Ethan’s point re: the NBA accessibility is even more true for the NFL.
All the hand wringing about the special Amazon and Netflix and other games ignores that for decades, we only had access via the “free” networks to three total games on Sunday and one on Monday. And now we have four total on Sunday.
Nothing has changed! Access to other games definitely costs more now but that seems like a good (and fair) trade to me.
I mean NFL sunday ticket has been around on some level since 1994. So it has been 30 years and we can actually look at the price to see if it is actually true.
The best data I could find was sunday ticket was around 350 dollars when it was widely available, on top of that you needed to have DirectTV install a satellite and receiver which was 1k up front cost and a $30 dollar a month directTV regular subscription.
So lets say installation was amortitized cost over 5 years, so only $200 for 1 year. that is 350+360+200 = $910 dollars a year to get sunday ticket in 1995. So pop that into the inflation calculator and that is $1977 dollars in today's money.
Compare that to $479 dollars for NFL Sunday ticket without a youtubeTV subscription.
You’re the best. I did a similar calculation and was going to include it but I was just using Sunday Ticket and forgot about the rest.
Not to mention that I was being very conservative and not including the MNF game because it’s on ESPN but paid cable was already the norm in the 90s so we’re already getting one incremental game (and a premier night game) more than we used to for the same cost.
The annoyance factor is a very real thing and is totally valid to bring up. However, cost and ability to watch games is clearly night and day better now.
it is kind of insane that the writer didn't think to do the math of what all of those services would have cost in his "before times" maybe he did and just chose to omit that fact because it would ruin his view of the world.
Its not just "SPORTS is more expensive" argument, people literally think everything was better in the past no matter what. You could afford a home on one salary! (if you could get a loan and are not a women or minority!) Its legit tiring to point out all the bullshit.
+1 on this leading to the death of the casual fan. As a teenager/young man I could name at least a dozen players on every NFL team, I could tell you who was in the running to lead the leagues in HR & ERA and tell you which bowl game every team from PAC-10 to Big East was going to.
As I enter middle age and have two young kids, I just don’t have it in me and I feel like I’m in such an information hole and team sports are just not friendly to the casual fan.
I will use this to say that is why I’ve become a big tennis and golf fan. There is essentially ZERO hot stove, free agents, mock drafts, trade deadlines or coaching carousel to follow and IT IS LIBERATING. There are 4-5 must see majors but other than that, the sports don’t punish you for not following the minor tournaments.
We’ll see how my fandom changes as my kids get older but after going several years without parking myself in front of a tv all weekend during all of football season I’ve learned that I don’t need it. TBD if I get back on that wagon in that way again.
I think the death of Sportscenter has also helped along the death of the casual fan, or at least people who were fans of one sport but would be casuals of many more simply from watching SC.
The death of Sportscenter *and* the death of box scores, stat leaderboards, and special Sunday "around the league" notebook coverage in the sports section of newspapers delivered to tens of millions of homes across the country.
The exact same subscription services that Joon Lee mentions in 2013 would have cost:
1 Year Monthly subscription of DirectTV Premier Package (required to get Sunday Ticket, HBO and NFL Network, plus receiver rental, free installation) = $1740
Sunday Ticket = $300
League Pass = $200
Extra Innings = $200
1 year of AppleTV (launched in 2019) = $60
1 year of Amazon Prime = $80
Peakcock (launched in 2020) = $60
Paramount Plus (previously CBS all access, launched in 2014) = $72
For a total of $2712 in 2013 and launch prices of the streaming services that weren't around in 2013. If you put that number into a CPI calculator the same price would be $3,740 dollars. So it is actually cheaper to be a fan by the measurement Jung Lee uses in his article.
I swear it is impossible to counter these arguments because there is no set date for the era of "the before times," just a vague time in the past, and it is always looked back with rose-tinted glasses with zero acknowledgement of the issues faced in the pre-streaming era. Without acknowledging the issues of the past, we can't make a comparison to now to see if it is any better.
The people who benefit the most in this era are the people who are casual fans or not sports fans at all. Before everyone basically paid the same price for cable even if you never watched sports. ESPN and regional sports networks made up a huge chunk of that cable bill and customers could not unbundle the sports channels from their cable bill. So, effectively non sports fans were subsidizing sports fans.
Also, the competition for the casual fans eye balls is much fiercer than it once was. in May 1995, my options were to watch the NBA playoffs, A cosby rerun or a made for TV movie. Today, viewers can get whatever movie or show they want which makes earning eyeballs from casual fans much harder. Do I want to watch Magic vs. Pacers or a new episode of Andor? That is a much different value proposition.
His arguments also counter each other, if paying to watch the Red Sox is so expensive, shouldn't that increase the amount of people collectively watching games at a friends house or at a bar? That way the costs are shared and the bonus of having a shared experience.
Also, Joon Lee, doesn't answer the questions of why would sports leagues chose to go this route except "private equity" and "greed" like previous generation of owners were full blown communists who were running worker collectives. Somehow a 5% ownership stake by private equity translates to complete operational control for a team?
“if paying to watch the Red Sox is so expensive, shouldn't that increase the amount of people collectively watching games at a friends house or at a bar?”
No. That assumes the universe of fans is fixed, which 1) it’s not because cost can and does drive away some fans; 2) 2025 has MANY more options and proclivities.
yes, I address that, I am saying his article has contradictions of the past where people would meet up to watch a game, which means they are already diehard fans to go to a bar to watch a particular game but now that is less likely because sports are too expensive to watch at home?
I am just confused by that logic from Joon Lee.
I won't even get into the fact that the average fan does not subscribe to NFL Sunday Ticket, League Pass and the MLB one. That person is most hardcore of hardcore fans.
I sort of see what you’re saying. Except everyone can go to a bar to watch sports because everyone can go to a bar to just go to a bar. It covers the spectrum of fandom.
I was a diehard sports fan. I watched by myself and in medium or huge groups. Whatever worked or fit the occasion. Often those huge groups would be at a residence or at a bar. And often many, or even most, of those people were not huge sports fans or even fans at all. Just there for socialization/the event.
But I agree, the avg fan isn’t paying hundreds for Sunday Ticket, etc. With kids and life in my 40’s I don’t have the time to be a huge fan anymore and I’m definitely not spending the money. To get my fix, I follow 3-ish leagues on free apps and subscribe to one thing, MLBTV. But while 2025 is different than 1985, 1995, and 2005, they were all different from each other. So I agree more with Strauss’s point than Lee’s.
I don't understand why Joon blames sports leagues for something that is obviously the fault of media companies blowing up the cable bundle.
Sports leagues want their product in front of the most viewers, which is why they were happy to sell to cable networks for decades. But then the cable bundle collapsed, a ton of streaming services popped up, and now there is no one place for sports leagues to put their product in front of most viewers.
Eventually, most of these streamers will likely throw in the towel, Netflix will become the dominant provider, sports leagues will start selling to Netflix, and then this problem will be solved. But for now you can't blame the sports leagues for trying to navigate the fractured environment that the media companies intentionally created.
Last Sunday, I found myself at a rather full dive bar in Michigan. The 1st place Detroit Tigers were playing the Cincinnati Reds at home. The patrons wanted to watch the game, and the bar had Direct TV, ESPN+, and the FanDuel App (which carries Detroit sports in 2025). Unfortunately, that particular game was Roku’s “MLB Game of the Week”. No Tigers baseball for us!
This has been the biggest problem I’ve found. Being at a bar of an area and wanting to watch “the game” but the bar doesn’t have a subscription to everything. Greater tragedies, but if you’re over 30, you just assume “the local bar” has “the game”
Oh go to hell. So this random bar needs to be informed of which out a dozen streaming services the local team is suddenly only to appear on? And that’s on them? You think people that run famously low margin businesses check on this obsessively? This is blaming the victim for doing nothing but what was the previously agreed upon practice.
This is the kind of bar where people yelled, “What the fuck is a Roku?” If you have Direct Tv, with all local channels, and the team’s gambling partner app, all the games should be readily available. It’s gone too far.
I'm a boxing fan but I think it's really under-reported the extent to which we were the canary in the coal mine on this stuff; boxing used to be on ABC, CBS, NBC, and now is spread across difficult-to-remember streamers (where my DAZN heads at?) and the best events are even specifically pay-per-view'd. It costs hundreds if not thousands of dollars to catch all the top boxing events legally in any given year.
You beat me to the punch. All this happened with boxing decades ago. At the time I noticed Ethan’s dynamic of fewer-fans-but-more-knowledgeable-fans and thought that might be good, but in the end it was bad for the sport. It turned boxing into ‘The Wire’ - appreciated by an audience of snobs and few others.
1. The youth truly don’t remember how inaccessible games were back in the day. Primetime was often the only way to see highlights of your team any given Sunday.
2. I remember when eliminating unbundling in favor of a la carte buying was the sophisticated midwit take. Midwit takes should be ignored. (The slow moving collapse of college football is so great)
3. Casual sports fandom needs an environment of mildly coercive organically proletarian conformity to thrive. Good luck with that.
I’m 45. Old, but not ancient. And I grew up in a time when I had 54 Orioles’ games available to me. Otherwise, I could have watched 90 games on HTS network, which was the local Baltimore-ish sports equivalent of HBO. My parents didn’t pay for that, nor did most. (HTS was so terrible from a production standpoint that to this day, the friends of mine who are still alive who haven’t died of a heroin overdose – pour one out for them and the Baltimore metro area – still refer to any instance of bad camerawork as “HTS camerawork”.)
Same deal in NY at that time. 1/3 of Mets games were on Channel 9. 2/3 on Sportschannel at $11 / month. My dad would not pay for it and would not even let me pay for it.
Also game 6 of the 94 NHL Eastern finals (the Messier game) was on Sportschannel and blacked out on ESPN because of the Devils contract with them and I listened to it on the radio.
my grandfather was in the military for his entire career and settled in CA but grew up in Virginia a huge Redskins fan, the moment he learned about DirectTV and Sunday ticket, he was buying it no matter the cost. lol.
Yeah now imagine if the Niners vs the Skins game just happened to be on Tubi Prime, and he only found out on gameday. Fuck him for not checking weeks in advance, right?
Ethan, you offer a very compelling “cornucopian” contrast to Joon Lee’s “alarmist” view of professional sports. However, things are still influx.
I hear of a pending owners lock-out in MLB coming in the next couple of years. And the NBA is still wrapping their head around this new (unofficial) hard cap that is already in place. The NFL airing games on ‘Peacock’ I found very quizzical.
And the fact that the NFL is on a 17-game schedule about to be an 18-game schedule blows my mind. There is something to be said for the sanctity of the NFL and its relative scarcity compared to the other 3 major sports in America.
College sports are a mess now (especially college football). Oh, and the WNBA with its rising stardom, (with Caitlin Clark being the tide raising all boats) might come to a head with player salaries being a pittance of the men’s league.
i guess the next question is: what happens to your sport if all the casuals die off and its only die hards? you can only frack the pie so much. where will sport X be in 50 years if the casuals are gone, the existing (usually older) generation who likes it dies off, and people don't want to do the work of finding the games?
The sports lose viewers. It becomes boxing. There are wildly corrupt sanctioning bodies picking games for PPV numbers, the die hard (usually) gamblers but it, the rest more and more tune it out, so in a generation it’s a completely hollowed out product.
I mean people have slowly grown accustomed to having multiple streaming services, so I don't think finding the game will be an issue, you can just use the voice button on any current remote and say the name of the team you want to watch and it will show you which streaming service it is on and if you have access.
My anecdotal experience, as someone who grew up in the Philadelphia area and lives in Seattle.
It is easier for me to be a fan of the Philadelphia Eagles than a fan of the Seattle Mariners.
A bit unfair, since the Eagles are Super Bowl Champions, and usually a "public team." But still, almost all of their games are on network television; I can listen to the Philly Special and other Philadelphia-centric content.
For the Mariners, almost all of their games are on a TV station that was dropped by the lowest tier local cable package. The newspaper is paywalled. They will almost never be discussed on national shows. etc.
Similar for the MLS Sounders team, where most of their games require a Season Pass to the MLS Apple TV package.
Seems that it's much easier to maintain an existing fandom (particularly to a "public" team) than get going on a new team.
The first paragraph of your obit is gonna be like: "captured the heart of a bemused nation while trying in vain to achieve immorality through an enduring catchphrase"
I was around 14 when I started to watch sports on TV, I remember always going to the sports section to look at every NBA box score to see what went on and my family didn't have espn in early 90s.
One of the first things I ever purchased with money from a job, after a car, was to pay for cable for my family so I could watch WGN and the Bulls.
I still remember an older friend who worked in local tech had a pager that gave him NBA scores and I had him hook me up solely so I could get scores wherever I was.
It’s all so cluster fucked and in this short term it’s going to get worse before possibly getting consumer friendly in give or take 5 plus years! Hurray! Aka Not Really!
Ethan’s point re: the NBA accessibility is even more true for the NFL.
All the hand wringing about the special Amazon and Netflix and other games ignores that for decades, we only had access via the “free” networks to three total games on Sunday and one on Monday. And now we have four total on Sunday.
Nothing has changed! Access to other games definitely costs more now but that seems like a good (and fair) trade to me.
I mean NFL sunday ticket has been around on some level since 1994. So it has been 30 years and we can actually look at the price to see if it is actually true.
The best data I could find was sunday ticket was around 350 dollars when it was widely available, on top of that you needed to have DirectTV install a satellite and receiver which was 1k up front cost and a $30 dollar a month directTV regular subscription.
So lets say installation was amortitized cost over 5 years, so only $200 for 1 year. that is 350+360+200 = $910 dollars a year to get sunday ticket in 1995. So pop that into the inflation calculator and that is $1977 dollars in today's money.
Compare that to $479 dollars for NFL Sunday ticket without a youtubeTV subscription.
You’re the best. I did a similar calculation and was going to include it but I was just using Sunday Ticket and forgot about the rest.
Not to mention that I was being very conservative and not including the MNF game because it’s on ESPN but paid cable was already the norm in the 90s so we’re already getting one incremental game (and a premier night game) more than we used to for the same cost.
The annoyance factor is a very real thing and is totally valid to bring up. However, cost and ability to watch games is clearly night and day better now.
it is kind of insane that the writer didn't think to do the math of what all of those services would have cost in his "before times" maybe he did and just chose to omit that fact because it would ruin his view of the world.
Its not just "SPORTS is more expensive" argument, people literally think everything was better in the past no matter what. You could afford a home on one salary! (if you could get a loan and are not a women or minority!) Its legit tiring to point out all the bullshit.
+1 on this leading to the death of the casual fan. As a teenager/young man I could name at least a dozen players on every NFL team, I could tell you who was in the running to lead the leagues in HR & ERA and tell you which bowl game every team from PAC-10 to Big East was going to.
As I enter middle age and have two young kids, I just don’t have it in me and I feel like I’m in such an information hole and team sports are just not friendly to the casual fan.
I will use this to say that is why I’ve become a big tennis and golf fan. There is essentially ZERO hot stove, free agents, mock drafts, trade deadlines or coaching carousel to follow and IT IS LIBERATING. There are 4-5 must see majors but other than that, the sports don’t punish you for not following the minor tournaments.
We’ll see how my fandom changes as my kids get older but after going several years without parking myself in front of a tv all weekend during all of football season I’ve learned that I don’t need it. TBD if I get back on that wagon in that way again.
I think the death of Sportscenter has also helped along the death of the casual fan, or at least people who were fans of one sport but would be casuals of many more simply from watching SC.
The death of Sportscenter *and* the death of box scores, stat leaderboards, and special Sunday "around the league" notebook coverage in the sports section of newspapers delivered to tens of millions of homes across the country.
Can we just sanity check this entire argument?
The exact same subscription services that Joon Lee mentions in 2013 would have cost:
1 Year Monthly subscription of DirectTV Premier Package (required to get Sunday Ticket, HBO and NFL Network, plus receiver rental, free installation) = $1740
Sunday Ticket = $300
League Pass = $200
Extra Innings = $200
1 year of AppleTV (launched in 2019) = $60
1 year of Amazon Prime = $80
Peakcock (launched in 2020) = $60
Paramount Plus (previously CBS all access, launched in 2014) = $72
For a total of $2712 in 2013 and launch prices of the streaming services that weren't around in 2013. If you put that number into a CPI calculator the same price would be $3,740 dollars. So it is actually cheaper to be a fan by the measurement Jung Lee uses in his article.
Jesus Christ are you employed by Netflix or something
I swear it is impossible to counter these arguments because there is no set date for the era of "the before times," just a vague time in the past, and it is always looked back with rose-tinted glasses with zero acknowledgement of the issues faced in the pre-streaming era. Without acknowledging the issues of the past, we can't make a comparison to now to see if it is any better.
The people who benefit the most in this era are the people who are casual fans or not sports fans at all. Before everyone basically paid the same price for cable even if you never watched sports. ESPN and regional sports networks made up a huge chunk of that cable bill and customers could not unbundle the sports channels from their cable bill. So, effectively non sports fans were subsidizing sports fans.
Also, the competition for the casual fans eye balls is much fiercer than it once was. in May 1995, my options were to watch the NBA playoffs, A cosby rerun or a made for TV movie. Today, viewers can get whatever movie or show they want which makes earning eyeballs from casual fans much harder. Do I want to watch Magic vs. Pacers or a new episode of Andor? That is a much different value proposition.
His arguments also counter each other, if paying to watch the Red Sox is so expensive, shouldn't that increase the amount of people collectively watching games at a friends house or at a bar? That way the costs are shared and the bonus of having a shared experience.
Also, Joon Lee, doesn't answer the questions of why would sports leagues chose to go this route except "private equity" and "greed" like previous generation of owners were full blown communists who were running worker collectives. Somehow a 5% ownership stake by private equity translates to complete operational control for a team?
“if paying to watch the Red Sox is so expensive, shouldn't that increase the amount of people collectively watching games at a friends house or at a bar?”
No. That assumes the universe of fans is fixed, which 1) it’s not because cost can and does drive away some fans; 2) 2025 has MANY more options and proclivities.
yes, I address that, I am saying his article has contradictions of the past where people would meet up to watch a game, which means they are already diehard fans to go to a bar to watch a particular game but now that is less likely because sports are too expensive to watch at home?
I am just confused by that logic from Joon Lee.
I won't even get into the fact that the average fan does not subscribe to NFL Sunday Ticket, League Pass and the MLB one. That person is most hardcore of hardcore fans.
I sort of see what you’re saying. Except everyone can go to a bar to watch sports because everyone can go to a bar to just go to a bar. It covers the spectrum of fandom.
I was a diehard sports fan. I watched by myself and in medium or huge groups. Whatever worked or fit the occasion. Often those huge groups would be at a residence or at a bar. And often many, or even most, of those people were not huge sports fans or even fans at all. Just there for socialization/the event.
But I agree, the avg fan isn’t paying hundreds for Sunday Ticket, etc. With kids and life in my 40’s I don’t have the time to be a huge fan anymore and I’m definitely not spending the money. To get my fix, I follow 3-ish leagues on free apps and subscribe to one thing, MLBTV. But while 2025 is different than 1985, 1995, and 2005, they were all different from each other. So I agree more with Strauss’s point than Lee’s.
I don't understand why Joon blames sports leagues for something that is obviously the fault of media companies blowing up the cable bundle.
Sports leagues want their product in front of the most viewers, which is why they were happy to sell to cable networks for decades. But then the cable bundle collapsed, a ton of streaming services popped up, and now there is no one place for sports leagues to put their product in front of most viewers.
Eventually, most of these streamers will likely throw in the towel, Netflix will become the dominant provider, sports leagues will start selling to Netflix, and then this problem will be solved. But for now you can't blame the sports leagues for trying to navigate the fractured environment that the media companies intentionally created.
Last Sunday, I found myself at a rather full dive bar in Michigan. The 1st place Detroit Tigers were playing the Cincinnati Reds at home. The patrons wanted to watch the game, and the bar had Direct TV, ESPN+, and the FanDuel App (which carries Detroit sports in 2025). Unfortunately, that particular game was Roku’s “MLB Game of the Week”. No Tigers baseball for us!
This has been the biggest problem I’ve found. Being at a bar of an area and wanting to watch “the game” but the bar doesn’t have a subscription to everything. Greater tragedies, but if you’re over 30, you just assume “the local bar” has “the game”
I mean this is on the management of the bar more than anything. Its not like they were not informed of it ahead of time.
Oh go to hell. So this random bar needs to be informed of which out a dozen streaming services the local team is suddenly only to appear on? And that’s on them? You think people that run famously low margin businesses check on this obsessively? This is blaming the victim for doing nothing but what was the previously agreed upon practice.
This is the kind of bar where people yelled, “What the fuck is a Roku?” If you have Direct Tv, with all local channels, and the team’s gambling partner app, all the games should be readily available. It’s gone too far.
I'm a boxing fan but I think it's really under-reported the extent to which we were the canary in the coal mine on this stuff; boxing used to be on ABC, CBS, NBC, and now is spread across difficult-to-remember streamers (where my DAZN heads at?) and the best events are even specifically pay-per-view'd. It costs hundreds if not thousands of dollars to catch all the top boxing events legally in any given year.
You beat me to the punch. All this happened with boxing decades ago. At the time I noticed Ethan’s dynamic of fewer-fans-but-more-knowledgeable-fans and thought that might be good, but in the end it was bad for the sport. It turned boxing into ‘The Wire’ - appreciated by an audience of snobs and few others.
1. The youth truly don’t remember how inaccessible games were back in the day. Primetime was often the only way to see highlights of your team any given Sunday.
2. I remember when eliminating unbundling in favor of a la carte buying was the sophisticated midwit take. Midwit takes should be ignored. (The slow moving collapse of college football is so great)
3. Casual sports fandom needs an environment of mildly coercive organically proletarian conformity to thrive. Good luck with that.
No point from me, here. Just anecdote.
I’m 45. Old, but not ancient. And I grew up in a time when I had 54 Orioles’ games available to me. Otherwise, I could have watched 90 games on HTS network, which was the local Baltimore-ish sports equivalent of HBO. My parents didn’t pay for that, nor did most. (HTS was so terrible from a production standpoint that to this day, the friends of mine who are still alive who haven’t died of a heroin overdose – pour one out for them and the Baltimore metro area – still refer to any instance of bad camerawork as “HTS camerawork”.)
Same deal in NY at that time. 1/3 of Mets games were on Channel 9. 2/3 on Sportschannel at $11 / month. My dad would not pay for it and would not even let me pay for it.
Also game 6 of the 94 NHL Eastern finals (the Messier game) was on Sportschannel and blacked out on ESPN because of the Devils contract with them and I listened to it on the radio.
my grandfather was in the military for his entire career and settled in CA but grew up in Virginia a huge Redskins fan, the moment he learned about DirectTV and Sunday ticket, he was buying it no matter the cost. lol.
Yeah now imagine if the Niners vs the Skins game just happened to be on Tubi Prime, and he only found out on gameday. Fuck him for not checking weeks in advance, right?
Ethan, you offer a very compelling “cornucopian” contrast to Joon Lee’s “alarmist” view of professional sports. However, things are still influx.
I hear of a pending owners lock-out in MLB coming in the next couple of years. And the NBA is still wrapping their head around this new (unofficial) hard cap that is already in place. The NFL airing games on ‘Peacock’ I found very quizzical.
And the fact that the NFL is on a 17-game schedule about to be an 18-game schedule blows my mind. There is something to be said for the sanctity of the NFL and its relative scarcity compared to the other 3 major sports in America.
College sports are a mess now (especially college football). Oh, and the WNBA with its rising stardom, (with Caitlin Clark being the tide raising all boats) might come to a head with player salaries being a pittance of the men’s league.
No shortage of content to write about for sure.
i guess the next question is: what happens to your sport if all the casuals die off and its only die hards? you can only frack the pie so much. where will sport X be in 50 years if the casuals are gone, the existing (usually older) generation who likes it dies off, and people don't want to do the work of finding the games?
The sports lose viewers. It becomes boxing. There are wildly corrupt sanctioning bodies picking games for PPV numbers, the die hard (usually) gamblers but it, the rest more and more tune it out, so in a generation it’s a completely hollowed out product.
I mean people have slowly grown accustomed to having multiple streaming services, so I don't think finding the game will be an issue, you can just use the voice button on any current remote and say the name of the team you want to watch and it will show you which streaming service it is on and if you have access.
My anecdotal experience, as someone who grew up in the Philadelphia area and lives in Seattle.
It is easier for me to be a fan of the Philadelphia Eagles than a fan of the Seattle Mariners.
A bit unfair, since the Eagles are Super Bowl Champions, and usually a "public team." But still, almost all of their games are on network television; I can listen to the Philly Special and other Philadelphia-centric content.
For the Mariners, almost all of their games are on a TV station that was dropped by the lowest tier local cable package. The newspaper is paywalled. They will almost never be discussed on national shows. etc.
Similar for the MLS Sounders team, where most of their games require a Season Pass to the MLS Apple TV package.
Seems that it's much easier to maintain an existing fandom (particularly to a "public" team) than get going on a new team.
The first paragraph of your obit is gonna be like: "captured the heart of a bemused nation while trying in vain to achieve immorality through an enduring catchphrase"
I was around 14 when I started to watch sports on TV, I remember always going to the sports section to look at every NBA box score to see what went on and my family didn't have espn in early 90s.
One of the first things I ever purchased with money from a job, after a car, was to pay for cable for my family so I could watch WGN and the Bulls.
I still remember an older friend who worked in local tech had a pager that gave him NBA scores and I had him hook me up solely so I could get scores wherever I was.
Degeneracy is not cheap.
It’s all so cluster fucked and in this short term it’s going to get worse before possibly getting consumer friendly in give or take 5 plus years! Hurray! Aka Not Really!