On August 21, Tencent Holdings Limited and The National Football League announced a three-year partnership, according to which Tencent Sports becomes the exclusive live digital streaming media partner of the NFL in China for the 2017, 2018 and 2019 seasons.

Under terms of the agreement, Tencent will be able to air NFL's live and on-demand games as well as other contents starting September 2017.

Richard Young, NFL China Managing Director, told NBD that it is the first time that NFL exclusively partners with Chinese digital media. It chose Tencent as its partner because Tencent Sports is one of the few profit-making sports media in China. This extraordinary partnership will hopefully bring localized NFL games and contents to Tencent's hundreds of millions of daily users across China, he added.

NFL values the Chinese market and has been exploiting it for quite a long time. NFL promoted flag football among Chinese teenagers in 2003. It also planned to hold pre-season games in China in 2007 and 2009, but those plans were dropped somehow. Since then, NFL starts to scale down its investments in China.

Industry insiders told NBD that a lot has to be done for NFL before U.S. footable fully grows in popularity in China because so far even many sportsmen don't know its rules.

Email: tanyuhan@nbd.com.cn