In the summer of 2002, my father and I drove to a friend’s house, climbed down to his basement and crowded around a small television to watch the World Cup. Our friend had bought the final on pay-per-view. We fussed with the box. The video quality was terrible. Brazil won.
My father is Spanish. I was a Spanish and American kid whose earliest memories are of soccer. Those memories include how hard it was to find the game in the United States. The channels that carried soccer had decided that the only way to profit from it in America was to charge the diehards directly, one match at a time. So we paid, as we had no other choice.
I still pay. My club, Real Madrid, plays in the UEFA Champions League, and in the United States that tournament belongs to Paramount, which holds the exclusive English-language rights through 2030 under a deal Bloomberg valued at about $1.5 billion. Nearly every match streams on Paramount+. I have no interest in Paramount+. It carries nothing else I want. I subscribed anyway, because it is the only place to watch my team. I know what it feels like when a company decides that the only path to your club runs through its door.
Now that Paramount will complete its $110 billion takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery, many American sports fans will learn that feeling. The combined Paramount and Warner will hold CBS Sports, the NFL, the Masters, the PGA Championship, Big Ten football and basketball, the Champions League and, as of this year, the UFC, thanks to a seven-year, $7.7 billion deal. Warner’s TNT Sports will add Major League Baseball, the NHL and the Stanley Cup Final in odd years, the French Open, NASCAR, a slice of the College Football Playoffs, and half of March Madness. The result will be a sports media colossus with almost no rivals. Only ESPN will be bigger.
Every one of those rights will flow into a single bundle. David Ellison, Paramount’s chief executive, told investors in March that the company will fold Paramount+ and HBO Max into one streaming service.
Picture a hockey fan. Today, she’s able to find TNT’s national games on cable or on HBO Max. Now, after the merger, those games will only be available through one enormous app that also carries pro and college football, golf, tennis, stock car racing, mixed martial arts, and two studios’ back catalogs. And, of course, priced to match. No one will sell her a hockey package, just as no one sells me a Champions League pass. We’ll be forced to pay more money.
When Paramount folded Showtime into Paramount+ in 2023, it raised the ad-free price from $9.99 to $11.99 a month. If we have to buy things we don’t want to in order to get the things we do, we’ll have to pay more. We know that will happen because we already do — and the bill is punishing. A fan who wants every game a favorite team plays can face a streaming bill approaching $2,000 a year.
Sports fans have nowhere else to go. We will have no other choice than to buy the bigger package. If HBO Max doubles its price, a viewer can skip the next prestige drama, or wait, or read a book. No substitute exists for a Champions League semifinal or a Stanley Cup Final. When one company owns exclusive rights, you pay that company. And sports aren’t just a show people are talking about that sounds interesting. They’re part of who we are. My connection to Spain, and to my grandparents who are buried there, partly runs through Real Madrid. I even founded a Real Madrid website, Managing Madrid (I’m no longer affiliated), to find other people who share my passion. Every league and every team has a community of fans who will pay whatever it costs to keep watching. Media companies know that, and that is exactly why prices keep rising.
For a while, twelve state attorneys general stood in the way. And they won a couple of victories: they first secured a temporary restraining order after Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín indicated that she didn’t buy what Paramount was selling. Paramount then agreed not to close the deal until those cases reached trial or until June 2027. On Sept. 21, the states settled. Their lawsuit challenged Paramount’s power over movie theaters and cable distributors, never its hold on sports rights or streaming. The settlement doesn’t either. Nothing in it moves a single game out of Paramount’s hands.
Competition is the only discipline this market has, and the deal weakens it from both directions. Leagues will auction their rights to one fewer bidder capable of writing a billion-dollar check. College conferences will face further pressure to consolidate. Fans will face limited sellers and even higher prices.
The public conversation about the merger centered on the loss of tens of thousands of job. As it should. That is where the pain will land hardest. But the household streaming bills deserve a place in that debate. This deal will push the cost up, and it will price some fans out entirely, because they cannot justify paying for golf and stock car racing just to watch their team play. It is one more small, relentless increase in the cost of ordinary life.
In 2002, my father and I paid because a few executives had decided that soccer fans were a niche worth squeezing. A far bigger company has now decided that every fan, including you, should pay more.
Thanks for the excellent article! My Dad was an excellent athlete, and we grew up together watching sporting events. He really enjoyed watching NFL and baseball games, as did I since that is when we would talk about life. My sons became soccer players, and my oldest played in the D2 national championships as the winning goalie. What a thrill.
Now, we won't pay for the corporate extortion of our national sporting events. The NFL will kill itself soon enough now that it has incorporated online, in-the-moment gambling. The media has ruined the essence of sports and constantly interrupts the emotion of the sport by interjecting sideline reporters or in-game reporters. The interviews are meaningless, the analysis is meaningless, and it all interrupts the actual flow of the game that we get to watch for maybe 5 minutes before they need to run gambling or car commercials. Media today is unwatchable, and as such, we don't watch anymore. My family of tiny grandbaby athletes continues to grow, and we continue to support community sports where we aren't extorted to pay expensive viewing fees to watch a sport played innocently by our children.
There is another option to watch soccer events: get VPN and watch the national TV stations of the country whose clubs you want to watch. I assume you and/or your dad speak Spanish. All other Americans need to learn at least one foreign language if they want to participate in this scheme.
US citizens can no longer insulate themselves, if they want to participate (or watch) international events.