NFL Nears Deal for YouTube Game That Could Break Streaming Records

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.