How much does it really cost to be a sports fan?
Fans now may be paying more to watch games, but paywalls are nothing new for the old ball game
‘Not just those with money!’
I find myself stricken more than ever by the following fantasy: A group of wealthy players and their wealthy agents march into the office of the wealthy owner and cry out, “Let’s give the fans, on whose love and loyalty our game depends, a break. We’ll settle for more reasonable contracts if you lower ticket costs. And don’t get greedy with cable TV deals… Let’s try to keep as many games as we realistically can on free TV.”
The owner, unable to contain his joy, gushes, “Yes! Yes! We want all of our fans to be able to afford to take their families to ball games… And yes, let’s allow our fans to watch as many games as possible for free on TV since many of them can’t afford cable. Besides, we’ve made plenty of money from TV over the years, and the exposure it’s given us has broadened our base of fan interest and support. Yes, let’s make sure that our game can be seen and enjoyed by all of our followers, not just those with money!”
Now do you see why it’s a fantasy?
– Ken Rader, Letter to The New York Times Sports Editor, March 29, 1987
We are biased toward thinking that what we’re experiencing is emblematic of what’s happening in society. It is a trap that I hope to avoid in this venture, writing as an observer and critic of sports, culture, and media.
Similarly, there is the trap that comes with (relative) youth: The belief that the happenings of modern times are completely new. Perhaps because we are acutely aware of technological advancements, we are biased toward believing that those advancements create entirely new situations and problems. Because my father worked in history and museums, I was raised with a bias toward believing that while the past doesn’t always repeat exactly, the present will contain its echo. That bias means I usually start with the past when looking for answers to the present. It has become a constant theme in my writing as I use the voices from back then to provide analysis of now.
In the middle of last month, during the Stanley Cup Finals and NBA Finals and with Major League Baseball heading toward its mid-point, sportswriter Joon Lee made an argument in The New York Times about how the rising costs for fans to watch their team’s play is shattering American sports culture as the leagues allow for more and more games to be shown behind a growing number of paywalls:
Sports is one of the last activities that can still be a shared American experience that cuts across class, race and geography, unfolding live, unscripted and in real time... But instead of uniting us, it’s been carved up. The wealthy can sit courtside, stream everything and pass down season tickets like heirlooms. For everyone else, belonging is for sale.
I can’t argue with the premise that the cost for fans to watch games is increasing as broadcast rights are sold to multiple different companies, many of which require stand-alone monthly subscriptions. This has led to more fans facing the tough choice of going without their team. And both those who pay and those who don’t feel like their loyalty is being exploited.
While I was excited to read a passionate defense of fandom, I kept thinking about the questions of bias. How does this fit in the historical context? Is this situation new or something from the past? And, how did we get here?
The point Lee makes is important because fans are feeling the squeeze. But while the argument’s main thrust that fans are being soaked remains true, a bias toward the present means he fails to identify a cause-and-effect sequence that leads to offering prescriptions based on a misdiagnosis.
‘Least destructible sports myths’
For decades, our national sports leagues — [NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL] — operated more like civic institutions. These organizations may have always chased the mighty dollar. But they also wanted their sports to last, so they cared about strengthening such powerful intangibles as local pride, generational fandom and public ritual. …
For most of the 20th century, pro sports were side hustles. Baseball clubs were run mostly by tavern owners, newspaper editors and civic boosters who usually lost money or broke even but saw teams as extensions of their communities. – Joon Lee
At the foundation of this argument is a bit of naivety that trips him up down the road: The notion that the owners and leagues ever truly saw their teams as institutions and ran them as civic trusts fails the ‘actions speak louder than words’ test. Yes, owners have used this language to reassure fans that they are just as loyal to their city as the city is to them, sometimes to pacify fan dissent as disloyalty and to sway municipalities into handing over taxpayer money for stadiums. But the image of Mayflower moving fans rolling out of Baltimore in the cover of darkness springs to mind among the countless examples of leagues allowing owners to tear up” generational fandom” in the service of the mighty dollar.
Present-day owners may be wealthier, non-local, and far less likely to lose money than their predecessors, but that shouldn’t make you think they’re a new breed, no longer caretakers but asset managers, as Lee suggests. Rather, they are upholding the grand tradition of American sports ownership: Business. Always business.
Leonard Koppett, writing in The Times 53 years before Lee, attacks the “least destructible sports myths.”
Club owners have changed; they are no longer sportsmen, wealthy gentlemen supporting a hobby for the good of the game, but crass businessmen milking the sport for every possible dollar.
“It would be difficult to get a wider range of misconceptions into a shorter statement,” Koppett writes, before adding, the owners have “always sought – quite proudly – to maximize profit and establish a ‘businesslike’ organization. Big-league sports exist as we know them precisely because they succeeded.”
This may seem like a minor point of his longer piece, but one that must be solidified before we go further: Owners – and by extension the leagues which are run with the owners’ interests at heart – care more about ensuring the bottom line is protected than for ‘good of the game,’ and that has always been the case. Lee stakes his argument about the rising costs of sports fandom on the basis that there has been a break in the traditional fiber of American sports, especially when it comes to the owners and leagues, in recent times. But that isn’t the case.
The owners have always been profit-maximizing individuals – think of every instant of labor strife. And they may not have been as good at doing so in the past – think of every failson owner – but that was not for a lack of trying, either. In addressing the real issues, we can’t first put any faith in a fantasy.
‘Another mouth to feed’
For most of my life, sports was one of the most accessible forms of entertainment in America. You turned on the TV, flipped to the game and cheered or booed — with your family, your neighborhood, your city. Being a fan was simple. It was community. …
Growing up in middle-class Boston, I felt lucky to be a sports fan… I obtained through sports a way to connect with my dad, my friends over the school lunch table and strangers on the subway. – Joon Lee
The piece begins by pulling at the heartstrings we all pull when we talk about what sports mean to fans. It would induce groans if it didn’t fill every fan’s breast with the feeling of warmth we get when thinking about going to the ballpark with dad. The reason so many of us care is because somebody who cared taught us to care. Teaching us that the joy experienced from being among the crowd is the best kind of joy because it is all of our joy together.
For my family, going to the game was the ultimate, and it was always a treat. I grew up in a ‘cheaper on the outside’ family, buying food or packing sandwiches to bring into the ballpark. Were my parents doing their best on a limited budget to get baseball-mad kids to as many games as possible, or were they just cheap? Perhaps the answer is a bit of both. My dad would argue it was the former.
The next best thing to being there was watching it on television. Growing up in a household that didn’t have cable television until late 2007, a few months before I turned 16, games on local TV, a transistor radio at night, and the next day’s sports page kept me connected.
In its infancy, cable television was a simple proposition: give customers better reception from faraway stations by transmitting through a cable. The town of Lansford, Pennsylvania, population 10,000, was in a “dead spot” for reception. Some 70 miles from stations in Philadelphia and tucked in a valley, a cable was run from an antenna placed on the nearby mountains, believed to be the first such community antenna in the country. “We’re getting just as good reception as you folks up in New York,” the mayor is quoted by The Times’ Jack Gould in December 1950. The original charge for homes was $100 with a $3-a-month maintence fee. (In today’s money: $1,285.86 and $38.58.)
By 1975, cable TV was still struggling to “break into metropolitan areas” because the biggest benefit, “better, more consistent reception,” usually wasn’t an issue enough for people to justify the cost, according to that year’s “Issues in Broadcasting: Radio, Television, and Cable.” Providers pinned their hopes on programs eventually breaking down the barrier.
The old guard of broadcast television selflessly jumped to the defense of the viewer. Arthur Taylor, president of CBS, called pay TV a “sneak attack on the family pocketbook” and wrote of the possibility that millions of Americans will soon be denied the television attractions, movies, and sporting events that “now form an integral part of their lives.”
“Millions of others will be allowed to view these attractions only at the expense of a large and continual drain on their family finances,” he wrote in a 1974 pamphlet titled “Does the American Family Need Another Mouth to Feed?” “… The basic notion of pay cable television... is nothing more than that the average television viewer should pay for the programs that he now receives free.”
‘It will be cheaper’
When many sports migrated to cable, there were grumbles about losing free access. But cable also brought more games to American households while keeping the cost to viewers relatively modest. – Joon Lee
Taylor then outlined a nightmare scenario: A football fan subscribes to cable to get better reception for games broadcast on CBS. Soon, the cable system has an audience exclusively its own and can then approach the distributors and, “by charging its subscribers an additional fee for the exclusive right to see certain programs, it can generate sufficient revenues to outbid CBS for the rights to football games.”
“Now our friend the football fan must pay more to see the football games he used to see free, or he must do without the games. His friends who had not subscribed to cable television would not be able to see the games at all,” Taylor wrote.
By 1981, there were signs of a ‘new’ trend.
“The cost of going out – the price of gas – has changed our sports habits,” Ted Turner, who broadcast the games of his Atlanta Braves across the country on his cable network, told The Times in April of that year. “People are going to stay at home to watch sports. It will be cheaper.”
At that time, 18 percent of households in the New York metro area were cable subscribers. The industry expected that number to hit 50 percent by the end of the decade. Geoff Mason, executive vice president of NBC Sports, pointed out “the crux of what may be a problem” for some of the major sports leagues: “How do you start charging for something that you had given away ‘free?’”
That July, The Times wrote how the “voracious sports fan” cable had become a worthwhile investment because of the “round-the-clock athletic events.” They note that ESPN recently began a one-hour nightly program with scores and clips called “SportsCenter.” But with sports offerings on cable improving, the cost to the consumer had increased as cable companies moved toward “tiered service” and put “much of the meatiest sports programming on special channels that cost extra money.”
Two years later, The Times reported about a new wrinkle of regional sports channels transmitting “17 hours a day of sports events from five regions of the country” to viewers elsewhere for an additional monthly fee. The article contains this line: “These [regional sports] channels assume that loyal fans will pay to see their local teams on television, and some cable experts have predicted that within several years, more local games will be seen on these channels than on conventional broadcast channels.”
In December 1988, the Yankees and the MSG Network reached a 12-year, $500 million agreement that would see 150 games broadcast on the cable channel. The agreement, beginning in 1991, would see the number jump from 75 games in each of the next two years. “The new contract might prove costly for the team's armchair fans,” The Times noted. Dick Aurelio, president of a local cable company, said, “We cannot ask our basic subscribers to subsidize those who are interested in the Yankees,” indicating the network would be moved from the basic tier. MSG expected adding the games would spur fans to sign up for cable, and anticipated 700,000 new subscribers in the first year.
One year earlier, as Long Island-based Cablevision and MSG quarreled over the network’s demands that the channel be on the basic service tier, Aurelio noted that it is hard to strike a balance between “basic service and specialized services that appeal to a limited audience and are too expensive to be part of basic service.”
“When some people are not interested in sports, they would have a right to complain,” he told The Times. “Why not eliminate MSG [from basic] and lower my rates?”
‘Oh Man the Future’
Starting in the early 2010s, live sports events were one of the last types of programming that guaranteed hundreds of thousands if not millions of real-time viewers and the leagues began to be flooded with requests from streamers, such as Amazon Prime, Peacock and Max, begging for a piece of the pie. …
As streaming services competed for subscribers, they began throwing enormous sums at the leagues in their eagerness to lock in loyal audiences. – Joon Lee
“There are two schools of thought,” Robert Alter, president of the Cable Advertising Bureau, told The Times in 1989. “Some people think that they should put sports on basic cable and give the basic subscriber as much as possible, and that the benefit will be in a larger number of basic subscribers. The other school is that cable should charge because it cannot afford to give away so much.”
One cable operator in New York told The Times that while “public officials” want them to see sporting events have the “broadest possible reach,” there was a “growing feeling that cable rates are rising too fast and creating a universe of cable ‘haves’ and ‘have nots.’”
David A. Klatell, writing in The Times in 1989, noted, “Companies are showing signs of strain as an increasing number of programmers carve up a slow-growing audience.”
“By the year 2000 an estimated $21 billion – the lifeblood of American sport – will be pumped from television in rights fees,” Klatell continued. “There is little doubt that television sports fans of the next decade will be asked to pay these enormous costs, either indirectly through corporate advertising and sponsorships or directly via pay cable and pay per view.”
These developments and time period – perhaps the most crucial period in explaining the present – are absent from Lee’s argument. In the time between 1980 and the mid-2010s, it is hard to determine if the popularity of sports changed all that much. But the game’s economic fortunes did. At the risk of falling into the trap of only looking toward technology, you’ll notice that this was also the period of cable TV’s rise and peak, as they bundled hundreds of channels and delivered them right to your home. At the same time that consumer habits shifted to cable, the leagues continued to get more and more cash from broadcasters.
“[ABC, CBS, and NBC] together showed 1,500 hours of sports in 1985, double what they put on in 1960,” a stat which comes in a Times piece from 1986 about rising rights fees, rising ratings, and, yet, declining commercial ad rates, thought to be due to sports oversaturation. The hope was that even with competition coming from cable, including ESPN, which was then in 37 million of the 86 million homes with a TV, rights fees would stabilize as the networks dealt with shrinking revenue from ad sales.
The networks recognized they had played a role in this, as when sports programming became popular through the 1960s and 70s, they “willingly paid out large sums of money” to the leagues, “assuming that the goose of advertising would continue to lay golden eggs.”
“They made very good money on football in the past,” NFL Commissioner Pete Rozelle said. “I never cried when I knew they were making good money that we should have made more on the rights.”
The same way radio’s rise to prominence was a boon for baseball and television’s a boon for football, the arrival of sports-centric cable channels broadcasting at all hours was a rising tide that lifted all leagues in the form of increased competition with the networks.
Klateel noted in 1989 that “the three major broadcast networks face particularly difficult challenges to their historical primacy in sports production. Their share of total television audiences continues to erode dramatically at the hand of cable, independent stations and the VCR.”
Cut the cord
The result is that dozens if not hundreds of games that make up America’s national pastimes are being sliced and diced and sold off to the highest bidder. – Joon Lee
Lee makes a jump in his argument early on in his piece. He jumps from the leagues operating like civic trusts to selling their inventory to raise cash for “lucrative opportunities offered by overseas expansion.” And that is when “the business of sustaining sports in America took a back seat.” He points to the shift coming at the start of what he calls “the streaming wars.”
But just as he did not discuss the importance of cable’s rise in getting to this moment, he misses the importance of cable’s fall.
In the mid-2010s, after cable subscriptions reached their peak, they began to drop off further. Pew Research Center found the share of Americans who watch television through cable fell from 76 percent in 2015 to 56 percent by early 2021. Of those without cable, 61 percent had a subscription at some point in the past and gave it up, meaning some 27 percent of the U.S. were “cord cutters.” Among those without cable, 69 percent said it was too expensive.
How does this impact sports fans, the people still watching live events in the era of on-demand viewing?
As millions of households left cable, the revenue networks received from cable companies declined. The huge number of non-sports fans, whose cable subscriptions funneled cash to the networks that broadcast games that they never watched, disappeared. With rights fees not changing, the networks needed to find new revenue to make up for the loss of subscriber fees. The online direct-to-consumer streaming services, which had helped create the conditions for consumers to cut the cord in the first place, became increasingly important. Retaining and growing those subscribers became the name of the game.
The streamers, which also include all the pluses like ESPN’s, knew what MSG knew in 1988 and Ted Turner before that: broadcasting games gets you subscribers.
“A few years ago, people scoffed when Ted Turner treated his Atlanta Braves as a part of his television station, scheduling game times based on when the station needed programming,” Floyd Norris wrote in The Times in 1998. “Now such things are taken for granted. The real purpose of big-time sports teams, it appears, is to bring in television viewers.”
Fathers and sons
I subscribe to nearly every service there is with live sports — YouTube TV, MLB.TV, NBA League Pass, NFL Sunday Ticket, Peacock, Apple TV+, Max, Amazon Prime, Paramount — for $2,634 a year…
My dad no longer watches the Red Sox. He cut the cord a few years back, and he won’t pay the $29.99 a month to NESN 360. – Joon Lee
The two generations tell a modern story. And in a piece that is built upon decrying the degradation of fandom, we see the two sides of the coin: the fan who is no longer watching their local team. And a fan paying nearly 10 times that price to have access to every game broadcast across the country – nationally televised games and local ones, too.
“I’m the guinea pig,” Seattle SuperSonics’ owner Sam Shulman told The Times in 1981 about putting his team’s entire 90-game slate on pay TV, charging subscribers $1.30 a game. (That would be $4.71 per game today, which was sold as a season package for $423.56, or around $60 a month.)
Change the channel
For our national games, it’s time for Congress to amend the antitrust exemption with a ban on blackouts, a cap on what streaming services can charge fans and a requirement that media companies offer affordable bundles. For local games, state legislators can force teams vying for taxpayer dollars to help pay for their gleaming new stadiums to offer affordable local streams, guaranteed public simulcasts and, similarly, no blackouts. – Joon Lee
I want to go to more games. I want to watch more sports. I want to have it all. But my demand, as meager as it is, increases the price of those things even by an infinitesimal amount. At this point, we must admit that things in demand will indeed cost money.
The current situation that sports fans find themselves in, feeling like they are being taken to the cleaners when they go to games and when they try to watch them at home, wasn’t caused by the leagues selling them out. At the core, it happened because of sport’s incredible popularity in this country and by viewers like you.
Changing habits and more options for entertainment led to a collapse in cable TV subscribers, which fueled the already growing market share of streaming platforms serving the consumers who wanted à la carte television viewing over the bundles, all-you-can-eat buffet. With networks dealing with a lose of revenue and sports’ popularity as television content never wavering – and, in fact, becoming even more valuable to advertisers as the last bastion of programing people still watched live – increased competition from traditional networks (both broadcast and cable) and streamers to televise games led to a continued rise in rights fees that outpaced any rise in advertising dollars, leading to more and more games falling behind paywalls.
The result: sports fans, who grew used to the subsidy of the cable era as non-sports fans helped foot the bill on programs they weren’t watching, are now being forced to pay closer to the market rate to watch games.
There is no doubt this is bad for sports fans, but this issue didn’t come out of nowhere in the last few years or as a result of greedy owners doing anything out of the ordinary. In not getting that part settled, the solutions can seem misguided.
Debates about regulation come down to one question: To safeguard the public, what level of government involvement is worth limiting the ability of firms to profit?
In looking to protect the class of consumers (sports fans), Lee’s answer is to upend the entire business of sports. Throw out the system developed since the games began to air on television, all in the hopes that leagues and owners will “act more like institutions that serve the public.” These solutions are non-starters because they stand on the shaky foundation that there was a time before when sports weren’t about money, that greed, not consumer habits, is the driving force for the present predicament, and that this era is unique to its time.
Lee is correct in identifying that the current state is harming fandom as people feel they are being priced out. But the state picking winners and losers is no solution.
David Stern, then commissioner of the NBA, was happy to be at the table in 1986 after his league survived rough financial times and would now benefit from a new deal that would see the league’s TV revenue double from $22 million to $44 million a year.
“This is an absolutely normal market phenomenon,” Stern said about the state of broadcast rights fees at the time. “What you’re seeing is supply and demand, a market at work. There’s no revolution going on here.”
Ben Krimmel is a writer from Baltimore who lives and works in New York.