The NFL’s drive to get a multiyear head start on renegotiating its current media rights deals hit a snag Thursday, as a key broadcast partner declared it would retain the contractual status quo until the league’s opt-out clause formally kicks in at the end of the 2029-30 season.Speaking to investors during his company’s fourth-quarter earnings call, Fox Corp. executive chair and CEO Lachlan Murdoch said that he does not anticipate having any further discussions about the broadcast flagship’s NFL package until the contractual obligation forces the issue. “We’ve had recent, thorough and productive discussions with the league, and as a result we will not be making any amendments to our existing contractual relationship, which extends through the completion of the 2029[-30] season,” Murdoch said at the top of the morning call.“We’ll be ready to engage with the NFL, on the opt-out seasons and beyond, at a date closer to the 2030[-31] season, which has been the customary timetable,” Murdoch added during his opening remarks.While analysts pressed for further details regarding the circumstances that led him to making the decision to stick to the script, Murdoch chose to keep such matters under his hat. “On the NFL, we don’t see any changes to our contractual terms until the 2030 season, but I can’t really give you any color in terms of the background of how we’ve come to that,” he said.When the request for more intel was rephrased by a second analyst, Murdoch held his ground. “We always err on the side of not going into specifics about discussions with our partners, but suffice it to say that our relationship with the NFL is an incredibly positive one,” he said. “We’ve been talking with them over the last period about the future of our rights and certainly for the next four years and then beyond the opt-out period, but we feel we continue to have a great relationship with them and are in a good place. And when we sit down and talk about the contractual extension of our rights after the 2029 season, we’ll do that much closer to that date.”In a nod to the state of the longstanding Fox-NFL relationship, Murdoch reminded his audience about the company’s June 8 deal to secure the rights to a secondary broadcast package that will see it air Sunday afternoon and Thursday night games to fans in Mexico. The deal also includes transmissions of all NFC playoff games and the Super Bowl.As it happens, the NFL this fall will stage a game in Mexico for the first time in four years, as the Vikings are set to square off with the 49ers in the capital on Nov. 22. The Week 11 matchup will air here in the States on NBC’s Sunday Night Football.“We’ve just taken NFL rights for Mexico, and we continue to promote and amplify their games and the league, which we’ve been doing for the last 30 years,” Murdoch said. “So we think we can see a clear path forward, certainly through the 2029[-30] season and also beyond.”Fox closed out the 2025-26 NFL season with its usual massive ratings, averaging 25.3 million viewers per game in its national Sunday afternoon window and 19.6 million viewers across the 1 p.m. ET and 4:25 p.m. ET games. All told, Fox’s NFL deliveries were up 6% versus the previous campaign.While Murdoch characterized Fox’s relationship with the NFL as collegial, the media company of late has taken pains to amplify political scrutiny of the league’s legacy broadcast antitrust exemption. This spring, Fox submitted a statement encouraging the Federal Communications Commission to take a closer look under the regulatory hood at the NFL’s trend of “placing more content on less-regulated, paid streaming platforms.”As filed by Joseph Di Scipio, Fox Corp.’s senior VP, legal and FCC compliance, the 19-page document characterized the streaming interlopers as an “existential threat.” A few days after Di Scipio fired off the missive, the editorial board of Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal published a column suggesting the NFL should “explain why it still deserves” an antitrust exemption.Fox is the first NFL partner to publicly assert a lack of interest in hammering out an early revision of its existing media contract. While CBS owner Paramount Skydance has kept mum on the status of its discussions with the league, it now appears increasingly unlikely that the NFL’s desire to reconfigure its legacy rights deals will come to fruition before the new season kicks off on Sept. 9.CBS is the only NFL partner with a contractual obligation to get an early revision squared away. Skydance’s $8.4 billion acquisition of Paramount last summer triggered a contractual change-of-control clause that presented the NFL with an opportunity to reconfigure CBS’ legacy deal. Talks between the league and the network remain fluid, although the unsettled state of PSKY’s pending acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery appears to have further complicated matters.