Sunday Ticket prices increase, while NFL decreases the number of Sunday afternoon games

A quarter-century ago, NFL Sunday Ticket felt like a modern miracle to football fans. What once was an impossible dream, being able to watch any NFL game you wanted on Sunday afternoon, was now a reality. Fans who could previously only watch a game or two on Sunday could now have their pick of more than a dozen. It was an astonishing luxury to have all those games just a remote click away.

Sunday Ticket is still a popular item for football fans, but it has lost some luster. There are now so many opportunities to watch the NFL, on so many days of the week, that it's much easier for fans to feel like they're getting their fill by watching only the games that air on prime time or on their local affiliates on Sunday afternoon, without needing Sunday Ticket.

In 2002, the first season when the NFL had 32 teams, there were 17 Monday night games, 16 Sunday night games, three Thursday games and five Saturday games. Everything else was on 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. Far fewer games were 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 one week longer, only 198 of 272 games (73 percent) were on Sunday afternoon.

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 Sunday Ticket is increasingly unnecessary for fans of popular teams that are frequently shown 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 shown across most of the country by Fox or CBS. If you're a Chiefs fan outside Kansas City or a Cowboys fan outside Dallas , it's a rare week when you need Sunday Ticket to watch your team.

And missing a game just isn't as big a deal today as it was in the early days of Sunday Ticket because there are so many opportunities to see what you're missing: If you have RedZone channel, you'll see all the big plays from every game, and even if you don't have RedZone, highlights are all over social media.

As the necessity of Sunday Ticket decreases, its prices increase: In 2023, YouTube took Sunday Ticket over from DirecTV, which had it from its inception. According to the Wall Street Journal , YouTube has increased the price of Sunday Ticket by almost 30 percent while the number of games available has declined.

The biggest NFL fans, the ones who love nothing more than spending a Sunday afternoon watching multiple games on multiple screens, will keep paying. But for a lot of fans, more money for fewer games is increasingly looking like a bad deal.