The Thursday Night Football broadcast features one of the most well-known voices in the NFL, Al Michaels. The legendary announcer has been a mainstay around NFL circles for decades and is now the lead voice of Amazon’s NFL coverage.
What did his massive contract look like after moving on from NBC, and what does his current net worth look like?
Al Michaels: The Voice of Amazon Prime Thursday Night Football
Michaels was raised in Brooklyn, New York. Growing up as a sports fan, Michaels attributes his long-lasting career to a passion he developed at a young age.
“So I think the one thing, maybe for me, as a kid, as a six-year-old: I loved sports,” Michaels told CNN’s Chris Wallace.
After his high school graduation, he attended Arizona State University, where he studied radio and television while minoring in journalism. He started broadcasting by covering football, baseball, and basketball games for the Sun Devils and working as a sports writer for The State Press.
He got his start in show business in a strange way. Michaels was in charge of choosing the female contestants for The Dating Game.
Not long after, he got his first professional sports gig covering the Los Angeles Lakers and was partnered with the legendary Chick Hearn.
However, Michaels got his “welcome to the big leagues” moment when he was fired four games in because Hearn reportedly didn’t want to work with someone so young.
MORE: PFN Life — Off-the-Field Content
“Of those eight games, I made it on the air for only four of them,” Michaels said in an interview. He was informed of his dismissal at the airport, as the team was preparing to leave on a two-game trip to Boston and Cincinnati.
“It was a shattering experience,” he said. “I had told all my friends that I’d be working with Chick, and then I wasn’t.”
Michaels moved to Hawaii to continue his broadcasting career, covering Hawaii baseball and football. Following his experience there, Michaels moved to Cincinnati to call games for the Reds. The move to Cincinnati was timely — in 1972 he was chosen to cover the World Series and ice hockey during the Winter Olympics.
Michaels became ABC’s full-time announcer, particularly for baseball. He replaced the legendary Keith Jackson and became synonymous with ABC Sports. There, he spent 20 years fronting ABC’s Monday Night Football broadcast, becoming known for his partnership with Hall of Fame coach and broadcaster John Madden.
“John (Madden) was the kind of guy that, he would weigh in on everything,” Michaels remembered. “And some people probably thought he was a bit of an oaf because he had all the sounds going on and that, the booms.”
In 2006, Michaels then went on to the Sunday Night Football slot, striking up a long-running partnership with former Cincinnati Bengals wide receiver Cris Collinsworth.
How Much is Michaels’ Salary and Net Worth?
Michaels’ annual salary with Amazon is roughly $11 million. In March 2022, Michaels signed a three-year, $33 million deal with the network to broadcast Thursday Night Football. He is worth about $40 million, per Celebrity Net Worth.
As with most approximations of net worth for celebrities and high-profile people, it’s not entirely certain what Michaels’ actual net worth is.
Want to predict the rest of the 2023 season with our FREE NFL Playoff Predictor? Looking for the most up-to-date NFL standings? What about a breakdown of team depth charts or the NFL schedule? Pro Football Network has you covered with that and more!
