A sports fan is an individual who is interested in sports, showing a deeper level of involvement with a certain team or player.
Sports fans are loyal to their respective teams, spending lots of time and money to show their support. Sadly, this loyalty is not met with any reward, but rather a slap in the face by the league.
While professional sports are in a golden age with the world’s best athletes competing at the highest level, fans can’t see this unless they can climb an always-rising paywall.
With constant contract negotiations between networks and streaming services for rights to certain leagues, the burden of payment has fallen on the average fan.
The National Football League (NFL) now has five streaming partners in Peacock, Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, ESPN+ and the combination of NFL Sunday Ticket and YouTube TV. In order to watch every game from your favorite team, you would need to spend hundreds of dollars on these yearly subscriptions.
The greed doesn’t stop here, though.
While Peacock is NBC’s streaming service, certain games are only shown on Peacock instead of also being played on your local NBC television station, like Sunday Night Football does.
The Week 1 Friday night matchup between the Green Bay Packers and the Philadelphia Eagles from this past season was only available on Peacock. The NFL couldn’t even showcase the first-ever game in Brazil without asking fans for more money.
And if you are a fan of a team not in your immediate area, finding a way to watch your team without spending an egregious amount of money is impossible. In the Central Valley, 49ers and Raiders games take up the majority of Sunday cable time slots due to the local fan bases, leaving other teams or even better matchups to fall outside the view of Central Valley fans.
But the NFL isn’t the only league guilty of pricing out fans.
The National Basketball Association (NBA) is already dealing with falling viewership, making the price of streaming enough for fans to just give up.
NBA fans with cable get to watch basketball games throughout the season due to the coverage the TNT crew offers and through NBA on ESPN, but the nationally broadcast games aren’t fair for everyone.
Only fans of the biggest market teams, like the Lakers and Celtics, get to watch a large portion of their teams’ games on TV. If you’re a fan of a team struggling to make the playoffs, good luck finding a game on cable.
Going into this 2024-25 NBA season, the price for the NBA League Pass was raised once again, forcing fans to decide if it’s even worth the high price.
The sad part about being a fan is that the leagues don’t seem to care.
Baseball fans that bought the MLB.TV subscription, there is no guarantee you get to watch your team. With Apple TV dipping into the MLB streaming world, fans miss out on those games being shown through Apple, despite paying for their MLB subscription.
As far as playoffs go, the MLB and NBA seem to have the best availability, if you have cable. The NFL, on the other hand, continues to be greedy.
Multiple streaming services now hold playoff games, with Netflix being the most recent addition. While CBS and Fox hold the championship games and other divisional games, the Wild Card Round is a frenzy among the multiple streaming services.
Then there’s the fear of blackouts, that even paying the subscription isn’t even good enough to get away from.
So do these leagues do this to promote going to see the sporting events live?
No, because if that were the case, they wouldn’t be charging hundreds of dollars for tickets on top of outrageous concession prices.
Even jersey prices have gotten out of hand.
Much like the streaming services, the leagues don’t seem to care about the fans, as seen by the decline in quality of NBA and MLB jerseys.
Being a fan is hard, no matter how die-hard you are. Just watching a game comes with many hoops to jump through.
At the end of the day, loyalty to your favorite franchises or leagues isn’t enough.
No matter how crazy of a dream it is, one can only hope that one day, being a fan gets easier.
