I was at Fenway Park with my dad when the Boston Red Sox legend David Ortiz hit the game-tying grand slam in Game 2 of the 2013 American League Championship Series. Months earlier, after the Boston Marathon bombing, Mr. Ortiz had stood on the field and said, “This is our city,” adding an expletive.
That night in October when the grand slam cleared the fence, I hugged strangers. Grown men were on the verge of tears. Fenway shook like it might collapse from the sound. You didn’t need to understand the score to understand the moment. It didn’t matter who you were. Everyone understood what it meant. A few weeks later, the Red Sox won the World Series — and it felt like Boston had come all the way back.
For most of my life, sports was one of the most accessible forms of entertainment in America. 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. Take the N.B.A. playoffs. Wanted to watch the Denver Nuggets? You needed to shell out at least $8.99 a month for NBA TV — unless you happened to live in Denver, in which case you had to spend an additional $20 a month for a regional basketball streaming subscription.
It’s not just basketball. 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.
For decades, our national sports leagues — the National Football League, the National Basketball Association, Major League Baseball, the National Hockey League — operated more like civic institutions. These organizations may have always chased the mighty dollar, but they also wanted their sports to last. And as such, they cared about strengthening such powerful intangibles as local pride, generational fandom and public ritual. Tradition was good business. Community built loyalty. Loyalty built value.
Then came the streaming wars. Starting in the early 2010s, live sports events were one of the last types of programming that guaranteed hundreds of thousands if not millions of real-time viewers, and the leagues began to be flooded with requests from streamers, such as Amazon Prime, Peacock and Max, begging for a piece of the pie. At the same time, the leagues were looking for a way to raise the cash required to invest in the lucrative opportunities offered by overseas expansion. And that’s when the business of sustaining sports in America took a back seat, and our country’s sports leagues stopped acting like caretakers and started thinking like asset managers.
The result is that 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.
Going to a game is similarly growing out of reach: From 1999 to 2020, the average price of a seat across all sports rose roughly twice as fast as overall consumer prices. It increased 19.5 percent between May 2023 and May 2025 alone, one of the biggest jumps of any category tracked by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
The result isn’t just inconvenient. It’s lonely. As access shatters, rituals vanish, as do the moments that make sports communal — a bar full of strangers cheering for the same team, the generational ties passed down through the seasons. Those experiences fade under a system that dictates that the more you can pay, the more you can see — until the game disappears behind another paywall.
“Two years ago, we were packed,” says Christine Reay, the general manager of Rookies Sports Bar and Grill in Clive, Iowa. Today, you can live amid the cornfields from “Field of Dreams” and still miss nearly half of Major League Baseball games. Between shuffling from platform to platform, unclear blackout rules and bars needing special subscriptions to stream certain games, Ms. Reay says, there are often times when “I’m standing out in the middle of the room, almost in tears, because I can’t get the game on.” These days, “people leave angry. Or don’t come at all.”
What she’s mourning isn’t just the game, or the lost business. It’s the feeling that games brought people together — that even in a fractured country, sports gave her bar a pulse.
This mess isn’t a glitch. It’s the system. The blackouts and paywalls aren’t bugs. They’re features. The leagues and their investors count on fan loyalty. That your devotion runs too deep to quit.
Fandom isn’t being nurtured anymore. It’s being mined.
For most of the 20th century, pro sports were side hustles. Baseball clubs were run mostly by tavern owners, newspaper editors and civic boosters who usually lost money or broke even but saw teams as extensions of their communities. Then came television. In 1960, an early football league signed a contract with ABC and invented revenue sharing, which distributed a portion of the money generated by broadcasting games across all of a league’s teams. This model, which would rule the business for decades, gave leagues a path to financial stability while also supporting teams in smaller markets that would never otherwise have been able to compete with richer rivals in bigger metropolitan areas.
With games airing on both national networks and local broadcast channels, leagues were motivated to keep sports a communal experience. M.L.B. kept local radio broadcast deals decentralized and community-rooted in order to encourage and protect a cheap way for families to follow their teams across generations. Sports carved out rhythms — Sunday afternoons for pro football, Saturday for college football — that turned games into shared rituals.
Throughout this time, sports leagues barred private equity investors and the like from team ownership for fear that short-term financial interests would override long-term team stability. When many sports migrated to cable, there were grumbles about losing free access. But cable also brought more games to American households while keeping the cost to viewers relatively modest. The revenue-sharing model was maintained.
Growing up in middle-class Boston, I felt lucky to be a sports fan. As a Korean American who moved to the United States at 2 months old, I obtained through sports a way to connect with my dad, my friends over the school lunch table and strangers on the subway. It was a shared language: The rituals, heartbreaks and absurd arguments meant something because they were ours.
I was there for those magical years in the 2000s, when the Boston Celtics went from being one of the worst teams in the league to N.B.A. champions. The New England Patriots have gone on to win six Super Bowls, the Red Sox earned four titles, and the Bruins returned to glory.
The internet revolution brought a flood of new platforms all hungry for live sports content. As streaming services competed for subscribers, they began throwing enormous sums at the leagues, eager to lock in loyal audiences. At the same time, the leagues — particularly the N.B.A. and M.L.B. — were looking to fund global expansion, following the playbook of the Premier League, England’s pro soccer organization: international TV deals, overseas tours, building global icons, all of which required more money. That money had to come from somewhere.
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.
Executions have differed. The N.B.A. is getting $1.8 billion a year for the next 11 seasons from Amazon. M.L.B. stumbled, getting a comparatively measly $85 million per year from Apple TV+. 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.
The new solution: private equity. In 2019, M.L.B. approved private equity minority ownership, and the N.B.A. soon followed. As an executive at a small-market Major League Baseball team texted me, desperate times call for lower standards.
Although team valuations had soared alongside the fortunes of America’s wealthiest, many wealthy families still treated ownership as a legacy purchase: a long-term bet, a symbol of status, even a civic responsibility. But even they can’t compete with the likes of private equity, which brought more money to the table.
But private equity doesn’t profit from prestige. It profits from returns. Now, the shattering of sports culture is only accelerating as more and more teams, finding themselves outbid by richer rivals and struggling to stabilize media revenue, throw in the towel. As of last month, private-equity-backed entities owned stakes in 74 major North American sports teams valued at $229.1 billion.
My hometown is hardly immune to these shifts. My dad no longer watches the Red Sox. He cut the cord a few years back, and he won’t pay the $29.99 a month to NESN 360. The David Ortiz grand slam I once watched with him, the one that brought a shaken city to its feet, wouldn’t land the same way today.
On March 20, it was announced that the Boston Celtics’ majority owner, Wyc Grousbeck, whose family had long absorbed steep losses to build a roster with championship aspirations, was selling the team to Bill Chisholm, a Boston native, for $6.1 billion. At first, it looked like a purchase in the classic tradition of a local kid buying the team he grew up rooting for. But reporting revealed Mr. Chisholm was being backed in part by Sixth Street, a private equity firm. Critics now see the deal, which is pending N.B.A. approval, as another moment when a sports team becomes a vessel for wealth extraction.
Who owns a team shapes everything: how tickets are priced, how games are broadcast, how much is spent on talent and what values guide the franchise’s future. The leagues’ old fears — that fans would be exploited for short-term return rather than long-term growth or continuity — are gradually coming to pass.
In 2004, a hard-core Boston fan would have spent around $1,321 to follow her or his favorite team — that included tickets, TV access and merchandise. Today, that number is $4,785. That’s a 262 percent jump. Wages, in that same stretch, have risen 87 percent.
What used to be hometown investments — flawed but familiar symbols of local pride — are now spreadsheet cells. And with them go the parts of sports you can’t quantify: the inside jokes, the heartbreaks, the irrational faith that next year will be our year. And it’s not just the pros. College sports are being reshaped by whoever writes the biggest check, from deals to peddle their name, image and likeness to conference realignment chaos.
Increasingly, access to cultural life is paywalled. Sports is one of the last activities that can still be a shared American experience that cuts across class, race and geography, unfolding live, unscripted and in real time, in the real world with real people. But instead of uniting us, it’s been carved up. The wealthy can sit curtsied, stream everything and pass down season tickets like heirlooms. For everyone else, belonging is for sale.
The unraveling doesn’t have to happen. The leagues — the very institutions tasked with preserving and growing the games — chose this future for us. Fortunately, there are solutions.
Our state and federal legislators have bestowed the leagues with an extraordinary array of legal privileges, from a 1961 antitrust exemption allowing them to bundle the television rights of all of their teams to taxpayer subsidies for stadiums — often through tax-exempt municipal bonds — to limited oversight for financial transparency.
These privileges were given to these leagues on the understanding that they were propagating civic institutions, where stability and shared cultural moments were worth protecting. If leagues want to keep these privileges, they need to act more like institutions that serve the public.
For our national games, it’s time for Congress to amend the antitrust exemption with a ban on blackouts, a cap on what streaming services can charge fans and a requirement that media companies offer affordable bundles. For local games, state legislators can force teams vying for taxpayer dollars to help pay for their gleaming new stadiums to offer affordable local streams, guaranteed public simulcasts and, similarly, no blackouts. Some teams already do this. The Dallas Stars of the N.H.L. stream their regional games free with ads — proving that it’s possible.
Congress could also take inspiration from Britain’s “Crown Jewel” rule and designate key sporting events — perhaps the World Series, the Super Bowl, the N.B.A. Finals — as nationally significant and require that they air on free, widely accessible platforms.
There are still games on broadcast channels, but the streaming landscape is so fragmented that most people don’t know how to find them, especially not those fans who’ve cut the cord and don’t use a digital antenna. For these games, our government could consider building a free streaming app that makes the basic broadcast networks — ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox, PBS, Univision, the CW — available to anyone with internet access. The app could be ad-supported and built in partnership with a tech platform like YouTube or Samsung with oversight from the Federal Communications Commission or the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
Our legislators aren’t oblivious to this problem. Last month, Senator Ted Cruz led a hearing on sports broadcasting and asked a question many fans have been wondering: “Why does it seem to be getting harder and more expensive to just watch the game?” He cited the growing costs and fragmentation and criticized the leagues for leaning on their special legal treatment.
Yet instead of introducing regulation, he left it up to them to police themselves. Little wonder that representatives from the N.F.L. didn’t bother to show up. If public money is going to support professional sports, then public obligations — like ensuring access — should come with it.
This isn’t just about games. It’s also about whether sports will remain one of the last public spaces where regular people still feel that they matter. Where strangers can become neighbors, united by something bigger than themselves. It’s not about preserving the past, but about building a future that still feels human.
The question isn’t whether sports will change. It’s who they’ll belong to when they do.
Joon Lee is the founder of Morning Announcements, a production company behind his YouTube channel on sports and culture.
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