An ode to the sports-less Christmas Eve
Christmas Eve is gloriously quiet. Netflix, Prime Video and this new class of sports streamers will surely change that.
Welcome back to Club Sportico, where we break down the intersection of sports and money—with an extra bit of humor and opinion. Today, we’re talking about an endangered holiday tradition.
🎵 ‘Twas the night before Christmas,
And all through the clime,
Not a sports game was streaming,
On Netflix or Prime… 🎵
For years I lamented the fact that there were basically no live sports on Christmas Eve. Sure, the NFL plays whenever it’s a Sunday, and there is that one bowl game1, but for the most part Dec. 24 is one of the darkest sports days of the year.
More recently, however, I’ve come to love it. Big time U.S. sports has spread its tentacles across the annual calendar, taking over myriad new days and new timeslots. Earlier this year we had 49 straight days with an NFL or FBS football game, and both the NBA and NHL are constantly looking for ways to squeeze in around the edges of America’s favorite sport.
Christmas Eve has become perhaps the last major bulwark against this stick-and-ball takeover. It’s a rare moment where Roger Goodell, Adam Silver and the rest of the commissioners are okay with you and your family doing something that doesn’t involve yelling at a screen. It’s refreshing. And it likely will not last.
In 2025, this sports-wide Christmas Eve deference has nothing to do with the holiday itself, or the preferences of athletes. Dec. 24 is just not historically a great ratings day, and too many midweek games do disrupt the NFL’s carefully-orchestrated calendar. That said, there was once a time when Christmas was bigger than the NFL.
In the earliest decades of professional football, seasons ended well before Dec. 25. As the schedule expanded for both the AFL and NFL, both leagues deliberately avoided Christmas. The NFL championship games in both 1955 and 1960 were moved to Mondays (!) to avoid playing on Christmas Sundays. The AFL moved its 1960 title game a full week, to New Year’s Day.
Then, in 1971, the newly-merged NFL decided to try its hand on Christmas. The league scheduled two divisional playoff games for Dec. 25. The second game, between the Miami Dolphins and Kansas City Chiefs, went into double overtime, and remains the longest game in NFL history.
Fans were furious. People complained that the game ruined Christmas dinner for families around the country. According to Wikipedia, a Kansas lawmaker proposed a bill to ban the league from playing on the holiday. And the pressure campaign worked! It would be almost two more decades before the NFL played again on Dec. 25, and it wouldn’t do so with any consistency until 2020.
In that time, of course, the NBA rode its Christmas Day traditional to massive ratings, appointment viewing, and one all-time great commercial. The NBA, however, hasn’t played on Christmas Eve since 1967. The NHL hasn’t done so since 1972. College basketball avoids the date too.
This will almost certainly change in the coming years. New age sports streamers like Netflix, Prime Video and Apple—the ones with nearly unlimited budgets and a newfound interest in live sports—are largely approaching sports differently than their cable network forefathers. They’re not necessarily interested in huge blocks of games, they’re interest in special games. Jacob has coined this “eventizing.” Netflix’s NFL package is for Christmas Day, and it recently paid MLB for the Home Run Derby, an Opening Night game and one “special event game.” Amazon’s Prime Video wanted Black Friday NFL. NBC’s Peacock took an MLB package that includes an exclusive Labor Day timeslot and a “special event game” of its own.2
Christmas Eve is sitting out there waiting to be claimed. And sadly, it will be. Maybe by the NFL, or maybe by a smaller league… and then the NFL.
For now, I will savor these quaint, quiet Christmas Eves. Then I’ll wake up on Dec. 25, hand out some gifts, then turn on the NFL games.
On the most recent Sporticast episode, Eben and Scott discussed a new $3 billion stadium project for the Kansas City Chiefs, which includes the largest public subsidy—by far—for an NFL venue 👇
Club Sportico is a community organized by Sportico, a digital media company launched in 2020 to cover the business side of sports. You can read breaking news, smart analysis, and in-depth features from Eben, Jacob and their colleagues at Sportico.com, and listen to the Sporticast podcast wherever you get your audio. Contact us at club@sportico.com.
These are games in non-traditional venues such as recent MLB games in an Iowa cornfield or on a Tennessee racetrack.