As rival streamers eagerly snatched up the rights to Major League Baseball, the National Football League, and the National Basketball Association, Netflix balked. The company wasn’t “anti-sports,” Netflix’s co-CEO Ted Sarandos explained in 2022. It was just “pro-profit.” And with leagues routinely fetching billions for their broadcast and streaming rights, Sarandos said that Netflix didn’t see “a profit path to renting big sports.”

By the end of last year, the company continued to stand pat, with Sarandos telling investors there was “no core change in our live sport strategy or licensing of live sports.” Netflix had established itself as the dominant player in the sports documentary space, drawing big audiences and critical acclaim for series such as Drive to Survive, Quarterback, and Full Swing. That, Sarandos said at the time, was the extent of the company’s sporting purview.

“We are in the sports business,” he said then, “but we’re in the part of the sports business that we bring the most value to, which is the drama of sport.”

With 2024 drawing to a close, those comments now read a bit like a New Year’s resolution that didn’t stick. The last 12 months have seen Netflix dive head first into live sports, beginning in January, when the company signed a 10-year, $5 billion deal with WWE. Two months later, Netflix revealed that it would stream a fight between Jake Paul and Mike Tyson, which according to the company, drew 108 million global viewers and peaked at 65 million concurrent streams. On Friday, Netflix landed exclusive US broadcasting rights for the next two FIFA Women's World Cup tournaments, “a landmark moment for sports media rights,” as Gianni Infantino, the organization’s president, put it. And next week, Netflix is staking yet another claim in big-time sports by exclusively carrying two NFL games.

Brandon Riegg, the vice president of nonfiction series and sports at Netflix, said that the company’s recent sports offerings don’t “represent a seismic shift” in strategy, but a change in its capacity to host live events. Last year, Netflix streamed a live comedy special with Chris Rock and a golf tournament involving members of the PGA Tour and Formula 1 drivers. “I think because we hadn’t gotten into sport, there was this belief and presumption like, They’re just not going to do that,” Riegg told me. “But we didn’t have live functionality capabilities so that precluded it right there.”

The yuletide doubleheader––which will feature the defending Super Bowl champion Kansas City Chiefs visiting the Pittsburgh Steelers, followed by the Houston Texans playing host to the Baltimore Ravens––is a marriage between the world’s biggest streaming service and the country’s most popular sport. As part of the deal, Netflix will also carry at least one holiday game in 2025 and 2026, and the conventional wisdom throughout the NFL is that this is only the start of a partnership between the company and the league. “We’re so excited in the NFL about Netflix becoming a huge part of our future,” Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones recently said. The NFL’s current media rights deal runs through 2033, but the league has the option to opt out after the 2029 season and open negotiations with new bidders. The expectation around the media industry and league is that Netflix will pursue a larger package of games at that time.

“I guess we’ll see,” said Brian Rolapp, the chief media and business officer at the NFL. “We have a multiyear agreement now, and I think the focus is making sure that’s great and executing on that. I think with Netflix, it’s sort of similar to other platforms. Our business sort of evolves with it.”

Netflix, for its part, isn’t ready to declare the Christmas games as a harbinger of more NFL on its platform. Riegg said that the company is selective about the type of live sports it streams, preferring a one-off spectacle over a season-long package. “I think it’s got to feel like something that we can truly spotlight and ‘eventize’ for our members and that feels differentiated,” Riegg said.

“Big audience and big conversation,” he added. “Those are the criteria.”

The Christmas doubleheader will satisfy those requirements. The Chiefs-Steelers game, kicking off at 1 p.m., will feature a couple of the sport’s biggest names, Patrick Mahomes and Travis Kelce, while two-time MVP Lamar Jackson will lead the Ravens against the Texans at 4:30 pm. Not to mention, Netflix has tapped Beyoncé to perform at halftime for the second game, while Mariah Carey will appear in a pre-taped rendition of her iconic holiday tune. The company has also assembled a small army of commentators and entertainers to contribute to its coverage.

The chance to team up with the NFL over the holidays was a case of Netflix being “opportunistic,” Riegg said.

“We’re certainly not getting into sports in the traditional sense. We didn’t bid on the NBA package. It’s not like we’re carrying 18 weeks of the NFL season,” he said. “But when the NFL said, We want to make Christmas Day a thing, we engaged with them because of the checklist of what we look for with these live events. Is it a big audience and does it drive a lot of conversation and buzz?”

With the NFL increasingly moving its content from linear television to digital platforms, Netflix will be the third streamer to exclusively carry a game this season. Amazon’s Prime Video has served as the weekly home of Thursday Night Football since 2022, while the NBC-owned streaming service Peacock aired the week one game between the Green Bay Packers and Philadelphia Eagles in September in São Paulo, Brazil. Prime Video will also stream an NFL playoff game next month, after Peacock became the first streaming service to exclusively show a postseason game last January.

Rolapp said the league has been “deliberate” in its pivot to digital platforms. The NFL exclusively streamed its first game in 2015 on Yahoo, and began simulcasting games on what was then known as Twitter in 2016. Its deal with Amazon for Thursday Night Football, which was inked in 2021 and runs through 2033, was “years in the making,” Rolapp said. “We haven’t rushed into any of this stuff,” he added. “Netflix is no different. That platform has evolved.”

How the NFL’s partnership with Netflix evolves remains to be seen. Rolapp said that Quarterback, the 2023 Netflix docuseries about football’s most important position, was the “genesis” of the league’s relationship with the company. Quarterback and this summer’s follow-up series Receiver allowed Netflix, which says it has 283 million subscribers in more than 190 countries, to flex its global reach.

“They not only resonated here in the United States, but around the world, they had quite a bit of interest,” Rolapp said.

The league’s Christmas deal with Netflix is the first time the NFL has negotiated a game package with worldwide distribution, Rolapp noted. And with the NFL planning to increase the number of international games from five to eight next season, there have been suggestions that some could be carried by Netflix. Rolapp didn’t exactly tamp down that speculation.

“I don’t think it’s a coincidence that we have done our first real global deal for a game package at the same time that we have really focused on how to grow the game internationally, and we are playing more games internationally than we ever have before,” he said. “When you try to grow the sport internationally, it’s important that you actually bring your best product to those territories.”

For now, Netflix is focused on conquering Christmas. Riegg said that the games will have a “Netflix sheen,” and will “showcase some of the most popular pieces of the Netflix universe.” Comedians Bert Kreischer and Nate Bargatze, both of whom have forthcoming specials on Netflix, will be a part of the festivities. The company has also enlisted a number of NFL commentators from other networks, including ESPN’s Mina Kimes and Fox’s Greg Olsen, to contribute to its coverage. Meanwhile, CBS will produce both of the games, while NFL Network will handle the pregame, postgame, and halftime shows.

“Whether it’s broadcast television or if it’s streaming, when an NFL fan turns on that game, it’s got to look like an NFL game,” Rolapp said. “There’s a high level of production that an NFL fan expects.”

Those fans will also expect the games to unfold without any disruptions. That didn’t happen with last month’s fight between Paul and Tyson, which was marred by technical difficulties. But Riegg said he is “incredibly confident” that the NFL games will run smoothly. The Paul-Tyson fight, he told me, was “the mother of all stress tests.”

“What went wrong is also what went right. So many people came to watch that fight that it completely blew past any expectation that we had, and it tested the system to the nth degree,” Riegg said. “I’d say, the good news about all of this stuff is those are all solvable problems.” The NFL also expects that––and for the games to be glitch-free. “Tyson-Paul had 65 million concurrents, which is a gigantic number,” Rolapp said. “And for the most part, the quality was good.”

The NFL dominates American television like nothing else, claiming 93 of the 100 highest-rated broadcasts in the United States last year. Riegg declined to offer an estimate for the Christmas doubleheader, but said he expects it to attract a “meaningful-sized audience.”