The NFL will expand to Black Friday beginning next season.
The league announced Tuesday that Amazon Prime Video will stream a game on the day after Thanksgiving. The first Black Friday game will kick off at 3 p.m. Eastern time on Nov. 23, 2023. The teams will be announced in May when the regular-season schedule is expected to be released.
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Prime Video is in its first season as the exclusive carrier of “Thursday Night Football” and will expand to 16 games next season.
The package, which goes through the 2033 season, averages $1.2 billion per season, and Amazon will pay between $50 million and $70 million per year for the additional game.
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NFL owners passed a resolution during league meetings in March that gave the league permission to schedule another short-turnaround game the week of Thanksgiving.
Marie Donoghue, Amazon’s vice president of global sports video, said discussions about a Black Friday game began while the original contract was being negotiated last year, and it picked up more steam this year.
Donoghue said Amazon will treat the game like one of the biggest of the season.
“Given what that day already means to millions of Americans … and also the fact that there were no NFL games on that day, we thought we could treat it like a Super Bowl,” she said.
The NFL has regularly played three games on Thanksgiving since 2006. NFL Network originally carried the prime-time game before NBC took it over in 2012. CBS and Fox alternate carrying the early game in Detroit and the late afternoon matchup in Dallas.
There were rumors this summer that the Black Friday game would be fast-tracked to this year, but the day already is packed with the World Cup and high-profile college football matchups.
The United States will face England in a World Cup group stage match on Fox at 2 p.m. ET. College football has long used Black Friday to showcase rivalry games, and this year is no exception with Texas-Baylor, North Carolina-N.C. State, Missouri-Arkansas, Iowa-Nebraska and Florida State-Florida among the matchups.
“This year we were focused on the 15 Thursdays they already had,” said Hans Schroeder, executive vice president of NFL Media. “But now as we get here almost to the halfway point and see the great success out of the gate with Amazon, it felt like the right time to take the next step forward and add to the partnership and expand onto Black Friday.”
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According to Nielsen, Prime Video is averaging 10.8 million viewers through the first five games. The last two have not been must-see TV as the Indianapolis Colts defeated the Denver Broncos 12-9 and the Washington Commanders held on for a 12-7 victory over the Chicago Bears.
This Thursday’s game matches 2-4 teams when the New Orleans Saints visit the Arizona Cardinals. The Oct. 27 matchup features Lamar Jackson’s Baltimore Ravens and Tom Brady’s Tampa Bay Buccaneers.
The league has eight weeks set aside to cycle through byes, but all 32 teams are playing in Week 12 this season, which is the week of Thanksgiving.
The additional game also means there will be eight windows to fill with intriguing matchups while satisfying five broadcast partners. Schroeder said the league had the same case this year with Christmas week and it will use that as a template for how to build the week of Thanksgiving.
