I have been a big sports fan all my life, but I feel myself withdrawing HARD from pro sports this year.
Main culprits for me:
- The gross enshitification of being a sports fan.
Ticket and concession prices are though the roof. It requires multiple subscriptions to follow your team.
Worst one is fan merchandise which has completely turned to shit. When Fanatics bought the rights to every leagues jerseys, the quality completely fell off. I used to be able to buy a stitched premium jersey for $150. Now they want you to spend close to $300 and everything is screen printed. I have not bought a new jersey in 5 years.
- Advertising on everything.
It used to be that you would put up with what I considered a fair amount of advertising. 5 min commercial breaks after like 20-30 mins of gameplay.
Today though the commercial breaks are not good enough for these leagues. Now they are on the screen always. Patches on jerseys and helmets. Digitally inserted on the field/court.
Worst offenders are the NHL who now have their boards on the rink covered in digitally inserted advertising on their broadcasts. It would be one thing if they just changed ads every once in a while, but they make those things dance around and are insanely distracting. I consider the NHL basically unwatchable because of those stupid fake boards. It is funny to me when they show highlights and you see the real boards with simple advertising and I basically long for those again.
I also used to be a fan of NFL Redzone for alot of years. Not anymore though and if you have watched it lately then you understand why. They always billed themselves as “7 hours of commercial free sports,” but over the years they started to really test what that meant. They didn’t take proper commercial breaks, but suddenly sponsored segments were everywhere on the screen and they would pop up these ads on the edge of the screen and reduce the broadcast to a small box. This season they are showing full commercials now and are not even pretentending to be commercial free anymore. What I found most interesting about this situation though was the fans who basically ridiculed other fans for complaining about the commercials by saying that they should not have expected it to last forever. Which shows how conditioned fans are to expect rampant advertising in sports.
- The time suck
So many sports games takes 3-4 hours to play. If you are going to follow all your teams games, then that is 100’s of hours a season spent watching other people play a game. If you follow multiple teams then we are probably easily encroaching on thousands of hours. We have not even included the hours people spend watching analysis or “hot takes”
If I feel I have to catch up on a game, I can go on YouTube and watch a highlight of the game. The amount of times a 5 hour baseball game has a highlight video the lasts 5 mins really speaks volumes to me.
- Gambling
Probably the biggest factor that has eroded sports. It started with fantasy football forever ago, but now we see people literally throwing their lives away for parlays. Then seeing pregame shows where they are talking about the over/under of the game.
Sports leagues used to fight gambling to preserve their leagues integrity. Now they support gambling hard, but act shocked and dismayed when their players get corrupted.
- Pro sports don’t involve you
More of a personal realization than anything, as much as you can dedicate yourself to a team and be a diehard fan, these teams don’t care about you and never will. They are happy to sell you things stamped with their logo and claim that they will always chase championships, but ultimately they care about profit and themselves. They don’t act in the best interest of fans no matter how much they try to convince you otherwise.
This is just the tip of the iceberg for me and I could list examples all day. I think ultimately I am realizing that I need to reevaluate my relationship with sports and not make it such a priority in my life.
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I used to watch as much sport as I could find. Now I can’t find any unless I revert to paid, or questionable, streaming sites.
I started as a foundation member of my local A-League club and remained for over 12 years, my seat never changed, but they would classify my seat differently from silver to gold to platinum, this substantially increased the cost, now it’s not affordable.
I get far more enjoyment watching the 1st team of my son’s soccer club – it’s cheaper and I’m happy to volunteer my time around the club.
We’ve already see baseball start to respond to some of the problems you listed, but I see it continuing to be a major issue for most leagues as the teams have got caught up in the asset appreciation seen in other kinds of assets.
You should try following Sumo. Its -extremely- traditional, so the commercialism has a hard time sneaking in. Only the top two divisions are pro. There’s a major tournament starting today (Sunday 9th nov) for the next two weeks. You can easily catch replays on youtube.
I’ve stopped caring about physical sports and their broadcast literal decades ago. I only occasionally watch relatively niche sports during the Olympics (climbing for example), but that’s it.
What I do watch is eSports. More exciting than watching a bunch of people run over a field repeatedly, trying to get a ball into a things or whatever.
I understand the need for entertainment. I just think the current value of watching live sports is little to none. In the NFL’s case, why would you buy a cable subscription to watch a program that’s only 11% the actual game I want to watch(source: trust me bro). That’s like asking if someone would want to watch a show that’s 90% filler.
Our struggle has been the enshittifcation of streaming the games. We don’t live in the market of our hockey team we like to watch. In order to actually get (legally) 95% of the games we would need to subscribe to about 5 different services and still be blacked out for the games against the “local” team, which is 4 hours away from us, unless we also pay for cable/satellite television as well. We used to legitimately pay for the service that the NHL offered where we could get just our team, or all of the games, for one season price. Then they split everything to all the different networks so now we’d need sling, TNT, espn+ (and the highest tier of it), nhl network, prime, Apple TV +, and a cable subscription
I’ve never understood why they don’t have a “shut up and take my money” service. Fine they have their contracts, but they have die-hard fans who would love to give them money to watch their teams in one place. Give credit to paramount, fox, whoever, just get it to your customers. They’re doing them a disservice and missing out on money
And that’s why sites exist where you can stream all the games, regardless of location and blackouts… and they don’t cost a dime!
I’m with you. Professional sports have gone downhill. I used to be a diehard Denver Broncos fan. I had DirectTV specifically so I could get every NFL game. During football season, I’d watch every game I could. If I were to do that now, I’d need a number of different streaming services. Apart from that, I began watching less and less a few years ago when every other commercial, and every commentation, became about betting. Draft Kings, Fan Dual, MGM, and whatever else there was. It stopped being about watching the game and became more about gambling.
With baseball, they’re digitally putting ads on the pitcher’s mound. A couple years ago, they added advertising patches to the damn uniforms. It’s disgusting. People don’t play for a team anymore, they play for a brand.
Yet, even with all the additional ad revenue, ticket and concession prices have skyrocketed. It used to be that you could take a family of four to a game and not break the bank. Now, a single game is the cost of a full vacation. With four tickets, concession, and parking, you’re paying at least $500. And that’s without any sort of souvenirs. To make it worse, every team is wanting a new stadium and they are forcing the cities and states to pay for it through taxes. It’s greed on top of greed on top of greed.
I can’t stand watching professional sports anymore. On the plus side, I now have a lot more time to do other things that are a more fun and give a better sense of accomplishment than, “Hey, my team won.”
The new stadiums are another factor that really is ruining sports for me. In my city they are building a new one for the hockey team and it is mostly paid by taxes. So our property taxes are going to sky rocket to build this thing and then they will jack up the game ticket prices so we cannot even afford to go to games.
They sold it to the public as this was going to be a community building, which is such garbage. Am I going to be able to go down there when no games are happening and skate on the rink? Of course not
And heeeeere come your Doritos Locos Tacos Players!!
It used to be that they’d put baseball games on broadcast TV.
Now you basically need a subscription to watch the team in my area. It’s like they don’t want anyone to see the games.
My team is the Padres, but I live in the Midwest. I’d have to buy a subscription to the MLB app just to watch them, but I’m such a casual fan that I don’t care enough even though I do find them fun to watch.
If you have T-Mobile they usually give away free MLB tv for the regular season each year. Since you don’t live where your team is you’ll actually be able to watch them since you aren’t blacked out. No post season ofc though.
Capitalism has a price and enshittification is the consequence.
Same way I’ve always felt about professional sports. Do what you want, have fun, but you’re taking a game way too seriously.
I’ve never been interested in the “big” pro sports as many times it’s watching a bunch of millionaires working a sweat. Ever since they invented the multi million transfers, it stopped being about a sport and just became watching an investment firm
I’d rather watch local amateur games
Last year I went to the league championship of my local lower level pro soccer club. Tickets were $40 each for good seats and it was a sell out. Our team won and it was honestly a blast.
I don’t know that I would have had a better time at a top tier pro sports final that would have cost thousands to attend.
I had many of the same revelations when I got out of the military. I worked nights and Armed Forces Network played literally every game. I watched so much football on my last deployment. Once I got out, I realized how hard it was to follow football. Once I stared a family I gave up completely.
I’m glad you brought this up, because this is another great point related to the time suck. I have two kids now and every hour I spend watching sports is an hour not spent with my kids or being an absent parent. Makes it hard to justify.
Recently too I had a brother in law who skipped his infant sons first time trick or treating because his team was in the World Series. It was a big topic of debate for our family.
I have my favorite teams and sometimes I liken sports as a form of escapism. But, I do not ever religiously watch sports shows, listen to a lot of sports networks and actively follow anything closely. I am only there when the World Series, NBA Finals and the Super Bowl happens.
Can’t say I’ve ever attended a game, paid a ticket, bought any merch and whatnot. All of that just sound like money sinks to me. I am as minimal effort as they come when it comes to sports.
I think quite frankly, that athletes are simply overpaid. I always often wonder as to how much of their salaried contracts could go to better things than just dumping multi-millions into a few year long contract. And trust me, I get it, it’s a lot of hard work for an athlete to be in shape, remain in shape and deal with the grueling travel and schedules of some leagues. But, still, we’re talking millions to people who’re all set for life, regardless unless they turn out to be trainwrecks of human beings.
I enjoy watching sports, but I do not obsess over it. I have a MythTV DVR setup to record OTA broadcasts. It records some matches, I watch those matches. I skip all the commercials and a lot of the boring bits TBH. Sometimes I go watch highlights on Youtube of my favorite teams.
I quit watching all sports, cold turkey, four years ago and haven’t looked back. I feel so much better now and have more free time.
