Did Joon Lee Steal My Idea?!

"Fracking the pie" is going mainstream

This is a bit of a clickbait headline. I don’t believe that former ESPNer Joon Lee actually stole my “fracking the pie” idea in this New York Times Op Ed. I don’t believe it because the dynamic, whatever we’re calling it, is everywhere and observable. Joon’s been on a sports industry soul search since getting laid off by ESPN, and is focused on how something is amiss in this current era. If you’re on such a journey, and are an honest observer, you’ll certainly notice that the sports fan experience is increasingly fracked.

What I call “fracking the pie,” Lee calls “mining fandom.” The basic idea is that, in lieu of an ability to grow, leagues and attached media are inordinately consumed with wringing more dollars out of the customers who remain. Joon’s focus is more on the cost of the fan experience, where I’m more inclined to look at how leagues have turned themselves into a giant casino. Joon:

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. But to watch the Boston Red Sox play the New York Yankees earlier this month, I would have had to fork over an additional $19.99 a month for some obscure baseball-focused service that has that slice of one of the most iconic rivalries in America’s national pastime.

For decades, our national sports leagues — the National Football League, the National Basketball Association, Major League Baseball, the National Hockey League — operated more like civic institutions. These organizations may have always chased the mighty dollar, but they also wanted their sports to last. And as such, they cared about strengthening such powerful intangibles as local pride, generational fandom and public ritual. Tradition was good business. Community built loyalty. Loyalty built value.

Then came the streaming wars.

Did the streaming wars kick off the fracking era? I think there’s something to that. It’s not necessarily that the streaming wars caused the current state and more that they reflected a fractured media environment. In such terrain, you could not count on your major sports league to merely own mainstream focus simply by existing. You were up against on demand entertainment for everyone, all of the time.

In such an environment, sports fandom struggles to spread. Surveys suggest that the incoming generation alpha, the current crop of teenagers, aren’t that into the games. According to the Sports Business Journal, only 15 percent of this cohort report that they enjoy watching sports. If you aren’t assured a vast customer base in the future, it makes sense to desperately rake what you can out of the interest that remains. Disney/ESPN was reluctant to get in on gambling because they’re a family company and sports is a family activity. That’s less so these days, and so they made the move, along with the leagues, into being a seat of adult vice.

Joon’s perspective is more concerned with paywallification of sports, though, and how this cuts against the unifying force of fandom. Some observed the irony that his words were behind a paywall. Regardless, he’s getting at something real.

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 — be that a cable giant, or a streaming upstart, or a regional sports network or a subscription app. Games jump from one service to another with so little notice or apparent logic that even some of the biggest superfans struggle to track what’s available where.

The result isn’t just inconvenient. It’s lonely. As access shatters, rituals vanish, as do the moments that make sports communal — a bar full of strangers cheering for the same team, the generational ties passed down through the seasons. Those experiences fade under a system that dictates that the more you can pay, the more you can see — until the game disappears behind another paywall.

There’s something to that idea, but I don’t think I completely agree. Following sports has been made more expensive, but there’s also such better access nowadays. My dad is a big Knicks fan and as a kid, I loved watching their weekend games on NBC. And that’s about the only time I’d see the Knicks, outside of the playoffs. League Pass started in 1994-1995, but it was a pretty exotic purchase back then. There were games on Turner, but this was the pre-Barkley wilderness.

It’s hard to convey what the past was like to people who didn’t experience it, but even when good options were available, you might not hear about their existence. We literally watched a CNN headline news ticker for updates on scores in games. I, a massive NBA fan, knew little about the league outside of a select few Eastern Conference teams and the locally broadcast Los Angeles Lakers. I’ve got hazy memories of being on a family road trip to Idaho, and figuring out what happened in the NBA off newspaper box scores.

Death of the Casual

I’d say that it’s far easier to be a fan these days, and to know a great deal about your favorite sport. There are just fewer casual fans. Without getting deep into the ratings nitty gritty, I’d say I’ve noticed a pattern with NBA viewership and the other non football sports. The viewership floor is pretty high, with early playoff rounds remaining competitive against the past. Then we get to the championship round and suddenly half the standard audience is gone.

Those remaining viewers are far more sports aware than I was as a childhood diehard though. Fewer people follow sports now, but those who do, usually have strong opinions on role players, rotations, and aspects of the game that weren’t widely discussed on mainstream channels until recently. The average person, and especially average kid, is far less likely to be a sports fan, but the average fan is far more likely to be an expert.

So yes, the pie is being fracked, or mined, or however you want to put it. These leagues are more about charging and extracting money than making themselves widely accessible. It’s also so that technology has allowed for different means of accessibility, sometimes at a cost to the consumer. The “communal” might be waning, but today’s sports communities are united by a greater knowledge than passions allowed for in the past.