Karen Brodkin

Executive VP, Business and Legal Affairs, Fox Sports Media Group

By John Consoli -- Broadcasting & Cable, 6/4/2012 12:01:00 AM

Last year, when she earned her first Women in the Game honor, Karen Brodkin, then senior VP, business and legal affairs for Fox Cable Networks, was busy finishing up a 10- year, $220 million TV rights deal with the Pac-12 conference that she negotiated. This year, as she is being honored once again, Brodkin has an even bigger title, and has been even busier, inking new and renegotiated major sports media rights deals for Fox Sports Media Group.

In the past year Brodkin was directly involved in finalizing a seven-year multimedia rights deal for Fox with Ultimate Fighting Championship, the world’s largest mixed martial arts organization. She also took part in renegotiating with Major League Baseball to get the league to schedule more games on Saturday nights for Fox’s new live sports block, and with the NFL on a nineyear extension to the current TV rights deal that was set to expire after the 2013 regular season.

Brodkin also oversaw the negotiation efforts by Fox that led to the $425 million winning bid for men’s and women’s FIFA World Cup soccer from 2015-22.

Since joining Fox Sports in 1998, Brodkin has been instrumental in completing hundreds of sports programming rights deals and on-air talent agreements, and has developed relationships with college conference commissioners and athletic directors and professional sports league executives across most of the major sports.

“I’ve become a lot busier,” says Brodkin, adding that the length of these new deals and the digital components make negotiations much more complex. “With the NFL rights extension, the agreement was announced in December, but we are still working out details like digital rights, production enhancements and sponsorships.”

Brodkin says the UFC deal was agreed upon, interestingly enough, via a handshake last July on the Friday before the baseball All- Star Game, with the entire weekend being spent hammering out the details.

She is currently talking with NASCAR about moving more races to Saturday nights on Fox. In other words, like the season spans of the sports she negotiates for, there’s never a lull.

“We are always talking with our sports league partners,” she says. Brodkin is no longer the lead negotiator for these rights deals but, as she puts it, “I am deciding what the big picture of the deals will encompass.”

And as a good leader always does, Brodkin is quick to praise her team. “I have a group of extraordinarily talented lawyers working for me, handling the day-to-day stuff. That allows me to think more big-picture.”