Mark Loftus has been a New York Yankees fan since the days when Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris were smashing home runs. As a boy, Loftus would keep up with his heroes on the team's local radio and TV station, and occasionally on a weekend network broadcast. It wasn't hard to figure out where to catch the game and when. And it cost nothing to tune in.
It isn't so simple, or as inexpensive, now. Yankees games appear on a bewildering array of channels and platforms -- some free, most not. The list includes the Fox broadcast network, basic cable networks such as TBS, FS1, ESPN and ESPN2, the YES premium sports network, and the Amazon Prime, Peacock, Apple TV+, MLB.TV and Gotham Sports streaming apps.
Pick a night and the venue might change. Apple TV+ has the exclusive Major League Baseball deal on Fridays, often featuring the Yankees. If it's Sunday, the game is on Peacock. The one place Yankees games no longer regularly appear: on a local broadcast station.
"This is not a win for the fans," says Loftus, 69, a real-estate appraiser who lives in Austin, Texas. "I've seen no indication that the providers and leagues are concerned about the fans. They've adopted a 'let them eat cake' attitude."
As sports on TV continues to fragment, that sentiment appears to be widely shared. The complex array of TV sports deals has been a boon for professional and college leagues, generating billions in revenues from networks and streaming platforms eager for live games and clip-heavy highlight shows. But the fragmentation has created its own issues for fans. Games are here, there and everywhere every day of the week, sometimes at odd hours. Major League Baseball games carried by Peacock on Sundays, for example, have started at 11:30 a.m. Eastern time, or 8:30 a.m. Pacific time. Thanks to the expansion of the Big Ten football conference to include Western teams, away games for West Coast teams can sometimes start at 9 a.m. Pacific time.
The high cost of fandom
A second, and bigger, complaint is the escalating cost. Pro sports began migrating from "free" broadcast TV to basic cable decades ago, marking the first time viewers had to pay to see them play. New pay "windows," such as streaming, have been opening ever since, setting off a sports-price spiral.
These days fully outfitted fans can easily spend hundreds of dollars a month to watch their favorite sport, once the cost of a basic cable subscription, a premium sports subscription, a broadband connection and a subscription to one or more streaming services are added up. Premium services like NFL Sunday Ticket, which carries all out-of-market games on Sunday afternoons, start at $240 a year and can exceed $500 in some configurations. Sports journalist Joon Lee calculated last year in the New York Times that a hardcore Boston fan has to spend $4,785 to "to follow her or his favorite team" -- including tickets, TV access and merchandise, a 262% increase over 20 years.
Fans like Stacey De Salvo have had enough. For years, De Salvo, an elementary-school teacher who lives in Dana Point, Calif., subscribed to a regional sports network to watch his beloved Los Angeles Dodgers. But as the price of his satellite service increased, De Salvo cut the cord in 2021 and declined to follow the team to its new TV home on a competing pay channel. Eventually, De Salvo says, he "just lost interest" in the games. When the Dodgers began their run to the World Series last season, De Salvo's lifelong passion returned. This time, he followed many of the games on the radio.
Bill Sullivan, a director of a Chicago-area mortgage company, has also said no to paying more to watch pro sports. Sullivan, 63, spends $252 a month for his cable subscription, plus a few streaming platforms. And that, he says, is plenty.
"I can't blame the owners and athletes who benefit from these services, as they demand to be paid," he said. "But they also need to be protected from themselves and their own greed." The current landscape serves well-heeled superfans, Sullivan says, but doesn't do much to attract new fans the way widely available broadcast TV telecasts did in his youth. The professional leagues "will eventually regret these choices," he says.
A DOJ investigation
While many hometown games are still available on traditional broadcast TV, a kind of Rubicon was crossed early last year when Amazon Prime streamed an NFL playoff game on an exclusive basis, the first time a postseason contest was available only to those with a streaming subscription. The game raised anew the fear that the ascendant streaming services would eventually outbid the broadcast networks for events once considered a sports fan's birthright, such as the Super Bowl and World Series.
In fact, the issue has begun to attract attention among lawmakers and regulators in Washington. In April, the Justice Department opened an investigation into whether the NFL's streaming deals violate terms of the Sports Broadcasting Act, a landmark 1961 law that granted professional leagues limited antitrust protection to bargain for TV deals. The Federal Communications Commission began its own inquiry in February; its file of public comments bulges with criticism of the sports-migration trend.
"After watching football for decades, it is appalling to see how things have changed," wrote one. "I am angry and disappointed to see that the Monday and Thursday games have been hijacked to cable services for what I see as greed."
In their defense, the leagues point out that viewers still have free or low-cost access to the hometown team's games, in some cases more of them than in year's past. The most dramatic story may be the NBA. Two decades ago, most of the league's games were available only on ESPN and TNT, requiring viewers to have cable. But with the decline of cable, the NBA struck a new 11-year deal with ABC and NBC in late 2024 that puts a minimum of 75 regular-season games on broadcast TV, five times as many as under its previous contract. The broadcast networks will also carry more than twice as many playoff games compared with the previous two decades.
The NFL, which oversees the most popular sport on television, notes every team's regular-season games are available free in its home market. All told, the league says 87% of its regular-season games are carried via a traditional broadcast network (Fox, CBS, NBC and ABC via "Monday Night Football" simulcasts with ESPN), almost exactly the same total as in 2013. (Viewers don't have access to all these games, however, since many are carried on a regional-only basis.)
"If you're an NFL fan, I don't think there's a better model than the one the NFL offers," says Hans Schroeder, the league's executive vice president of media distribution. Rather than diminishing the overall audience, the various packages and options have expanded the games' popularity, he says. Ticking off growth in broadcast, cable and streaming audiences, Schroeder adds, "All the metrics tell us the model is working. It's incredibly fan friendly."
Schroeder declines to predict whether more games, including the Super Bowl, would move to a paid tier. "Broadcast remains an incredible home for us," he says.
Better than ticket prices
While many viewers balk at the cost and complexity of the current offerings, some say the trade-offs have been worth it. "I think hardcore sports fans are more than lucky at the availability of games online," says Bill Moseley, a fan who lives in Los Angeles. Moseley says the pay-TV sports option compare favorably to the "crazy" cost of ticket prices. Given the sophistication of contemporary TV coverage, "it's almost preferable to stay home and watch your favorite games on the big screen hanging on your den wall," he says.
What's being lost, however, may be harder to measure. Mark Pelesh, a retired attorney who lives in Chevy Chase, Md., recalls how the Washington Redskins' glory years in the 1980s and early 1990s brought the region to a standstill every Sunday afternoon. "The ready availability of [local TV] facilitated this, and everyone, regardless of their background and income, shared in it," Pelesh says. "It's hard to see that happening again in the fragmented viewing marketplace that is upon us."
The TV landscape, he says, is becoming as stratified as the experience of going to a game. With stadium clubs, exclusive viewing areas and luxury suites, "fans are getting sorted and separated by how much they can pay." In the end, there's a cost -- not just to the fan but to the culture at large: "The shared experience of being fans, the feeling of solidarity irrespective and class and background, is being eroded."
Write to reports@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
July 14, 2026 12:36 ET (16:36 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2026 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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