson was seen shutting down questions about their relationship; CBS reporter Tony Dokoupil called her a “constant presence.”

Belichick released a statement through UNC after the interview claiming he had only agreed to speak about his book. CBS said the interview took place without any preconditions. The entire saga raised questions about how much influence Hudson plays in the eight-time Super Bowl–winning coach’s professional life, especially after he stopped working with former PR handler Berj Najarian. For his part, Belichick said that he and Hudson have “both a personal and professional relationship.”

In response to Torre’s podcast—which also said Hudson had forced her way onto a seven-figure commercial with Belichick—the university denied the report that Hudson is banned from facilities, telling reporters there had been “false reports about Jordon Hudson’s role.”

“While Jordon Hudson is not an employee at the University or Carolina Athletics, she is welcome to the Carolina Football facilities,” a spokesperson for the athletic department said in a statement to Front Office Sports. “Jordon will continue to manage all activities related to Coach Belichick’s personal brand outside of his responsibilities for Carolina Football and the University.”

But Torre doubled down, standing by his reporting in a statement to FOS.

“The University of North Carolina can choose to describe or change its position on Jordon Hudson’s involvement however it wishes, following the publication of our episode,” he said. “We requested comment and filed dozens of FOIA requests that were not satisfied. And we stand by the specific reporting in our episode, which came from the highest levels of the football program.”

A UNC spokesperson did not immediately respond to a question about whether Hudson had ever been banned from the facility previously.

Belichick signed on to lead the UNC program in December and will earn a salary of $10 million annually. Hudson reportedly was central to the collapse of an agreement that Belichick and North Carolina had with NFL Films to film Hard Knocks on campus.