The NFL will spend plenty of time negotiating TV rights which are up for renewal in 2022, but on Monday, the league and CBS announced an agreement with ESPN Deportes to televise Super Bowl LV in Spanish.
Currently scheduled for Sunday, Feb. 7 2021 in Tampa, although dealings with COVID-19 could potentially alter the date, it will be the third Super Bowl telecast for ESPN Deportes. According to the agreement, the Spanish-language sports network will also cover an AFC Divisional Playoff game and the AFC Championship Game. ESPN Deportes already televises Monday Night Football weekly, the Pro Bowl, NFL Draft and one Wild Card Playoff game.
“The NFL’s Hispanic fan base is rapidly expanding and growing more passionate every day,” VP Marketing Strategy, Operations & Planning for the NFL Amanda Herald said in the press release. “It is of the utmost importance to us to make NFL football accessible to Spanish-speaking fans and we are ecstatic to see this come to fruition with ESPN Deportes during the postseason.”
The rapidly growing Hispanic-American fan base for the NFL was most recently estimated to include 28.7 million people according to an ESPN poll. The league has done a good job of marketing themselves to the demographic, despite only 16 of its 1,696 players being of Hispanic descent last season.
Even with the growing fan base, this season’s AFC Championship Game will be the first to ever air on a Spanish-language network in the United States. The only other two Super Bowls broadcast on ESPN Deportes came in 2016 and 2019, which like this season, was an event aired by CBS.
Brandon Contes is a former reporter for BSM, now working for Awful Announcing. You can find him on Twitter @BrandonContes or reach him by email at Brandon.Contes@gmail.com.
