A version of this article first appeared in the CNBC Sport newsletter with Alex Sherman, which brings you the biggest news and exclusive interviews from the worlds of sports business and media. Sign up to receive future editions, straight to your inbox. Sports journalist Joon Lee wrote a New York Times opinion column this week about how the evolution of the media landscape has fractured sports fandom as it’s become increasingly expensive to watch games on TV. If you haven’t read the piece, titled “$4,785. That’s how much it costs to be a sports fan now,” the crux is as follows: “For most of my life, sports was one of the most accessible forms of entertainment in America,” Lee writes. “You turned on the TV, flipped to the game and cheered or booed — with your family, your neighborhood, your city. Being a fan was simple. It was community. This community is dying, because some of its shared moments are disappearing.” The column is worth reading. Fox Sports executive Michael Mulvihill tweeted it’s “the most important piece written about the sports business this year.” I guess now’s a good time to let you know I don’t agree with most of it. Lee’s central thesis is that live sports have become less accessible and more expensive. As an in-person live event, I have no argument. The data is pretty straightforward: Ticket prices just keep getting more expensive. Taking a family of five to a game is simply not the family-friendly activity it once was. My problem with the piece is the idea that sports on TV used to be accessible and now aren’t. Cable TV still exists. About 65 million U.S. households still subscribe to a bundle of linear TV channels, according to research firm MoffettNathanson. Granted, that’s a lot lower than the 100 million that subscribed about 12 years ago. But Lee’s thesis is that people who once watched sports on TV aren’t watching anymore because the cost is too high. While it’s true that tens of millions of American families have cut the cord on cable, many that have left aren’t sports fans. Sports have always been the most expensive part of the cable bundle. ESPN costs about 10 to 20 times more than most cable networks. The problem was, in the olden times before 2010, there weren’t many appealing at-home entertainment options beyond cable TV. So, non-sports fans took it on the chin and paid the $100 a month or so for cable TV. Now, with Netflix and Disney+ and the plethora of streaming options, they don’t have to anymore. For the cost conscious, sports were actually far less accessible decades ago, when families’ options were either cable TV or free broadcast. With ESPN about to debut its direct-to-consumer all-in service this fall, consumers that don’t have cable can mix and match to get the sports they want without being forced to buy a bundle. The “a-la-carte” dream has finally arrived. Will some casual fans who used to flip on a game at random drop off? Sure. But I don’t think those people really defined the community that Lee’s talking about. TV ratings for marquee sporting events – the type that bring communities together – actually don’t look all that different from 15 years ago, despite the massive loss in cable TV subscribers. The Super Bowl has set all-time highs for TV viewership in back-to-back years. Ratings for the Stanley Cup the past three years look pretty similar to 15 years ago – in fact, they’re a little higher. Recent NBA Finals ratings look pretty similar to what they looked like from 2003-2010. Last year’s MLB World Series had the highest TV ratings in seven years . Here’s Lee: 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….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. It’s true that if you want to watch every possible game of every major sport, you’ll be paying up the wazoo. But there simply aren’t many people like Lee who are doing this. Again, if you want to watch most sports, pay for cable (or YouTube TV) and Amazon Prime – a service about 200 million Americans already have. Many streaming services now come baked in with a cable subscription, so you may not even have to pay extra for Peacock or Paramount+. If you’re a young person who doesn’t pay for cable, most of the marquee sporting events are free over the air on NBC, ABC, CBS and Fox, and soon you can pay $29.99 per month for ESPN, with Disney+ and Hulu free for a year. Maybe throw in Peacock for $7.99 per month and Max for $9.99 for some college football, NBA games next season, golf, tennis, NASCAR and March Madness. You’ll be extremely connected to most major sports, and you’ll pay less than traditional cable. NFL Sunday Ticket, NBA League Pass, MLB.TV – these services were never part of the fabric of America. Even at the local level, while others have made the argument that a fractured TV environment has led to lower ratings this year , they’re ignoring the fact that bad teams have always had worse ratings. If your team is doing great, guess what? Your regional sports network ratings are usually great too. Lee again: The leagues could have devised ways to pocket streamers’ cash while preserving their fandoms. Instead, they pursued the biggest immediate payouts by slicing up games and selling marquee matchups across platforms….The N.F.L. has been slower to move, as it continues to rake in tens of millions by airing its games on traditional broadcast networks. But as more fans move to streaming, it, too, is also starting to slowly carve up its schedule across an expanding slate of platforms. What is true — particularly for basketball and baseball — is that this shift has been almost universally disastrous not only for fans but also for teams in smaller markets that relied on revenue-sharing models. As the old way of doing business fell away, the rich teams were getting richer while the rest were threatened with being left behind. Leagues certainly have made more money by slicing TV rights to include streamers like Amazon, Apple and Netflix. But there’s a good argument that moving some games to streaming embraces the future and is fan-friendly. The NFL actually hasn’t been slower to move to embrace streamers – it was first to move. The NFL was the first major American sports league to have an exclusive game package owned by a streaming service – Amazon Prime Video. That deal was signed in 2021 for about $1 billion per season. Lee’s point about the shift to streaming being “universally disastrous” for smaller markets has to do with the crumbling of the RSN model. But most teams make more money from national media rights deals than their local deals. The NBA Finals is currently the Indiana Pacers vs. the Oklahoma City Thunder – two small market teams. And MLB’s small market problems have to do more with billionaire owners simply not spending (because there’s no salary floor) more than the RSN transition. Lee ends his piece talking about how private equity is destroying teams by valuing returns over prestige, but private equity firms typically own minority stakes in teams, not majority stakes. While Boston sports fans (like Lee) are quick to point to Fenway Sports Group’s downsizing of the Red Sox, there’s little evidence that private equity has dramatically changed the way teams are run, because most funds’ stakes don’t come with any decision-making power. Private equity isn’t there to harvest assets for cash, it’s there because wealthy families wanted some liquidity out of their teams that are skyrocketing in value. I simply don’t buy the somewhat common narrative that the streaming era is much less consumer friendly than the cable era. Loyal readers know I’m a big San Francisco 49ers fan. In the 1990s, I literally could not watch most 49ers games on the East Coast. I used to watch ESPN’s “NFL Primetime” at 7:40 p.m. ET to see a freshly cut highlight package to find out if they won. Today, if you want to watch a game, you can find a way to do so, and you can watch on your phone or your tablet or your TV. Yes, the cost of all content keeps rising – and it’s definitely more confusing to keep all the options straight – but sports are actually more available than ever before. On the record With U.S. Open winner J.J. Spaun … I chatted with the man of the hour in the sports world, U.S. Open winner J.J. Spaun , after his thrilling victory at Oakmont on Sunday. While I, of course, asked Spaun about his 3 a.m. run to CVS to get medicine for his sick daughter the night before his final round, I was really interested in hearing what Spaun thought of the PGA Tour’s new rules to limit the number of players in a starting field to increase pace of play and strengthen the overall quality of competitors. The new changes go into effect for the 2026 season. They include: Only 20 PGA Tour cards will be awarded to Korn Ferry Tour graduates, down from 30 Standard tournament fields will be reduced to 144 players from 156 The Players Championship will shrink from 144 players to 120 Spaun is one of those Korn Ferry Tour graduates. He also played on the Canadian Tour. His experience – from qualifier to Major winner – speaks to how getting an opportunity on the PGA Tour can be the difference between making millions of dollars playing golf and barely making a liveable salary. He explained his mixed feelings about the new rules: “It’s maybe disappointing that the line is so thin on the PGA Tour between the 125th guy to the top 10,” Spaun told me. “I was that guy the last three years, kind of grinding just inside the top 100. So that goes to show that any player on the PGA Tour can turn things around, or things can happen so quickly and end up having the success that I’ve had this season. So I think overall, it’s a great product. Unfortunately, there’s so many great players, but I understand what the Tour is trying to do to create such a strong product and make things a lot more competitive.” Watch the entire interview here. Or listen to it here and follow the CNBC Sport podcast if you prefer the audio version, which also comes with a wrap up of the biggest stories of the week with my colleague Lillian Rizzo . CNBC Sport highlight reel The best of CNBC Sport from the past week: It’s the end of an era in the NBA: The Buss family has agreed to sell a majority stake in the Los Angeles Lakers to businessman Mark Walter. The deal values the team at $10 billion. The PGA Tour has a new CEO : former NFL Chief Media and Business Officer Brian Rolapp . I spoke with Rolapp during the Super Bowl a few months ago about the NFL. Little did we both know he’d have a new job four months later. Rolapp is the PGA Tour CEO, which is separate from the commissioner title that Jay Monahan holds, but Monahan announced this week he will step down at the end of 2026. The WNBA has renewed its media rights deal with E.W. Scripps’ Ion. The WNBA has been airing games on Ion since 2023. This season, the network will broadcast 50 regular season games. Ion is available on pay TV, over the air, and on free ad-supported streaming platforms in more than 128 million homes, as CNBC’s Jessica Golden reports. Fanatics Fest is in New York this week – Friday, June 20 to Sunday, June 22. Fanatics CEO Michael Rubin stopped by CNBC’s “Squawk Box” to discuss this year’s event at the Javits Center – a three-day sports festival featuring hundreds of celebrities, collectables and games. Nearly half of the NFL’s starting quarterbacks will be in attendance, Rubin said. The festival isn’t a moneymaker for the company. Rubin said the company lost about $15 million on the event last year, and this year’s Fanatics Fest is considerably bigger. The big number: $2.25 million That’s roughly the walkaway money going to J.J. Spaun for winning the U.S. Open. This factors in both taxes and caddy fees – 10% is the standard. Spaun will net approximately $2.5 million after federal, state and payroll taxes, according to Robert Raiola , director of PKF O’Connor Davies’ sports and entertainment group. I asked Spaun what he plans on doing with the money. “My wife and I, and our kids, we like to travel to the U.K. during the offseason and visit the Cotswolds,” Spaun said. “My wife’s dream has always been to have a nice cottage out there. And it was actually funny this year, she said, ‘If you win a major, will you maybe buy me a little cottage in the Cotswolds?’ And, you know, I was just like, ‘Sure.’ Like, my odds to win a major, you know, they’re OK, but you know, it’s not most likely going to happen anytime soon – at least I thought at the time. So she’s definitely taking me up on that deal now.” Quote of the week “I’m here to play wherever they want me to play.” – Rafael Devers in his introductory press conference with the San Francisco Giants. Devers will likely play some first base for the Giants, a position he refused to play with the Boston Red Sox. Around the league The Tampa Bay Rays are nearing a deal to sell to a group led by Florida homebuilder Patrick Zalupski. The deal values the team at $1.7 billion, according to Sportico. Stu Sternberg is currently the Rays’ principal owner. Sternberg and his partners bought 48% of the team in 2004 for an estimated $65 million, according to the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. An old-fashioned Sports Illustrated athlete profile this week – a good read from Chris Mannix on soon-to-be No. 1 NBA draft pick Cooper Flagg. For the first time, streaming has captured a bigger share of total audience than cable and broadcast combined, Nielsen revealed in its monthly The Gauge report. Another TV ratings story: The NBA Finals continue to deliver low TV audiences as their series heads to game six. And given Pacers star Tyrese Haliburton is now hurt , I’d bet ratings will be low again today. Game 5’s 9.54 million audience on Disney’s ABC was down 22% from last year and was the least-watched Game 5 since 2003, excluding the Covid bubble series in 2020. And, a big week for NASCAR on Amazon Prime Video this week – Prime Video’s NASCAR Cup Series race from Mexico City on Sunday had 2.1 million viewers. The race, won by Shane van Gisbergen , outperformed both IndyCar (1.2 million) and F1 (1.57 million). SPOILER ALERT: We will go deeper into the racing world in next week’s newsletter.
