| Andrés Martinez
The Netflix Christmas Day streaming of two marquee NFL games is an underappreciated milestone in sport’s globalization, but its actual historical significance is being overshadowed by a more prosaic concern: Will buffering or other glitches mess with my enjoyment of the game? Oh and also, how the heck did they get Beyoncé to perform for a regular season game?
That first prosaic question is especially understandable (and important when my Steelers will be on the field) after the glitches Netflix encountered on what amounted to its trial run for this occasion, the Mike Tyson – Jake Paul fighting spectacle. Netflix is an astonishing platform, but it is still a relative novice at driving its 283 million members in 190 countries toward the same live content in real time. As for the Beyoncé query, the answer also lies in those 283 million/190 numbers.
Yes, the NFL has stuck some of its games behind streaming platform paywalls before: Thursday nights on Amazon Prime and (much to the dismay of many fans) a playoff game on Peacock last January. But Netflix’s Christmas Day doubleheader represents a seismic watershed on a different order of magnitude, when you zoom out and look beyond the United States: this will be the first time America’s most popular sport is projected globally via a single “broadcast.”
We tend to analyze the advent of live sporting events on streaming platforms within the context of the ongoing transition from linear TV and cable bundles to streaming, and that’s certainly an important part of the story. But the Netflix Christmas deal also presages another possible transition, one towards global sports rights deals. It isn’t as if fans in other countries don’t get to watch other NFL games this season, it’s just that those games are accessible through a patchwork of outlets determined by country-by-country licensing agreements (and certainly not extending to 190 countries). Apple TV+ had earlier pioneered a revolutionary global rights deal with Major League Soccer, but the MLS is no NFL.
Weirdly, this instantaneous global reach for a domestic American football game has me thinking of Pelé’s visit to the United States in May of 1973. I have long been fascinated by a picture of President Richard Nixon receiving the world’s most famous athlete in the Oval Office. Nixon, one of the most avid sports fans to have ever served as president though he probably knew close to nothing about soccer, was already consumed by the Watergate scandal, and he clearly had very little to say to Pelé beyond some cringey platitudes.
Sporting cultures were so Balkanized back then, so confined to national boundaries. That is why the Nixon-Pelé photo opp resonates, as a rare diplomatic encounter between two civilizations that are far removed from each other but bound to coexist. The photo shares a similar poignancy to the shots of Nixon dining with Mao Zedong in Beijing the year before.
The night after he stopped by the Oval Office, Pelé appeared on the Tonight Show and introduced Johnny Carson and American late-night owls to the bicycle kick. Their interactions in a combination of broken Spanish and rudimentary English are both endearing and cringey. Reinforcing how non-globalized sporting cultures were back then, Carson marvels at one point that the Brazilian government has declared Pelé a national asset, preventing him from going to play in Europe, and saying how wonderful that was (it wasn’t). As it turned out, thanks to some forceful diplomacy by Henry Kissinger, Brazil’s authoritarian regime would allow Pelé to come to the U.S. to play two years later.
Even within the more interconnected world of international football outside the United States, things were far more cordoned off by country back then. I recently talked about this with our Great Game Lab Fellow Andrei Markovits. He pointed out that the difficulty of comparing Pelé vs. Maradona or Pelé vs. Messi isn’t just about comparing players across different times. It’s also the relative scant evidence of Pelé’s mesmerizing brilliance. It was part of his mystique at the time but now part of why he may be underappreciated: most people outside of Brazil or the Sao Paulo region only caught glimpses of Pelé every four years when the World Cup was on. By contrast, every weekly Messi game for years has been accessible to global audiences, and every highlight of his populates our social media, and can be recreated by kids on video games.
The Netflix Christmas deal, coming in the same year that the NFL played its first game ever in Brazil, is another milestone in the convergence of media and global sport. And it’s a reminder of globalization’s promise, removing national barriers that stand in the way of the creation of shared sporting cultures that bring like-minded people in different geographies closer together. More and more, we can find our games and our fellow fans in other places.
If only Netflix had been able to stream Pelé’s games for his club Santos back in the day.