Being a fan of sports in 2026 is a lot different than twenty, ten, even five years ago. It costs more to watch games and access team related media, but there is a lot more of it to consume, so it’s kind of a trade-off. For example, ten years ago pretty much all major sporting events were available on television through your one cable provider. Now, you have to have multiple streaming service subscriptions just to watch regular season NFL games. On the flip side of this, fans often have access to much more content outside of games through social media platforms like Instagram and Youtube, which is free and doesnt require a paid subscription.
My personal media consumption consists of mainly Seattle sports teams. The will regularly turn on Mariners baseball, Seahawks football, and Kraken hockey games on in the evening after practice and school. I would say my mine interest is the Mariners, for whom I pay a yearly fee to access streams of every regular season game. This is a large difference from my childhood, as when I was just starting to be a fan and watch baseball I could just turn on the TV and look down the channel guide to find the game. To watch Seahawks games I have a subscription to YouTubeTV, which mimics the feel of a traditional cable TV setting. And to watch Kraken games I have an Amazon Prime video subscription. Quite the headache to pay for all of these subscriptions separately when these are really the only three things I watch, I don’t need all the extra fluff that comes with.
I don’t even want to begin to think about what this will look like in five years. Surely it can’t get worse? I predict that the price will go up even more and the subscriptions will get even more complicated. Hopefully that also means they will be more customizable though, and i’ll be able to pick and choose what I have access too. If I could change one thing about the sports media landscape right now, it would be to flip the current pay to watch set-up. Right now, it’s free to see behind the scenes content on your favorite teams social media, but costs money to watch the games. This feels backwards to me. I think the competition, the main part that everyone wants to watch, should be free. The rest of it could then be treated like exclusive content that you have to pay a subscription for.