As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases, including a fee if you start a Prime trial or add a channel through a link here. YouTube TV, Fubo, Sling, Hulu, ESPN, Peacock, Paramount+, FOX One and NFL+ pay us nothing — and the cheapest recommendation below involves buying almost none of them. See our methodology.
Football is spread across more services than any other sport, and every one of them wants a monthly bill. Assemble the obvious four — ESPN, Peacock, Paramount+ and FOX One — and you are paying $73.96 a month.
YouTube TV‘s Sports Plan is $64.99 a month and carries all four of those networks plus about twenty-six more. The à la carte route costs $8.97 a month more for less football. That single comparison decides this for most people, and it is the opposite of what “just subscribe to what you need” intuition suggests.
Where the games actually are
The NFL’s own Ways to Watch page, read on 6 September 2026, lists the split: Sunday afternoon on CBS and FOX, Sunday Night Football on NBC, Monday Night Football on ESPN or ABC, and Thursday Night Football on Amazon Prime. Its streaming partners are NFL+, Sunday Ticket, FOX One, Peacock, Paramount+, ESPN, Prime and Netflix.
Four of those carriers — CBS, FOX, NBC and ABC — are free broadcast networks. An antenna gets you every Sunday afternoon game in your market, every Sunday night game, and the Monday games that land on ABC. That is most of the football most people watch, for the one-off cost of the antenna.
What an antenna cannot get you: Monday Night Football on ESPN, Thursday Night Football on Prime, and any Sunday game outside your market.
The prices, read from each company’s own page today
All figures below were read from the companies’ own sites on 6 September 2026 and are exact. The regular season runs eighteen weeks, so a “season” here is five monthly bills — September through January.
| Route | Monthly | 5-month season | 12 months |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sling Blue or Orange | $45.99 | $229.95 | $551.88 |
| Sling Orange & Blue | $60.99 | $304.95 | $731.88 |
| YouTube TV Sports Plan | $64.99 | $324.95 | $779.88 |
| Fubo Sports + News | $64.99 | $324.95 | $779.88 |
| YouTube TV (main plan) | $82.99 | $414.95 | $995.88 |
| Fubo Pro | $88.99 | $444.95 | $1,067.88 |
| Hulu + Live TV (with ads) | $89.99 | $449.95 | $1,079.88 |
And the single-app prices, for building it yourself:
| App | Monthly | Annual plan |
|---|---|---|
| Paramount+ Essential | $8.99 | — |
| Peacock Premium | $12.99 | $129.99 |
| FOX One | $19.99 | $199.99 |
| ESPN Unlimited | $31.99 | — |
Three numbers on that second table are worth pausing on.
Peacock Select at $8.99 does not include sports. Peacock’s own plan grid says so in the feature list — “Excludes Sports, Movies and Peacock Originals”. Sunday Night Football needs Premium at $12.99. This is the most common way people buy the wrong Peacock plan, and we cover the rest of the tier trap in our Peacock write-up.
Paramount+ splits CBS across two tiers. Essential at $8.99 lists “Catch NFL on CBS”; the live local CBS feed, and the extra sports that come with it, is Premium at $13.99. More on which one you actually want in our Paramount+ piece.
FOX One is $99 for the first year, against a regular $199.99, an offer its own site says ends 21 September 2026. At $8.25 a month that is the single best-value football app on this page — for one year. Then it doubles.
The calculation to run on yourself
Take your season cost and divide it by the number of games you will genuinely sit down and watch.
YouTube TV’s Sports Plan across five bills is $324.95. Watch three games a week for eighteen weeks — 54 games — and that is $6.02 a game. Watch only your own team’s seventeen, which is what a lot of people actually do, and it is $19.11 a game.
Nineteen dollars a game is a bad deal when the majority of your team’s games are on free broadcast television. Run the number before you sign up, not in February.
The Amazon piece: Thursday nights
Thursday Night Football is exclusive to Prime Video, so Amazon Prime is the one subscription on this page with no substitute. Prime runs about $140 a year — that figure is approximate, because Amazon’s prices cannot be verified on Amazon’s own pages without API access, and we won’t print a precise number we can’t source. Our full Prime breakdown covers what else is in it.
If you already pay for Prime, Thursday nights cost you nothing extra, and you can also add Paramount+ or Peacock through Prime Video Channels to keep one bill. The monthly rate is the same either way — but Channels doesn’t sell annual plans, which is why Peacock’s $129.99 annual beats it. We ran that comparison in full.
Out-of-market games: the $378 question
If you follow a team you don’t live near, none of the above helps on Sunday afternoons. NFL Sunday Ticket, added to YouTube TV’s Sports Plan, is $378 for the season, or $47.25 a month — currently $240 for new subscribers, per YouTube TV’s own page today.
That is more than the entire five-month cost of the Sports Plan it attaches to. It is the correct purchase for exactly one person: a displaced fan whose team is never on national television. For everyone else it is the most expensive habit in streaming.
NFL+ is the budget cousin — local and primetime games on phones and tablets, plus NFL RedZone on the Premium tier. We could not confirm NFL+’s standalone price, because the NFL publishes it only inside a logged-in signup flow. ESPN does publish the bundle: ESPN Unlimited with NFL+ Premium is $41.99 a month, against $31.99 for ESPN Unlimited alone.
The promo trap
Every price on this page has a cheaper number sitting in front of it, and the season is exactly long enough for the cheap number to run out.
YouTube TV’s Sports Plan is $44.99 for six months, then $64.99, an offer its own site says ends 30 September 2026. Six months covers the whole season, so a new subscriber who cancels in February genuinely pays $44.99 a month. One who doesn’t pays $64.99 from March onwards — $454.93 for the seven months of the year with no football in them.
That is the real cost of a football bundle: not the September price, but the February-through-August price you forget to cancel. It is the same arithmetic we set out in annual vs monthly billing, and it is why the promo is priced the way it is.
Verdict
Buy nothing, if you mostly watch your own team. An antenna plus Prime — which you probably already have — covers Sunday afternoon, Sunday night, Thursday night and the ABC Mondays. This is the right answer for more people than any streaming site will tell you.
YouTube TV Sports Plan or Fubo Sports + News, at $64.99, if you want everything. Identical monthly price, both include ESPN and the broadcast networks. Fubo’s Sports + News tier carries no regional sports fee; its Pro and Elite tiers add $3.99 to $16.99 a month depending on where you live. Pick on channel list, not price.
Sling Blue or Orange at $45.99 if you want live TV and can live with gaps. It is $19 a month cheaper than the Sports Plan and it shows.
Do not build it from four apps. ESPN plus Peacock plus Paramount+ plus FOX One is $73.96 a month for a worse channel list than a $64.99 live-TV plan. The only version of this that works is FOX One’s $99 first year, and only for a year.
Do not buy a live-TV subscription in September without a calendar reminder for February. That reminder is worth $454.93.
Prices for YouTube TV, Fubo, Sling, Hulu, ESPN, Peacock, Paramount+ and FOX One were read from those companies’ own pages on 6 September 2026 and are exact. The Amazon Prime figure is approximate and could not be confirmed at source. NFL+’s standalone price is unconfirmed. Football broadcast assignments are from the NFL’s own Ways to Watch page, same date.