David Rosenthal

Right as Disney is now going out and making the pitch to consumers, hey, in addition to Disney Plus and Hulu, also subscribe to ESPN Unlimited and your new digital streaming cable bundle, essentially.

Now here's where it gets really interesting for the NFL.

Already, their rights partners were moving to much more of a tech company digital mix than cable networks and broadcast networks with Google, Netflix, with Amazon, etc.

in doing this deal, they're now essentially helping stand up another digital bidder for future media rights with this new ESPN standalone streaming service.

Like it is vastly in the NFL's interests for a standalone digital ESPN streaming service to be viable, to then also be a bidder on their future media rights.

So they're helping make sure that that happens.

And they're getting a 10% equity stake in the whole thing, too.

So this is a great deal.

And to be clear, it's not like the NFL is just getting a 10% stake in the new ESPN streaming service.

They're getting a 10% stake in ESPN, the whole thing.

This is everything we talked about in the episode.

The NFL is the most perfectly designed league, maybe with the exception of IPL now that we've done that.

The most perfectly designed American league for a media product.

Very, very fun.

But that said, even now, a couple years later, and even now after the Taylor Swift crossover, the social media gap between players in the NFL and players in the NBA absolutely still persists.

So I believe Travis Kelsey is the active NFL player for now with the

highest number of Instagram followers these days.

He has just under 8 million followers on Instagram.

Patrick Mahomes has 6.5.

Tom Brady has 15.