NASCAR Xfinity $800M Deal Marks CW’s Biggest Sports Investment Yet
The CW’s sports-rights shopping spree has shifted into high gear, as the broadcast network has landed the exclusive rights to televise NASCAR’s Xfinity Series. While financial terms were not disclosed, sources said the CW will pay around $800 million for the seven-year package, which is set to run from 2025 through 2031.
Under the new contract, the CW will air each of the 33 annual Xfinity Series races, which in recent years have been a Saturday afternoon staple for the cable networks FS1 and USA Network. Fox Sports, which hosts the first 14 Xfinity races, aired one event on the flagship Fox broadcast network (the Shriners Children’s 200), while NBC has four races scheduled for 2023, starting with Saturday’s Henry 180.
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All told, 85% of this season’s Xfinity races will be televised on basic cable, thereby limiting the overall reach of NASCAR’s second-tier stock car circuit. Per Nielsen, both FS1 and USA are available in 72.4 million households, which works out to just 58% of all U.S. TV homes.
The move to place the entire series on a single broadcast network will not only expand the series’ footprint—the CW is 75% owned by Nexstar Media Group, which oversees affiliate stations in 116 markets—but should also go a long way toward establishing a unified marketing plan. “Any time you can create a destination for an entire series, that probably helps in terms of conditioning fans as to where to go [to see the races],” said NASCAR senior VP of media and productions Brian Herbst in a conference call held earlier Friday.
The advantages of network television are hard to overstate. For example, Fox’s lone Xfinity broadcast on May 13 averaged 1.27 million viewers, which marked a 29% improvement over the 984,800 viewers FS1 averaged over the course of its first 10 races. The added incentive of Nexstar’s affiliate map makes for an even more intriguing matchup; as Herbst noted on the call, 84% of NASCAR’s tracks are in an area served by one of the company’s local stations.
For the CW, the NASCAR deal is the latest in an array of moves designed to reimagine the network as a sports outlet. Earlier this month, the CW inked a four-year deal to televise 50 ACC football and basketball games per season, an arrangement that followed a pact with LIV Golf that was forged in January. These initial rights deals are a precursor to an overall sea change at the CW, which for most of its 17-year history has targeted a younger-skewing female audience with primetime drama series such as Gossip Girl, Jane the Virgin and Riverdale.
The legacy programming model began to be dismantled in October 2022, after Nexstar closed on its majority ownership stake in the CW. (Paramount Global and Warner Bros. Discovery have each retained a 12.5% interest in the network.) According to CW president Dennis Miller, the network’s schedule will feature sports programming 48 weeks per year once the Xfinity Series makes the jump in 2025.
“This is our most significant investment to date,” Miller said. “We hope to bring the best of what we know about broadcast television to NASCAR, and they’re going to bring us their great IP.”
While the CW’s core audience has aged considerably since its heyday—originally conceived as a destination for the 18-34 demo, the channel in 2022 reached a viewership with a median age north of 58 years—Miller said the Xfinity Series’ stable of young drivers should prove to be a “nice fit in terms of how we’re doing our brand management.”
Looking ahead, Herbst said that he expects Xfinity events to bookend the CW’s ACC football games starting in fall 2025. “I think you could be looking at a Saturday where you have Xfinity practices and qualifying sessions leading into ACC football, leading into an Xfinity Series race. That’s a really big block of sports programming.”
With the Xfinity deal off the books, NASCAR turns its attention to securing new deals for its Cup and Truck series, which are expected to be retained by incumbent partners Fox and NBC. The combined value of the current deals is around $820 million per year, and NASCAR is said to be looking for an extension that will jack the combined price up to nearly $1 billion annually.
Although the renewals are expected to be hashed out before the end of the year, Herbst said there remains “a lot to work out on the Cup Series side.”
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