With Halloween over, you might think all the scares are done. Nope, not even close. If you’re a sports fan, your worries are just beginning.
Now you might be asking yourself, “Why? Sports are back now, and it’s finally somewhat normal.” That is true, sports are back, and it’s great that we have something somewhat normal again with COVID still out there. The problem is sports might not ever be the same. Will fans want to return to stadiums and create the atmospheres that people love about sports? Will you still be able to watch them at home with your friends and family and have a good time? That’s the million dollar question, and it comes down to capitalism unfortunately. The fact of the matter is, it is more likely that entertainment corporations and sports franchises will continue to increase prices of tickets and TV services to the point where nobody watches sports anymore than it is that sports will go back to being the cheap entertainment accessible to anyone that it once was.
In order to talk about why the coronavirus has the potential to kill off sports, we have to go back in time about a decade ago and break down what was going on with sports in terms of TV. Football was generally available on all the major cable sports channels (ABC, NBC, CBS, ESPN, ect.) for free. Now there weren’t enough channels to show every game every Sunday, and that’s where the paid service NFL Sunday Ticket came into play. You had to shell out a lot of hard earned cash only if you were obsessed with catching every game. Most American sports (football, baseball, basketball, etc.) followed this model where games were generally available for free on any network you had, and you only paid money if you had really nothing else going for you in life except for sports. The only sport to really break this model was boxing. This intense sport has always been behind the controversial pay-per-match pricing scheme, and fans have had to routinely fork over upwards of 60 dollars to watch their favorite fighters. Now there are some exceptions for less popular sports like soccer or tennis, but in general, most sports were typically free.
Tickets for live sports are a different story. They have always been a little pricey, largely because they are a main source of revenue for team franchises. Some teams get money based on viewership, but the ad revenue generated there largely goes to entertainment corporations. So, teams turn to their stadiums. Let’s take a look at football again. In 2010, the average cost of a ticket to a single NFL home game was around 76 dollars. That might not mean anything to someone who doesn’t go to games, and that number really doesn’t mean anything unless it is compared to ticket prices today. Accounting for inflation, a 76 dollar ticket in 2010 should equate to a 123 dollar ticket in 2020. Do you think that’s what tickets cost today? If you said yes, then you might have been dropped on your head as a child. In the 2019-2020 season, a ticket for one NFL game typically cost around 151 dollars, an astonishing 20% increase (accounting for inflation) that is not mirrored by a significant increase in wages in the United States. That’s a lot of numbers, but what it boils down to is ticket prices are getting disproportionately more and more expensive for the average American. People who go to games aren’t usually crazy superfans, and most attendees just want a fun day out with family and friends. With the drastic rise in ticket prices over the past decade, it appears that this pastime is getting harder and harder to sustain.
It appears the entertainment industry is following in the footsteps of team franchises. Streaming services have arisen for nearly every major sports network: CBS All Access, NBC Sports Gold, Peacock, ESPN-U, and ESPN+ are just some of the many that have put soccer, basketball, football, golf, tennis, baseball and other sports behind paywalls. I decided to hit the streets to find out what others thought about the rising inaccessibility in watching sports, and it’s safe to say I got some very strong responses. Here’s one of the best from our very own Mr. Estes:
“I remember when I was in high-school, I was so very frustrated that my parents wouldn’t purchase pay-per-view boxing matches. I was obsessed with boxing, but even in the early 2000s, it was tightly locked up behind the paywalls of HBO and Showtime Boxing’s “pay-per-view.“ There was no subscription for a series of boxing matches; your only option was to purchase high-dollar single events. These days, the subscription model is starting to break into the boxing world, but much of it still is on the pay-per-view and will run viewers $80-100.
As one might imagine, those costs are outrageous for a single evening of watching a sporting event. I loved boxing, but if I was going to spend that kind of money on entertainment, there was more utility to be found elsewhere. As a result, I have steadily drifted away from passionately following a sport that I once spent hours obsessing over from watching old famous matches, reading analysis of boxers in training, recording pre-fight interviews – the list goes on. Naturally, it was hard to stay invested in a sport that was so cost-prohibitive and required you to follow it through summaries and out-of-context video clips. Ironically, lots of boxing fans including myself began following UFC when it was in its infancy, a time when UFC matches were available with most cable/satellite tv subscriptions and no further paywalls. The accessibility of UFC slowly changed as it increasingly emulated the boxing distribution model as the popularity of UFC grew and thus its potential profits for such a business model. History repeats itself; I tried to keep up but eventually lost interest entirely.
The landscape of costs associated with sports viewership has changed even more dramatically in the past five to seven years. These days, NFL enthusiasts rightly complain of the nearly $400 cost of buying “Sunday Ticket,” which provides subscribers every football game for the NFL season – that is 32 teams playing 16 regular season games, not to mention the playoffs and Superbowl. Compared to boxing, this would seem like a bargain, but the days of more freely accessible NFL games are quite fresh in our cultural memory which makes the transition all the more frustrating. One of the latest sports to fall victim of this is college basketball, now largely behind the ESPN-U paywall. College NCAA Basketball was a sport that Mrs. Estes and I both enjoyed following for some time but continuing meant one more subscription service on top of Netflix and CBS All Access (I’ll confess – there is no price I won’t begrudgingly pay for Star Trek). These days, NFL football is the sport I currently enjoy and follow quite closely, although as the cost increases yearly, we find ourselves weighing the opportunity cost of NFL Sunday Ticket against other forms of media entertainment.”
I would like to draw your attention to a couple things Mr. Estes pointed out. He lost interest in a sport due to the outrageous costs. This is something many have done. For instance, I find myself struggling to stay interested in soccer because of the many paywalls, free trials, and other hoops I have to jump through every weekend. Estes also mentioned that he now has to sacrifice certain streaming services for others, and choose between sports and shows/movies as a result. People who aren’t interested in sports might not find this particularly troublesome. To them, I’ll say this: sports used to be free or at least cheap entertainment while movies were typically the things you would shell out money for. Back then, shows and movies moved behind paywalls, and sports remained outside of them. Now, everything is behind a paywall. The change in sports accessibility is a product of the larger change in the entertainment industry — forcing Americans to spend obscene amounts of money for things that used to be and should continue to be free. You should care about the sports problem unless you’re okay with being fed crappy shows and low effort films more regularly. For sports fans, I don’t need to tell you how scary this is.
Alright, let’s circle back to the virus now. COVID has limited in-stadium seating, meaning franchises’ bottom lines have been and are continuing to be hit hard. Where are they turning for lost revenue? They’re relying on paid streaming services and TV ad revenue of course. Because teams now want a bigger part of that pie, the entertainment industry has to jack up their prices and include more adverts. That means Americans have to cope with another price increase. As people trickle back into stadiums, ticket prices will be higher to give teams the money they have been missing due to COVID. Naturally, those prices definitely won’t go back down even if COVID goes away. As Mr. Estes puts it:
“Because of COVID-19, I feel we’ll likely see the paywall model grow as sport franchises try to make up for revenue shortfalls due to in-person ticket sales being nearly non-existent. Additionally, I can’t imagine all the various ways that the economic upheaval has sent shockwaves through the way companies are evaluating where they want to spend their advertising money, and that is sure to impact the revenue stream for the sports that don’t currently exist behind a paywall. These changes likely won’t bode well for the fans.”
Now, I’m not saying I have a solution, nor am I going to sit back here and just bash away at capitalism for the problem. Here’s the facts — Sports have slowly become less accessible to the average American. Whether that trend would have fixed itself if not for COVID, I don’t know. However, that problem has been exacerbated dramatically by the pandemic, and I’m unsure if sports will ever come back the same way as they once were. I do know that it can’t get better without some serious changes from corporations and fans.
