In the United States, major sports on television are going through a seismic transformation on many levels — from splintering TV rights to cross-brand acquisitions to financial disparities among franchises to social changes and economic realities.
Among these changes was the fact that Major League Baseball (MLB) welcomed Jen Pawol as its first female umpire, but at the same time the league is witnessing an escalating feud between franchise owners and players over the salary cap that could result in a strike.
At the social level, the Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA), whose biggest draw is Caitlin Clark, is currently embroiled in a public controversy about reverse discrimination. And the American National Football League (NFL) headquarters in New York City was recently the target of an attempted mass shooting by a mentally unstable former player. And all of this is occurring alongside a major overhaul of sports’ multiple TV rights assignments.
Driving some of these changes is the new short-term corporate view that is replacing the old “plan for the future” mantra with financial maneuvers rather than sports considerations.
To Parrot Analytics’ Chris Hamilton, the picture is clear: “The current sports rights landscape is absolutely at an inflection point,” he said. “What used to be a relatively simple broadcast model has now fragmented into a multi-platform strategy that resembles the old cable bundle, except with higher stakes for fans, leagues, and distributors.
“For a league, spreading rights across multiple streamers and networks may maximize short-term revenue, but it also risks eroding fan engagement if access becomes too complicated. All the streamers are trying to figure out how to leverage sports to make money but nobody knows how,” Hamilton concluded.
Now let’s look at some of the evidence. The NFL sold broadcast rights to CBS, NBC, FOX, and ESPN/ABC, plus to streaming platforms such as Amazon Prime Video, Peacock, Google, and NFL+. The league’s latest television deals, spanning from 2023 to 2033, are worth $113 billion.
The National Basketball Association (NBA) has signed new media rights deals with Disney (ABC and ESPN), NBC (including Peacock), and Amazon Prime Video, starting with the 2025-26 season. Overall, these 11-year agreements are worth $76 billion.
Major League Baseball’s (MLB) national television and streaming rights are held by Apple, ESPN, FOX Sports, TBS, and Roku. Other potential contenders include Netflix and NBC.
Then there’s college sports, which sealed deals with Comcast, Disney, FOX, Paramount, and Warner Bros.; World Wrestling Entertainment, which signed agreements with Comcast, Disney, Netflix, and The CW; and the National Hockey League, which signed contracts with Disney and Warner Bros.
Netflix has secured exclusive U.S. rights to the quadrennial FIFA Women’s World Cup 2027 and 2031. The 2027 event will mark the first time the Cup tournament will appear on a streaming service.
Holman W. Jenkins, Jr., who runs the “Business World” feature in the Op-Ed pages of The Wall Street Journal, made the point in the August 9, 2025 edition of the Journal, that: “As football migrates away from big three TV networks and cable bundles […] increasingly games will be spread over many streaming apps, which consumers will find it burdensome to track and subscribe to.”
Historically, bundling cable TV channels had contributed to the general malaise of the U.S. cable TV sector, now it is wondered if it is possible that a similar tactic by various sports leagues will also harm popular U.S. TV sports offerings.
Various research indicated that older and lower-income households (TVHH) stick to traditional TV, while younger audiences prefer streaming platforms, so advertisers tend to rely on streaming platforms to reach younger audiences, while using broadcast TV to reach older, less tech-savvy users, as well as lower-income TVHH.
High subscription fees, however, could undermine results since younger fans may be keen on sports, but some are unable and/or unwilling to pay for the live TV transmissions.
Widely reported surveys in sports articles also found that 34 percent of sports fans don’t watch live matches on TV due to the difficulty of accessing content and/or an unwillingness to pay. Plus, 65 percent of global sports executives are reported to be concerned over the continued relevance of live TV broadcasts for sports fans.
Financial TV deals with individual clubs are also creating a huge financial disparity among the 30 major MLB franchises, where rich teams like the Los Angeles Dodgers can now spend close to $500 million on yearly salaries, while the Miami Marlins have a payroll of just $70 million. Similarly, the New York Mets are paying out $400 million a year, while the Chicago White Sox’s payroll is $90 million.
Under the current system, the League sells the rights to national TV networks and divides the revenue among the 30 teams. In addition, each baseball franchise sells rights to regional sports networks (that lately are not doing well financially), which generates about 25 percent of their revenues.
To spread money more equally, the League is proposing a model whereby the teams would give local TV rights to the League, which, in turn, would sell them as a unified package with revenue distributed among all teams.
But expenditures and TV rights income are not all the same, and that is causing some concern. In 2013, the Dodgers signed a 25-year $8.35 billion deal with Time Warner Cable (now Charter Spectrum), and the Mets have an $85 million-a-year deal with SportsNet New York (SNY) up until 2035. These rights are in addition to the national licenses negotiated by the League. The income difference between rich and less rich teams is exacerbated by the lack of a players’ pay ceiling that is in place in other U.S. leagues. A baseball pay cap is opposed by the players’ union because it is considered anti-free market.
Then there are the “inbred” acquisitions: The NFL is taking a 10 percent stake in Disney’s sports TV operator ESPN for an estimated value that ranges between $2.5 billion and $3 billion. The deal also calls for the NFL Network to be added to ESPN’s stable of channels, and for ESPN to distribute NFL’s Red Zone to pay-TV channels.
Previously, in 2022, NFL and Skydance Media joined forces to create Skydance Sports, for the development of a variety of sports-related content, including scripted and unscripted films and series. Skydance, now owner of Paramount Global, will give NFL access to Paramount’s CBS TV network.
If approved by the U.S. regulatory agencies, the NFL’s stake in ESPN will cause Disney’s ownership to drop to 72 percent (from 80 percent), while the shares of Hearst, the other ESPN owner, will go from 20 percent to 18 percent.
Similarly, Fox Corp. acquired 33 percent of Penske Entertainment (PE) to gain media rights for PE-owned IndyCar races. Fox Corp., which owns several TV channels, including FOX Network and FOX Sports, paid between $125 million and $135 million for the PE stake.
PE is 67 percent owned by the Michigan-based Penske Corporation, helmed by Roger Penske, an 88-year-old former racecar driver who’s the chairman of a holding company active in various businesses. Penske reportedly wasn’t looking for capital, but was impressed with FOX’s 7.1 million viewers for this year’s Indy 500 (a 41 percent increase from 2024), while Fox Corp. was impressed by the increased interest in IndyCar races. (Penske is the father of Jay Penske, the owner of Penske Media Corporation, publisher of Variety, Deadline, and The Hollywood Reporter.)
In conclusion, in the U.S., large payoffs for television rights to sports leagues are changing the nature of sports telecasts, especially baseball, and it hasn’t anything to do with the “torpedo bats” (newly shaped, high-performance bat design). And it is understandable if we consider the fact that sports are the most valuable programming on TV. Of the top 100 U.S. telecasts of 2024, 85 were sporting events and related programming.
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