Rogers Communications Inc. has doubled down on the NHL.
The Canadian broadcaster and majority owner of the Maple Leafs will spend a record $11 billion — about $7.7 billion (U.S.) — to extend its national broadcast rights for big-league hockey for 12 more years.
The Star has confirmed the story Sportico first broke. A formal announcement could come as early as this week.
The new deal kicks in for the 2026-27 season, when the old deal expires. That deal, a then-record $5.2 billion, is less than half the value of the current deal.
The deal does not include rights to the World Cup of Hockey, set for February 2028, but Rogers is believed to have the rights of first refusal. After the success of the 4 Nations Face-Off, a ratings winner on both sides of the border, the league is hoping for a separate lucrative revenue stream from international hockey.
The Rogers-NHL deal makes it likely that Amazon Prime Video, which began streaming games on Monday nights this year, will continue its deal to sublease games from Sportsnet. There’s one more year left on the Rogers-Amazon deal.
It also freezes out TSN from national broadcast rights again, though Canada’s other sports network has secured regional rights to the Maple Leafs, Canadiens, Senators and Jets.
TSN’s parent company, BCE Inc., had previously sold its 37.5 per cent stake in Maple Leaf Sports & Entertainment to Rogers Communications for $4.7 billion, a deal that valued MLSE at $12.5 billion.
That gave Rogers a big asset, and the company is apparently happy to invest in more hockey.
The run to the Stanley Cup final by the Edmonton Oilers went a long way to convincing Rogers to reinvest in the NHL’s national broadcast rights, according a source. It dominated not just ratings, which helps ad revenue, but helped get new customers to sign up.
Game 7 reached 15 million Canadians, or 39 per cent of Canada’s population. The game delivered Sportsnet’s most-watched broadcast with an average minute audience of 7.55 million across Sportsnet, Citytv and CBC.
The broadcast was also the most-watched program on Sportsnet-Plus, reaching 1.93 million streamers.
The state of Canada’s hockey teams is much stronger than in Rogers’ first year broadcasting all of the playoffs, when no Canadian teams made the post-season. Now the Leafs, Oilers and Jets are perennial playoff contenders, with young teams in Montreal and Ottawa looking to return to the post-season this season. Vancouver and Calgary aren’t that far off.
The news is also good for the NHL’s players. Increased fees for broadcast and streaming rights means more hockey-related revenue, which in turn will drive up the salary cap and the amount teams can spend on player contracts.
ESPN and TNT own the NHL’s television rights in the United States through the 2027-28 campaign. The networks pay the league approximately $600 million (U.S.) per season.
NHL revenues for the 2024-25 season are projected to exceed $6.6 billion (U.S.), the league’s highest sum ever. That means the salary cap will rise by $7.5 million in 2025-26, another $8.5 million in 2026-27, and by at least $9.5 million in 2027-28.
It hasn’t always been smooth sailing for Rogers as owners of properties like “Hockey Night In Canada.” It fired Don Cherry for inappropriate comments. It tried to replace “Hockey Night” host Ron MacLean with George Stroumboulopoulos in a move that had an immediate backlash with watchers preferring the folksy MacLean to the hipper Strombo.
It also hired and later laid off a number of key hockey voices like Glenn Healy, Paul Romanuk, Damien Cox and Mike Johnson. And it introduced and then abandoned “Hometown Hockey,” a show that brought the broadcaster’s biggest names to Canada’s small towns.
