The 2026 NFL season kicked off on Wednesday, 9 September, when the New England Patriots visited the Seattle Seahawks. The dynamic kickoff rule Trump has publicly attacked for more than a year was in place. So was the streaming arrangement he has told voters is pricing fans out.

A day later, Netflix aired the San Francisco 49ers against the Los Angeles Rams from Melbourne, the first NFL regular-season game in Australia.

The two demands

Trump’s kickoff complaint dates back to at least September 2025, when he called the reworked rule “sissy” football on his Truth Social account and said it was “bad for America, and bad for the NFL.” He returned to it in January 2026, writing that he could not watch the new kickoff and simply turned his head away.

He repeated the point in a springtime interview picked up by The Spun and republished on Yahoo Sports and AOL.

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“I hate the kickoff in football. I think it’s so terrible; I think it’s so demeaning. I think it hurts the game and hurts the pageantry,” Trump said.

“I’ve told that to Roger Goodell. And I don’t think it’s any safer. I mean, you still have guys crashing into each other.”

His second target is the league’s streaming push. Trump has said fans who “live for Sunday” are being asked to pay for multiple subscriptions to follow their team, and he framed it as a broader threat to the sport.

“There’s something very sad when they take football away from many, many people,” he told The Spun in comments republished by AOL. “Very sad. I don’t like it.”

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Kickoff kept, streaming widened

On the kickoff, the Competition Committee kept the dynamic format and tightened it. Ahead of the March 2026 owners’ meeting, the league proposed letting any team declare an onside kick at any point in a game, not only trailing teams in the closing minutes, and it closed a loophole that had rewarded teams for kicking the ball out of bounds from midfield. The format Trump wants scrapped remained the framework.

The streaming footprint went the other way. Every game this season is available to stream somewhere. Netflix picked up the Melbourne opener plus two Christmas Day games and a Thanksgiving Eve fixture. Amazon still has Thursday Night Football, YouTube TV keeps NFL Sunday Ticket, and Peacock, Paramount+, ESPN and Prime Video all carry exclusive windows.

Goodell locked in through 2030

In early September the NFL confirmed a four-year extension for Roger Goodell that keeps him in charge until March 2031, according to CNBC.

Robert Kraft, chair of the league’s compensation committee, told fellow owners in a memo that the league was “very fortunate to have Roger at the helm for the next four years.”

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Goodell has not publicly answered Trump’s rule demands. The Federal Communications Commission and Department of Justice have separately been looking into whether NFL streaming deals fit inside the Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961, the law that underpins the league’s antitrust exemption. That review is ongoing.

Netflix’s next NFL fixture is the Green Bay Packers against the Los Angeles Rams on Thanksgiving Eve, 25 November, followed by two Christmas Day games on the same platform.

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