The wild card in the proposed NFL-ESPN deal is Donald Trump. The blockbuster agreement, which would give the league a multibillion-dollar equity stake in the Disney-owned company, could be delayed or blocked by the president, sources told Front Office Sports this weekend.

The deal would face regulatory approval and government oversight, and Trump has no problem throwing his weight around when it comes to corporate deals, let alone those involving parties he has famously clashed with over the years. 

Trump just threatened to hold up the Commanders’ proposed $3.8 billion domed stadium unless they bow to his demand that they change their name back. Ari Fleischer, the former White House press secretary to President George W. Bush turned crisis communications consultant, says the proposed deal is “political catnip” for Trump. 

“Given his interest in the NFL, and his history of using media mergers for leverage, it’s hard to see him not playing around with this,” Fleischer tells FOS. “I doubt this will be a straightforward commercial transaction.”

Trump has fought with both the NFL and ESPN before, using them to drum up his base in the culture wars. OutKick founder Clay Travis, fired one of the first shots this weekend on social media. “President Trump should hold up the NFL Network selling to ESPN — which will require federal approval — and the building of a new Washington football stadium — which also will require federal approval — until the NFL agrees to bring the … name back.”

Added Travis in another tweet: “Some will argue that bringing the … name back is unimportant, but I disagree, it’s an important symbol that wokeness in sports is over and won’t be permitted any longer. I used to believe you could negotiate with left wingers on things like team names. You can’t. They never operate in good faith and always want more. You have to take ground back from these people and refuse to give them an inch ever again.” 

But when it comes to the name change, Fleischer sees Trump applying pressure elsewhere.

“Names are up to the team, not the central office. While that may be of no concern to Trump, I just don’t see him using this deal to achieve that. I can see him demanding that of the DC Council,” says Fleischer, whose firm, Ari Fleischer Communications, has consulted with the NFL, NBA, MLB, College Football Playoff, and the SEC, Big Ten, and ACC conferences. 

Trump’s issues with the NFL date back to the 1980s when he backed the old USFL’s antitrust lawsuit. Then NFL owners rejected Trump’s bid for the Bills in 2014, leading to his successful run for the presidency in 2016. During his first term in 2017, he lashed out at the league for allowing “son of a bitch” players to kneel in protest during the playing of the U.S. national anthem.

But the NFL and commissioner Roger Goodell have been smartly trying to mend fences with Trump. Goodell joined the president for a face-to-face chat in a luxury suite during Super Bowl LIX—the first time a sitting U.S. president had attended the Big Game in person. The commissioner was also on hand in the White House when Trump proudly announced Washington, D.C., as the site of the 2027 NFL Draft. The league previously told FOS it had “no issue” with players doing the “Trump Dance” as an on-field celebration. 

Still, as ProFootballTalk’s Mike Florio wrote: “Here’s the reality. To the extent that the NFL and ESPN were already walking on eggshells in order to avoid an executive order, they’ll be treading even more lightly now.”  

The long-awaited NFL-ESPN deal has been four years in the making. Under the proposed terms, sources say ESPN will get the popular RedZone channel, NFL Network’s slate of seven international game telecasts, and the league’s fantasy football business. ESPN is counting on RedZone to be a huge selling point for its new direct-to-consumer service launching for $29.99 per month this fall. The NFL, meanwhile, could acquire up to a 10% stake in ESPN, according to CNBC. That stake could be worth billions. The nation’s most powerful, popular league would also be able to exit the crumbling cable TV business, which it entered with the Nov. 4, 2003, launch of the NFL Network. 

Disney could make the deal official Wednesday when it reports its second-quarter earnings for 2025. Once the announcement is made, the waiting game will really kick in. Stay tuned.

Ryan Clark draws a little bit from Howard Stern in his philosophy on haters being a valuable part of one’s media audience. 

On a panel at Huddle in the Hamptons last week, the Super Bowl champion turned ESPN analyst was asked about sustaining a career in media after playing football. 

“It is such a subjective line of work, Clark said. “You have to get executives, you have to get viewers to not only believe your word and find trust in the way that you analyze and the way that you critique the game, but you also need to get them to want to hear your word. You need to get them to be fans of what you say. Or in the opposite or the polarizing effect, get them to hate what you say and get them to hate it enough that they’ll tune in.”

Clark, a regular on ESPN shows like Get Up and NFL Live and cohost of the Pivot podcast, argued that being polarizing can be an asset. 

“It’s the same thing [as] Floyd Mayweather,” Clark continued. “Floyd Mayweather wasn’t the greatest pay-per-view draw because everybody tuned in or bought his fights to watch him win. There were just as many people who bought his fights hoping that he lost. And it’s the same thing—I can’t walk around an airport or go to a gym without having someone debate me about their team or tell me about this certain thing that I said that they disagreed with.”

The key, Clark said, is surviving to make a media career sustainable in the long run. 

“The biggest thing about being a part of the media is how do I find a way to have longevity?” he asked. “It’s not about the splash you initially make because you were a great football player. It’s about who you become as a broadcaster, as an analyst, as a media member that gives you the longevity to have a tree that now has branches and tentacles that expand into other things like ownership, or other facets of business that allow you to make money off of your likeness.”

Speaking of prominent NFL players turned broadcasters with plenty of haters, Clark gave his take on Tom Brady’s broadcast career and whether it’s a conflict of interest that Brady is a minority owner in the Raiders. 

“If the greatest of all time can’t find a way to do both things … then nobody gets that opportunity,” Clark said. “If Tom Brady doesn’t get an opportunity to sit with [players] before the game and he can’t know what’s going through his mind, does that make Greg Olsen a better choice to listen to? I think that’s part of it. But if you’re the Las Vegas Raiders, absolutely, you want a man who’s been there, done that, experienced everything, and also seen every single level of being a player. … There isn’t a level of football that man does not understand. And to be able to give that knowledge to a team, and then also the viewers who are watching the game, in my opinion, Tom Brady is entitled to that because he earned that.”

MLS commissioner Don Garber defended the league’s streaming deal with Apple during a Front Office Sports event, just over a week after revealing some surprising viewership metrics about the 10-year, $2.5 billion media-rights contract.

“The media and pundits just don’t get it yet,” Garber said at Huddle in the Hamptons on Friday. “I’m not sure we are where we need to be, but I know that we’re going to have to get there soon.”

At MLS All-Star festivities in Austin last month, Garber said regular-season matches this season have been averaging 120,000 unique viewers, which was an increase of almost 50% compared to 2024.

However, unique viewers are not a true comparison to the average-minute audience that Nielsen, the industry standard for TV ratings, tracks for most other major sports leagues. In 2022, the last season before the Apple deal went into effect, ESPN networks averaged 343,000 viewers per match for their allotment of national TV broadcasts. Fox Sports also had some English-language broadcasts.

At Huddle in the Hamptons, Garber highlighted the international aspect of Apple’s global deal, saying he’s just as interested in who’s watching in Argentina as he is in who’s watching in Columbus, Ohio. “We had no ability to do that with a domestic linear deal, without going out and selling individual game packages to be the fourth or fifth or tenth program on some channel in Germany,” Garber said.

Garber believes MLS is at the forefront of a sports streaming revolution, despite the viewership not reflecting the switch just yet. “Other than the hassle of people complaining about it, we feel pretty good,” he said.

Garber predicted the world’s top soccer leagues will all eventually use a similar TV distribution model as MLS, which now has 600 games per season, “treated as one global feed” on Apple. “We’re just early,” he said.

Looking back at the decision to broadcast exclusively on the streamer, Garber is confident that moving away from multiple local and national TV partners was the right call. “We had 30 games on ESPN, 30 games on Fox, and 30 games on Univision, and we had 540 games on local TV, and nobody was watching them, and we weren’t getting paid,” he said.