NBA helps push global sports media rights to a record $65.8 billion

NEW YORK — Oct. 14, 2026 — Global sports media rights hit a record $65.82 billion in 2026, and the NBA is one of the main reasons the total climbed. SportBusiness’s Global Media Report 2026, published Wednesday, put year-over-year growth at 15 percent. The United States alone accounts for more than half of that market — about $35 billion — and American growth of 23 percent over the past 12 months was driven principally by the league’s 11-season domestic deals with Comcast, Disney and Amazon.

Those agreements also lifted the NBA to second place among global sports properties by media-rights value, behind only the NFL. The football league still generates nearly a fifth of all global media-rights money, more than the next two properties combined. Together, the NFL and the NBA account for roughly 30 percent of the worldwide total, according to the same report. The English Premier League sits at 7.8 percent.

What the NBA deals are worth

The domestic package that started with the 2025-26 season runs 11 years and is worth about $76 billion in total, or roughly $6.9 billion a year — a 165 percent jump from the prior cycle. Disney holds the lead package at about $2.6 billion per season across ABC and ESPN. Comcast’s NBCUniversal package is about $2.5 billion a year for NBC and Peacock. Amazon’s Prime Video package is about $1.8 billion a year. Earlier SportBusiness analysis put the NBA’s media and betting rights near $7.6 billion on an annualized basis, with more than 90 percent of that coming from the three domestic agreements.

That money shows up in more national windows than the old cycle offered. Regular-season national television inventory rose sharply, and streaming sits inside the same packages rather than as an afterthought. For teams, a bigger national pie supports franchise values and the salary-cap math that drives extension talks this month. For fans, it is why so many games now land on broadcast, cable and apps in the same week.

A record year that may not hold

Two one-off events helped 2026 look especially rich: the FIFA World Cup in North America and the Winter Olympics. Strip those out and the picture is flatter. SportBusiness forecasts the global total will fall back to $62.2 billion in 2027. Against the $62.4 billion recorded in 2024, a Summer Olympics year in Paris, two-year growth is only about 5 percent. The only year after 2026 projected to beat this year’s mark before the end of the decade is 2028, when a Summer Olympics and the UEFA European Championship land together.

Europe’s five biggest markets together are worth just over a third of the U.S. market, and none is projected to grow more than 1.5 percent a year between 2023 and 2029. France is the only top-10 market expected to shrink over that span after Ligue 1’s domestic value collapsed. The strongest growth outlooks sit in the Indian subcontinent and Australia. Football remains the most valuable sport worldwide, followed by American football, while the UFC entered the top 10 for the first time on the back of a massive rights deal.

Why this matters for the league

The report’s near-term risk is not basketball — it is whether the NFL reopens its domestic deals early. Those agreements run to 2033 with opt-outs after 2029-30, and Roger Goodell has signaled interest in renegotiating sooner. If football rights climb again, the NBA’s second-place ranking holds; if they stay locked at 2021 prices, basketball’s relative share looks even stronger. Either way, the league has already locked in a decade of elevated national fees while local TV models keep fracturing, as the Clippers’ ClipperVision launch this week underlined.

For now, the scoreboard is clear. Sports media rights have never been worth more in a single year, the U.S. owns more than half of that pile, and the NBA’s new Comcast-Disney-Amazon cycle is a primary reason the record was set. The next question is whether 2026 was a peak or a new floor.