Cowboys fans who have YouTube TV might need other solutions for Monday night. Jamie Schwaberow / Getty Images

Will fans be able to watch “Monday Night Football” tonight on ESPN or ABC through YouTube TV?

The short answer: “No.” Not as of right now.

The longer answer: Not yet, but there is a chance it might be resolved by kickoff.

YouTube TV and Disney — which includes ABC and ESPN’s range of networks — remain in a stand-off over distribution terms that began late last week, which has led to ESPN, ABC and other Disney networks being unavailable to YouTube TV subscribers.

With YouTube TV’s 10 million subscribers left in limbo, the industry tussle mainly concerns the size of the per-subscriber fee that YouTube TV will pay Disney for access to its networks.

The impact of the impasse was felt this past Saturday, with ESPN’s extensive slate of college football games inaccessible to YouTube TV subscribers, including Texas’ thrilling win over Vanderbilt, Georgia holding off Florida in their annual rivalry game and Oklahoma beating Tennessee in primetime.

Over the weekend, ESPN stars took to social media with a corporate promotional message directing fans to a website that offered other ways to watch games on ABC or ESPN’s networks. ESPN recently launched its own direct-to-consumer subscription service featuring access to all of Disney’s sports-related content, although that is a modest business line relative to revenues generated by its distribution deals with operators such as cable companies or multi-channel streaming services.

On Saturday, viewers expressed a range of emotions on social media over the service interruption, including frustration with both sides.

This is the third carriage dispute of the football season between YouTube TV and a major sports broadcaster, including Fox in August and NBC in September. Typically, the deadlines include increasing levels of bluster, followed by an inevitable agreement, as was the case with Fox and NBC.

Neither of those negotiations got to the stage that Disney and YouTube are at right now. However, a distributor not airing an NFL game — certainly primetime NFL game like “Monday Night Football” — is crossing a rubicon of accessibility that puts this dispute in new, largely uncharted territory. That is one reason there is belief from some industry experts that the stand-off could conclude ahead of tonight’s broadcast at 8:15 p.m. ET.

YouTube TV is the fourth-largest TV distributor in the U.S., behind cable giants Comcast and Charter and satellite operator DirecTV. However, industry trends project that YouTube TV will become the largest TV distributor by the end of the decade, which would give it more market power in its negotiations with content providers. In the absence of access through YouTube TV, fans can watch the game through alternatives of varying cost and complexity.

This story will be updated as conditions change.

Nov 3, 2025

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Dan Shanoff is a Managing Editor for The Athletic, focused on Sports Business. Before joining The Athletic, he held editorial and content-development roles at a range of companies including ESPN, USA Today Sports, Monumental and Quickish, a sports-news start-up he founded. He is a graduate of Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism, has an MBA from Harvard Business School and was an award-winning adjunct instructor in Georgetown’s Sports Industry Management program. Follow Dan on Twitter @danshanoff