A quarter of a century ago, NFL Sunday Ticket felt like a modern day miracle for football fans. What was once an impossible dream, being able to watch any NFL game you wanted on a Sunday afternoon was now a reality. Fans who previously could only watch one or two games on Sunday can now have their pick of more than a dozen. It was an amazing luxury to have all those games just a click away.
The Sunday Ticket is still a popular item for football fans, but it has lost some of its luster. There are now so many options to watch the NFL, on so many days of the week, that it’s much easier for fans to feel like they’re stuffing themselves by only watching games that air in prime time or on their local affiliates on Sunday afternoon, without the need for a Sunday Ticket.
In 2002, the first season when the NFL had 32 teams, there were 17 Monday night games, 16 Sunday night games, three on Thursday and five on Saturday. Everything else was Sunday afternoon.
In 2025, there were 21 Monday night games, 18 Sunday night games, six Sunday morning international games, 21 Thursday games (including three on Christmas Day), six Saturday games and two Friday games. There were far fewer games on Sunday afternoon.
So for the 2002 season, 215 of the NFL’s 256 games (84 percent) were on Sunday afternoon. By 2025, when the season was a week longer, only 198 of 272 games (73 percent) were on Sunday afternoons.
Many Sunday Ticket subscribers get the service because they want to watch their favorite team, but don’t live in their favorite team’s market. But The Sunday Ticket is increasingly unnecessary for fans of popular teams that appear frequently on national television. Last year the Chiefs and Cowboys each played eight games that were either on Sunday night or another day of the week, and many of their Sunday afternoon games were televised in much of the country by Fox or CBS. If you’re a Chiefs fan outside of Kansas City or a Cowboys fan outside of Dallas, it’s a rare week when you need Sunday Ticket to see your team.
And missing a game isn’t as big a deal today as it was in the early days of Sunday Ticket, because there are so many opportunities to catch up on what you’re missing: If you have the RedZone channel, you’ll see all the big plays from every game, and even if you don’t have RedZone, the highlights are all over social media.
As the need for Sunday Ticket decreases, its prices increase: In 2023, YouTube took over Sunday Ticket from DirecTV, which had it since its inception. According to Wall Street Journal, YouTube has increased the price of Sunday tickets by almost 30 percent, while the number of games available has fallen.
The biggest NFL fans, those who want nothing more than to spend a Sunday afternoon watching multiple games on multiple screens, will continue to pay. But for many fans, more money for fewer games is increasingly looking like a bad deal.