Ahead of the 2025-2026 NFL season, the league announced Sony as a technology partner for new coaches’ headsets. The news marked the end of a multi-year absence for a headset sponsor following the NFL’s deal with Bose, which concluded in 2022, and gives Sony a pivotal position on the sidelines for every NFL game.
That exposure, amid the NFL’s growing ratings, is bringing significant value.
According to AI-powered sponsorship analytics platform Relo Metrics, Sony’s headset exposure in the 2025 NFL season is averaging around $46,000 per game in sponsor media value (SMV), which takes into account various factors such as quality and viewership.
Considering Relo Metrics estimates across all 272 regular season games, Sony’s headset exposures are projected to bring in roughly $12.5 million in broadcast media value—that’s from high-quality exposures on both streaming and linear—for the season. Looking at the full media value of the deal, which estimates all the exposures across digital and social, regardless of quality, the deal could be worth upwards of $56 million in full media value (FMV) for the 2025 season.
“The only real mass audience you can reach these days, whether it’s via a broadcast or a stream or in person, is mainly sports,” Relo Metrics CEO Jay Prasad told ADWEEK, adding, “These live moments end up having all of this virality on social media, and we measure and track all that, so a lot of times you are getting value for days, if not longer.”
So how did Sony score such a prime spot?
According to Sony and NFL executives, there’s mutual value that goes beyond the dollar signs, with this new step years in the making.
“This is a true partnership. It’s not just a sponsorship where we’re slapping a logo on something. We have been working hand-in-hand with the NFL for many years on different technologies, so this is the culmination of that,” said Maya Wasserman, Sony’s head of marketing, personal and home entertainment, and brand marketing. “There’s been over a decade of us working together.”
