Tom Brady to Join Fox Sports as Lead NFL Analyst Once Playing Career Ends

In a stunning and unexpected move, star Tampa Bay Buccaneers quarterback Tom Brady has agreed to join Fox Sports as its lead NFL analyst, Fox CEO Lachlan Murdoch said on the company’s quarterly earnings call Tuesday.

Brady will join Fox Sports when he decides to retire from the NFL.

In his new role, Brady will join Fox’s lead NFL announcer Kevin Burkhardt in the booth, and be a staple of Fox’s NFL coverage.

“It is entirely up to him when he chooses to retire and move into what will be an exciting television career, that is up to him to make that choice when he sees fit,” Murdoch said, adding that Brady will “also serve as an ambassador for us, particularly with respect to client and promotional initiatives.”

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Earlier this year, Brady said he was retiring, only to decide to return to the Buccaneers a few weeks later. Still, he was busy in his brief retirement, and is clearly eager to engage with Hollywood when he does retire. In addition to Fox Sports duties, Brady is also producing and appearing in a road trip movie starring Jane Fonda and Rita Moreno.

The addition of Brady comes after Fox, like all of the NFL’s partners, has inked a new decade-long agreement with the league, locking in TV’s most important programming (but also significant costs).

Those deals, in turn, have sparked a boom time for NFL announcers, with every network (and new players like Amazon) all seeking A-list talent to lead their NFL booths. With networks like Fox already committed to spending billions of dollars on NFL coverage, spending a few hundred million more on trying to put together the best team to cover those games is a no-brainer.

Fox lost its booth of Troy Aikman and Joe Buck to ESPN earlier this year (Al Michaels, meanwhile, went from NBC to Amazon), but by locking in Brady before his playing career is even over, Fox may have put the feather in the cap for NFL booth deals, as there is no NFL player more sought-after than the seven-time Super Bowl winner.

Unlike its network competitors, Fox does not stream its NFL games online, a fact that it uses to garner higher distribution fees from cable providers.

“We think that our key rights deserve to stay on our broadcast and cable networks exclusively,” Murdoch added Tuesday. “It gives our league partners the most breadth and reach that they can achieve in viewership from their fans, but it is also key to our distribution strategy.”

The addition of Brady only makes that coverage more valuable to the network, particularly if Brady makes himself available to Fox’s partners.