For anyone under the age of 30 or so, it may seem like it's always been this way but it hasn't. The rise of sports runs parallel to the rise in cable and satellite television (or Pay-TV). It went from 50 million households in the 1990's to nearly 100 million as recently as 2014. With nothing to compete with, sports thrived in this quarter-century timeframe via massive TV deals and advertising.
Now that we are halfway through the 2020's we clearly see the shift away from old model and into a new world. Yes, people still watch and pay for TV, they just do it much less.
Another way to put this is that people aren't just "cutting the cord," they are cutting out watching TV altogether.
Social Media, Video Games (incl. mobile), YouTube, and various other streaming apps have all taken away from TV viewing habits that we can trace back to the 1950s.
This shift has already by and large claimed the lives of broadcast shows. Live sports appeared resilient up until the last couple of years. Even foundational changes in Nielsen measurement systems can't hide the erosion of viewership.
Now we have fragmentation. Smaller audiences.
This will lead to only a handful of leagues/events surviving on TV over the next five years by fighting for tv scraps. Things like the NFL, College Football, and March Madness will be what draws viewers to live linear events. The next tier (NBA, NHL, MLB) will be fighting for air now that it's clear the TV audience is half of what it was 10 years ago.
For soccer? Fans will seek out large international events. The Premier League, as well. But Liga MX, MLS, NWSL, and the smaller leagues like the USL and various Central American Leagues will be relegated to niche status on streaming services that pull in figures that measure five digits or less. Gone are the days of average viewership numbers of 300k on linear networks like ESPN, TUDN, FS1.
HOW TO SURVIVE
The NFL is already doing it.
1. Get your live product on Netflix, YouTube, and/or Amazon. These three companies pull just as much screen time as all of Pay-TV in the US right now. Five years from now, it will be double that (if Pay-TV still exists at all).
2. Fight for broadcast windows.
The future of sports will look like how Amazon does Thursday Night Football and how Netflix did the Tyson v. Paul fight.
FINAL THOUGHT
In the very near future "TV" will be Netflix, YT, and Amazon in the same way we see broadcast networks like NBC, TNT, ESPN, ABC, FOX, etc now.
The pie is getting smaller. The existence of all these sporting events south of the NFL will rely on other forms of revenue and not TV.
