This summer’s lineup of sporting events has been an embarrassment of riches. This morning, the No. 1 men’s tennis player in the world (Jannik Sinner) and the winningest men’s tennis player of all time (Novak Djokovic) played in the semifinal of the biggest tennis tournament in the world (Wimbledon). In the afternoon, Spain and Belgium are kicking off their World Cup quarterfinal match. If that wasn’t enough, the evening brings a full slate of Major League Baseball games, plus NBA Summer League debuts for half the league’s rookies. All of this comes after a packed June in which, at one point, the World Cup, the NBA finals, and the NHL finals all briefly overlapped.
If it feels like there is more sports to watch than ever before, that’s because there is. This year’s World Cup is the biggest ever, the tournament having jumped from 32 teams to 48. It may come around only every four years, but the sports calendar no longer stops. The MLB, NHL, and NBA have all added games over the past few years. In 2020, the NFL tacked on two extra playoff games; the following year, the league added an extra regular-season game for the first time in nearly 50 years. Since then, it has colonized ever more calendar territory, rescheduling games from its standard Sunday slate to the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, Black Friday, Christmas Day, and a number of late-season Saturdays. Every major league has expanded over the past few years, Stephen Master, an adjunct professor of sports media at NYU and the former global head of sports at Nielsen, told me: “There’s not a league that hasn’t been touched by it.” And while this isn’t the first time these leagues have grown, the recent across-the-board expansion surge is unusual, the experts I spoke with all said.
If you’re a sports fan like me, more games to watch can seem like a good thing. You don’t get the tiny African island nation of Cape Verde holding out for a miraculous draw against the mighty Spain without a 48-team World Cup. When leagues expand their playoffs—as, say, the MLB did in 2022—they give more teams a chance to qualify and more fans something to root for. But the glut of games can also be overwhelming, even if you aren’t someone who binges three different leagues. There’s simply too much.
The feeling of excess has to do in part with changes to the sports-media ecosystem. Before streaming, most viewers had access only to local, in-market games and a handful of national broadcasts each week. Now die-hard fans can watch everything (although doing so might require three separate streaming subscriptions on top of a cable package). If you want to consume all 570 hours of top-flight Spanish soccer over the course of a season, that is an option available to you.
But a good deal of blame falls on sports leagues themselves. More games means more money: more ticket sales, more corporate sponsorship opportunities, and more valuable media-rights packages. Master suspects that last factor in particular may go a long way in explaining the ballooning schedules. In 2005, 14 of the top 100 live TV broadcasts were sports, according to Nielsen; in 2025, they made up 95 of the top 100. As the bottom has fallen out of virtually all other live TV programming, networks have come to rely on sports—and they’ll pay through the teeth to keep them. At same time, they’re now competing for media rights against deep-pocketed streaming behemoths such as Netflix, Apple, and Amazon.
The more the value of TV deals swells, Master said, the more money leagues leave on the table by not expanding. In 2024, the NFL sold the rights to televise a few games to Netflix for $75 million apiece—this fall, Netflix will broadcast the first-ever NFL game on Thanksgiving Eve.
In aggregate, the expansions contribute to a feeling of oversaturation, of too-muchness. For a fanatic, either you’re always missing something or sports takes over your entire life. How are you supposed to have a regular, socially and familially acceptable Christmas Day while also keeping tabs on five prime NBA matchups and three NFL games? For a casual viewer, the proliferation of games can detract from the experience of watching any individual one.
Consider the NBA. The league introduced a pre-playoffs play-in tournament in 2021 and another in-season tournament in 2023. Yet for many years now, fans have complained that the 82-game season is too long, as have such leading lights as LeBron James and the Golden State Warriors coach Steve Kerr. To preserve their bodies, players end up taking semi-regular off nights (“load management,” to use the term of art), making it next-to-impossible for fans to predict whether the player they’re buying a ticket to see will even suit up that night. The length of the season and inclusiveness of the postseason (two-thirds of teams get in) ensure that most games have little meaning.
The nature and extent of the problem varies league to league. But the drive to grow is universal, and so is the resistance. The move to expand the World Cup generated serious backlash, in part because the group stage of the tournament has become lower stakes and hopelessly arcane. And seemingly no one favors the College Football Playoff’s planned expansion from 12 to 24 teams, because it will render regular-season games less consequential and water down the quality of the playoff itself. A number of MLB stars, too, have called for a shorter season, because 162 games is just flat-out a lot. Unlike basketball or baseball, pro football is far from the point where regular-season contests become meaningless, but that hasn’t stopped its fans from debating whether the NFL is sapping some of the magic that comes from football’s scarcity.
Whatever fans think of these expansions, chances are they’ll tune in. Sure, they’ll complain about how the extra games are diluting the product, but “everyone says that,” Master said. “And then the ratings come out and they’re incredible.” This is not a matter of fickleness; it’s a fundamental misfiring of the free market. Generally, if a business offers a product and it sells, that means consumers want it. But when sports leagues add games, the experience for fans degrades in a way that doesn’t always show up in the dollars and cents. Just because a fan watches the 82nd game of the NBA regular season doesn’t mean they wouldn’t prefer, say, a 70-game season in which every game was a little more competitive.
There’s no going back. FIFA is considering further expanding the World Cup to 64 teams, and the generally strong showings from first-time participants at this year’s tournament will only bolster that push. Despite having tripled just a couple of years ago, plans to double the size of the College Football Playoff already seem to be in motion. And NFL owners are pushing hard for another week of games. “In the NFL, there’s a sense of inevitability that it’ll go to 18 games,” Scott Rosner, a sports-management professor at Columbia University, told me. “There’s almost too much money at stake for it not to.” Owners aren’t going to walk away from an extra $1 billion in revenue, and many players aren’t going to walk away from the extra salary. The experts I spoke with couldn’t think of a single example of that happening.
Sports have always been a business, but it can feel these days as though we’re moving into a hard-knuckled, wring-out-every-penny era. The ever-multiplying microsponsorships, the split-screen commercial breaks interrupting play, the carving up of media rights, the expanded schedules—it all chips away, little by little, at the viewing experience. Add all of that to the way betting is reshaping the landscape, and in the process something intangible about sports fandom is being lost. Ultimately, every business has one destiny: to grow.
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