The Price of “Football”

By Hamish Girvan

If you’re an NFL or EPL fan in New Zealand, welcome to the most exciting — and possibly most frustrating next 6-9 months. The 2025 off-season has shuffled star players around both the NFL and EPL, reshaping title favourites and creating fresh storylines to follow so fan engagement is at its highest. Seeing both sports are referred to as football in their respective countries, let’s stick with that.

For fans of either code, though, making sure you can actually watch games live or replays, without missing anything is becoming fragmented. Forever a la’ carte pricing for sporting content has been asked for so here it is.

This piece attempts to lay practical options (and pitfalls) for following both the NFL and English Football from New Zealand — including where rights sit, what streaming services are available and most importantly the cost. It’s not easy.

The National Football League (Or American Football) options

NFL Game Pass via DAZN: Two years ago, the NFL sold their international streaming rights to DAZN, so DAZN now offers NFL Game Pass in New Zealand giving access to every regular-season and playoff game, plus the Super Bowl coverage, From a fans perspective when NFL owned and managed the rights nothing was wrong however DAZN’s real focus is broadcasting boxing and MMA making their platform is pretty clunky, let alone expensive (approx NZ$300 for a 12 months subscription) when in reality the NFL season is only September to February.

Then there is good old Sky (or Sky Sport Sport Now for the streaming option) Select games and highlights are available on Sky Sport via 2 channels of ESPN sports coverage. Sky only really remains somewhat relevant from an NFL perspective.

For a free to air option TVNZ+ offers three live games a week and both the playoffs and Superbowl. It’s great to see the national broadcaster diving into the sports market.

But here is the game changer for this season  – Disney Plus. The acquisition of some of the NFL broadcast rights by ESPN has led to a number of games, and the must watch on Monday mornings in New Zealand, NFL Redzone, being available on Disney Plus this season – and a bargain at $16.99 a month. Disney Plus also includes a lot of other ESPN programming and the Disney catalogue of content. Combining Disney plus with TVNZ+ and you are pretty well covered.

NFL fans in the States don’t have it much easier. Games are scattered across NBC, CBS, Fox, ESPN, Amazon Prime, Peacock. If you want them all, you’re paying north of US$1,000/year – another mess of subscriptions. By comparison the options here are a bargain.

The Premier League, the FA and Carabao Cups and European Competitions

 

Fans of English Premier League teams don’t have things quite as straight forward and it’s now becoming a myriad of online subscriptions to navigate

Sky Sports (and Sky Sports Now) only cover the Premier League when only a few years back they covered everything. The various loss of broadcast rights to other providers mean that the flagship competition is still in their stable. For the majority of fans this is all that is required however if you want both the FA Cup and League Cup with that you need a beIN Sports subscription and if you want the Champions League or Europa League competitions its a DAZN subscription that is also required.

Cost wise it’s up there – take the $55-$60 a month for a Sky or Sky Sports Now subscription, $15 a month for beIN Sports and $30 for a DAZN subscription and you are looking at $105 approx a month (you can get it less by signing up for annual subscriptions but the season is only 10 months)

Fans in the UK don’t have it much different with both a combined Sky Sports + TNT Sports subscription costing about £64/month (NZ$142) however with a lesser offering having access to roughly only 267 of the 380 Premier League matches. Some Cup games are shown free to air on BBC or ITV.

The days of Assuming Sky carries everything are over and even next year’s Football World Cup showpiece is going to be on a pay per view basis on TVNZ+. More subscriptions but don’t we only want to pay for what we want to watch ?

Overall we don’t have it too bad here cost wise for both sports but as the costs to broadcast (as well as the salaries players demand) incresae the prices will only go one way. Look around for deals across the relevant platforms as pricing may be less expensive than outlined. You don’t want to miss a Travis Kelce touchdown celebration or a Manchester United loss by not knowing where to watch.

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