American football’s elite NFL has cancelled its broadcast contract with global sports streaming service DAZN in the vital German market.

German publication Bild reports that the NFL has exercised an early exit clause in the agreement, allowing it to seek a new broadcast partner in the market for the upcoming 2026-27 campaign and beyond.

The deal, which began in 2023, was due to run through the 2026-27 season, and ran alongside a free-to-air agreement with commercial network RTL, which will continue through 2028.

It included the rights to showcase five live fixtures each gameweek, and the ‘ENDZN’ support show, as well as a split agreement through which the NFL shared the rights to post-season playoff games and the Super Bowl with RTL.

While DAZN’s live coverage deal has been scrapped, the service will nonetheless continue to disseminate NFL content in the country in the form of the NFL Game Pass offering, for which it is the global distributor through 2033.

The NFL will now reassess the German market and seek a new partner.

One option may be a reformatted agreement with RTL, which could expand its weekly broadcast slate (already three games per week), which it could then sub-license out to competitive pay-TV firms or paywall with its paid RTL+ streaming service.

Perhaps a more likely option would be the entry of pay-TV heavyweight Sky Deutschland into the NFL rights mix, drawing from the experience of Sky’s UK business, which has broadcast NFL action since 1995.

Germany is one of the NFL’s most important foreign markets, and the league has hosted an annual game in the country each year since 2022 (five in all so far), with 2026’s edition to take place in Munich.

In December 2025, the league signed a new agreement with the city of Munich to stage international games at the 75,000-capacity Allianz Arena in both 2026 and 2028, while an existing agreement will see games in Berlin in 2027 and 2029.

The demand for the NFL in Germany is illustrated by the league’s global markets program, through which teams are assigned international marketing rights for various territories.

In total, 11 teams currently hold marketing rights for Germany, more than any other territory, representing the scale of the market to interested franchises.