Not In Their League

This article appears in the February 2026 issue of The American Prospect magazine. Read more from the issue.

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My dad grew up in Philadelphia, and by law is an Eagles fan. In 1960, when he was 13 years old, a friend from junior high offered him a ticket to the NFL Championship Game at Franklin Field on the day after Christmas. It was a box seat in the upper deck on the 50-yard line, right next to one owned by Grace Kelly’s family. They were the best seats in the house.

In front of 67,325 cheering fans, Chuck Bednarik played every snap, Norm Van Brocklin threw for 204 yards and a touchdown, and the Eagles beat the Green Bay Packers 17-13, handing Vince Lombardi the only playoff loss of his career. My dad thought this would be his whole life: touchdowns, victory parades, consistent excellence.

The next time the Eagles won it all, it was 2018, and he was 70. After the game, I called him; it was one of the first times I ever heard him cry.

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Shortly after that triumph in Super Bowl LII, my dad was at his synagogue, and he met a fellow congregant named Lenny. They were about the same age and grew up near one another. Because this was Philly, the talk turned quickly to the Eagles. Lenny was a season ticket holder for decades; the team even honored him on the field once.

His only regret, he said, was not attending the 1960 Championship Game. Back then, a friend of Lenny’s used to give him an extra ticket for Eagles games, but they gave away the championship ticket to someone else. My dad asked Lenny where those seats were; he said they were right on the 50-yard line. Upper deck? Yes. Next to the Kellys? Yes.

My dad laughed. “Lenny, I had your fucking ticket!” They’re now good friends.

What strikes me about this story is that almost nothing about it could happen today. The family with the box seats on the 50-yard line owned a big scrap metal dealer in the city. With all due respect to scrap metal dealers, that’s not who gets the best seats in the house for football today.

Leagues and owners have learned how to exploit fan obsession to maximize profits.

In 1960, an NFL Championship Game ticket ran you $8; adjusted for inflation, that’s about $87.60. Last year, the cheapest seat for the Super Bowl—also won by the Eagles (yes, I inherited the fandom from my dad)—was $3,000. What about the best seats, the luxury skyboxes that weren’t around in 1960? Suite prices at last year’s Super Bowl topped out at $1,950,000.

The NFL championship hasn’t been played in Philadelphia since 1960; Super Bowls are held in either warm-weather sites or domed stadiums. (MetLife Stadium in New Jersey hosted once; the teams missed a snowstorm by one day.) The scrap metal magnate and his family would have to travel to Miami or New Orleans or Los Angeles; they couldn’t offer a spare ticket to a neighborhood kid to watch the home team.

These days, my dad roots for the Eagles from his sectional couch, with top-end sound and hi-def camera angles. That’s an improvement over 1960, when television blackout rules were in effect and local Eagles fans without a ticket had to drive 75 miles out of town to watch the game. But today’s fans endure an endless parade of commercials that turn the game into a chore. And while the privilege of blowing half a day on a football game remains technically free, the sports people love have been segregated onto numerous streaming channels that can cumulatively cost thousands of dollars a year.

In some ways, it’s never been a better time to be a sports fan. You can wake up on Saturday where I live in Los Angeles and binge on college football from 9:00 in the morning until late into the night. Though I’m over 2,200 miles from Ann Arbor, all the games of my alma mater Michigan Wolverines are televised nationally. And I can go online for vast volumes of high-quality statistical analysis, insider information, and even trash talk with fellow fans on social media. I can build large quantities of my life around sports and never lack for action. This grows fan interest, deepens emotional attachment, and helps make sports an unsurpassed phenomenon.

But leagues and owners have learned how to exploit this obsession to maximize profits. They assume rabid fans will suffer the inconveniences, the stratospheric prices, all the slings and arrows, motivated by the eternal hope that their team will end the season on top, and the desire to be there when it happens. And they know that in our grossly unequal society, money can be no object for some. As a result, stadiums and arenas have become gated communities, with the ultra-wealthy waved inside, and those who can’t afford it peeking through the fence hole on TV. They’re finding ways to charge you for that, too.

As fans continue to be monetized, one question emerges: Will they ever say enough is enough? Will a new generation miss out on the experiences my dad had, the stuff that made him a lifelong sports fan, and drift to other pursuits?

“There is a risk that there will be a generational crisis when the kids on their phones all the time will not be acculturated to in-person participation,” said Paul Campos, a law professor at the University of Colorado and author of A Fan’s Life: The Agony of Victory and the Thrill of Defeat. “There’s nothing natural about being a hardcore sports fan—it’s a learned, self-destructive behavior. If you don’t have the right cultural conditions, it dies.”

THE LABOR DEPARTMENT BEGAN TRACKING sporting event ticket prices in 1999. By 2020, they had more than doubled in cost, while overall inflation rose roughly 52 percent in that period. After 2020, leagues took advantage of the yearning for community and camaraderie coming out of the pandemic. “There certainly is that sense, a lot of YOLO [you only live once] going on,” said Victor Matheson, who teaches sports economics at the College of the Holy Cross. “People said, ‘The next time I have a chance to see a sporting event I’m going to do it.’”

From October 2022 to October 2023, sports tickets jumped 25 percent, and continued to rise through March 2025 before moderating. The average NFL ticket is over $300; for the most expensive stadium, Lincoln Financial Field in Philadelphia, it’s over $500. The Los Angeles Dodgers set the cheapest World Series seat last year at nearly $900.

Sports owners are uniquely positioned to exploit post-pandemic longing for community. The biggest NFL stadiums have between 75,000 and 80,000 seats; for indoor sports, it’s around 20,000. But that number is falling in real terms. New stadiums contain more premium seating to maximize profit per square foot. (Teams often share gate receipts with the league but not luxury box revenue, making the latter much more attractive.) That minimizes total fans through the gates. Matheson told me that there were fewer Major League Baseball tickets for sale last year than in 1994.

With flat or falling supply and rising demand as the population grows, prices will increase. But teams only need to capture a tiny sliver of a community to pack the house, and the wealthiest Americans do much of the spending anyway. That incentivizes price increases well above supply and demand. It may stun the blue-collar fan to learn that their favorite activity is now a luxury good, but that’s the new reality. Owners won’t hear much carping in their social circles; the average net worth of an NBA franchise owner is $12 billion.

The holy grail is extracting the maximum of what every fan is willing to pay. Variable pricing started in 2009 with the MLB’s San Francisco Giants, which charged more for games with better opponents or pitching matchups. The rapid shift to online ticketing, which shielded customers from knowing what others paid and delivered real-time demand information, led to widespread adoption.

Dynamic pricing should in theory work both ways, allowing cheaper seats to be sold when demand is low. But teams often close off upper decks and keep seats unsold to prevent fans from waiting out lower prices, using scarcity to their advantage. Ticket prices are usually a one-way ratchet.

Owners justify variable pricing by pointing to scalpers and resellers, reasoning that teams should benefit from a real-time auction instead of StubHub. “The people who do want to keep it for the real fans were finding out they were selling for $60 and fans were paying $300-$400 anyway,” Matheson noted. “So it’s either me getting $400 or some bot farm in Russia.” Yet that’s not so clean. Resale site SeatGeek is the “official marketplace” of Major League Baseball, and the New York Yankees have a decade-old partnership with StubHub. Having a hand in both first-sale and resale markets maximizes opportunities to raise prices.

The season ticket holder, the sports world’s version of an addict, bears a whole new set of costs. Personal seat licenses (PSLs) give a ticket holder the right to buy a seat, not the seat itself. Prices range across the NFL from $750 to $50,000. There’s even a PSL resale marketplace. PSLs in the lower ring at the San Francisco 49ers’ stadium in Santa Clara can go as high as $450,000 for a VIP seat.

Every new NFL stadium built in the last two decades has offset stadium construction costs with PSLs. The idea is that hardcore fans who use the stadium pay to get it built. But invariably, city and state governments also absorb some of the costs, putting ordinary taxpayers with no interest in the games on the hook, too. PSLs just reduce the team’s burden, relieving them from reinvesting profits or borrowing from banks.

Once fans enter the stadium, the squeeze continues. With no alternatives for food and beverages and souvenirs, the cost of concessions are rising faster than inflation. Two hot dogs, two drinks, and one piece of memorabilia will set you back $92.91 at the Las Vegas Raiders’ Allegiant Stadium. At a Washington Nationals game, a “cheap” beer is $14.99; some NFL sites charge $18.50 for a 16-ounce cold one.

As Groundwork Collaborative noted in a paper last March, publicly funded stadiums were supposed to serve a civic purpose, not exist as walled-off playgrounds for the powerful. That logic no longer applies, and fans are essentially trapped. “In many cases, there’s only one team in your city,” said Brian Shearer, director of competition and regulatory policy at the Vanderbilt Policy Accelerator, who wrote a separate report on captive pricing at stadiums and other venues last November. “There’s only one Ticketmaster, only one team, and once you get into the stadium only one vendor. It’s cumulative rent-seeking that happens at every step.”

TICKET AND CONCESSION SALES are not the primary profit center for sports. Most major leagues garner at least half their revenue from television contracts; for the NFL, it’s nearly two-thirds. In the late 1970s, the NBA Finals were on tape delay, and college football limited telecasts to a handful of games. Now, virtually everything is broadcast somewhere, every night of the week. Even as middle-class families are priced out of live attendance, leagues use TV to grow their sports. In both 2023 and 2025, 96 of the 100 most-watched broadcasts of the year were sporting events.

But below the surface, the cratering economics of television is making watching sports confusing, enervating, and yes, expensive.

Cable television has been dying for years. The Oscars are moving to YouTube. Streaming is rapidly becoming the primary television platform, and it’s not lost on streaming executives that they need sports to reel in viewers and advertising, which for last year’s Super Bowl cost $8 million for a 30-second spot.

Spending on sports broadcast rights has risen 122 percent over the past decade. Streamers are bidding them up so astronomically that leagues can’t say no, even if they cut off some of their audience. “Anytime a new bidder comes into the market they always overpay,” said Doug Creutz, a television industry analyst with TD Cowen. “They lose money on the first contract but put themselves on the map as a destination.”

Amazon Prime has Thursday night NFL and the NBA. Apple TV carries Major League Soccer and Formula 1 racing. Apple’s baseball package is moving to Peacock, which also airs college and pro basketball, college and pro football, the WNBA, many Olympic events, and more. (An NFL playoff game that aired exclusively on Peacock in 2024 generated controversy, but also the largest live streaming audience ever.) Netflix has Christmas Day football games, and this year will broadcast MLB Opening Day games and the All-Star Game Home Run Derby. Last year, the first-ever NFL broadcast on YouTube drew 17.3 million viewers globally. If you want NFL Sunday Ticket to see every game, you need YouTube TV; NBA League Pass is now on Amazon.

NFL games are now spread across 11 different networks, and varying estimates put the annual cost for access between $750 and $900. If you want to see games for all four major sports, New York Times commentator Joon Lee estimated that at $2,634 a year. And that’s a moving target, because streamers keep raising prices.

Most sports fans don’t enjoy tracking which streaming apps bought which contracts when they want to catch the game. But league executives demonstrably don’t care. When NBA commissioner Adam Silver was asked about its record $76 billion media contract that hived off many games onto Amazon and Peacock, he responded that basketball is “a highlight-based sport,” so fans could always go to TikTok or Instagram to find the best plays for free. The implication was clear: The rich get a courtside seat, everyone else gets a highlight reel.

For local fans, regional sports networks (RSNs) aired individual teams’ hockey, baseball, and basketball games, increasing fan access. But RSNs are distributed through cable, where cord-cutting has thinned out the audience and plummeted ad rates. The economics don’t work anymore. Diamond Sports Group, a division of Sinclair Broadcasting that acquired 21 RSNs from Fox in 2019, declared bankruptcy four years later. It rebranded as Main Street Sports, but continues to miss payments and lose cable carriage. All nine MLB teams affiliated with Main Street terminated their contracts in January. If a last-ditch sale to a British streaming company called DAZN doesn’t materialize, Main Street will likely shut down, leaving dozens of teams without a local broadcast partner.

Some teams, like the NHL’s Arizona Coyotes and NBA’s Phoenix Suns, are returning to free, over-the-air television, replicating the old model of using TV to grow the fan base. But others see profit-making opportunities in the RSN implosion by building direct-to-consumer streaming apps. Dallas-area teams use Victory+; Texas Rangers fans must pay $100 a year for access. Altitude+ costs $20 a month for Denver Nuggets fans. The YES app, for New York Yankees, Brooklyn Nets, and New York Liberty games, is $24.99 a month; Boston sports on NESN 360 is $29.99 a month.

Sports bundles like the Hulu + Live TV streaming service, a skinny sports bundle from YouTube TV, and a long-rumored sports tie-up between ESPN and Fox promise a one-stop shop. But none of them offer what fans already had: access to every available game, in one place, for one price. “I said a while ago that the way forward for media companies was to make the product worse and charge more for it,” Creutz joked. “That’s what happened.”

A related problem is that TV contracts drive everything in sports these days. Campos, who grew up in Michigan, recalled seeing the famous college football 10-10 tie between Michigan and Ohio State in 1973. The game lasted two hours and 20 minutes. The average college game now is around three and a half hours. “If you go to Michigan Stadium in November, it’s just oppressive, sitting in the stands with those TV timeouts,” Campos said. “We the long-suffering in-person fans have to be mortified so the plutocrats can make the money machine go brr.”

College football keeps the clock running when players go out of bounds, reducing game action while commercial breaks lengthen. This year’s FIFA World Cup will add two three-minute “hydration” breaks during halves, building commercials into matches that never had them before. Commercials were inserted into NFL RedZone, a service that whisked viewers around the league for nonstop action, even though it was literally marketed on the promise of “seven hours of commercial-free football.”

Television dictates when teams play as well. To accommodate prime-time doubleheaders, NBA playoff games sometimes start as late as 10:45 p.m. on the East Coast. Michigan State played a conference football game last year at USC in Los Angeles that started at 11 p.m. Eastern time. That’s an artifact of television-driven realignment, which blew up the Pac-12 and put Stanford and Cal Berkeley into the Atlantic Coast Conference. (To clarify, they reside on the Pacific Coast.) This has upended traditional rivalries and turned unfamiliar matchups into conference games. TV demands also lead to punishing NBA schedules with numerous back-to-back games, which have been blamed for a significant uptick in injuries. Long seasons provide networks and streamers with more inventory but punish players and exhaust fans.

“Why are we doing this?” Campos said. “It’s Cory Doctorow’s concept of enshittification applied to everything.”

ALARM AT HIGHER PRICES, changing TV schedules, and leagues at odds with their own fans has ascended to the level of politics. “I think it’s harder to be a fan,” said Rep. Chris Deluzio (D-PA). “It’s a major luxury for families, it prices people out. Then add to that games used to be broadcast locally and now you have to piece together streaming subscriptions. So I think it’s a real problem.” Deluzio is getting to work, co-sponsoring legislation that would require an FTC study of captive pricing at stadiums.

Politicians seizing on fan discontent can reach less-engaged voters and apply the lessons of sports exploitation to other topics. The dynamics of corporate capture are all there: Wealthy and well-connected owners get antitrust exemptions for their leagues and taxpayer money to build show palaces for their teams, yet still prioritize the almighty dollar over the public.

After a carriage dispute blacked out regional sports network MSG in upstate New York and Connecticut, Rep. Pat Ryan of upstate New York and Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut introduced the Stop Sports Blackouts Act, requiring customer refunds when fans don’t get the sports they’re paying for. “I think this is an important window into the broader lens of what’s happening in our economy in America,” Ryan told The Bulwark in November. “We have straight-up vertical integration and monopolies in almost all these parts of people’s lives. The service keeps getting shittier, the costs keep going up … and fans in this case or just Americans have no voice and no leverage.”

Alarm at higher prices, changing TV schedules, and leagues at odds with their own fans has ascended to the level of politics.

One of the biggest political interventions into fan unrest involves this summer’s World Cup soccer tournament, to be held in North America. FIFA, the international governing body, is using dynamic pricing for tickets on its own digital platform, with prices for some seats soaring tens of thousands of dollars above previous tournaments, uncapped resales rising even higher, and no set-asides for local fans. (See “Red Card.”) FIFA even earned millions from “right to buy” tokens, a form of a personal seat licenses, before tickets went on sale.

Fans were stunned at the display of greed, especially Europeans who have become accustomed to affordable prices to watch soccer. But FIFA surmised that enough high rollers wouldn’t want to miss the quadrennial spectacle of the world’s most popular sport. That is, until Zohran Mamdani started talking about it.

“Are any working-class New Yorkers actually going to be able to watch the matches?” the New York City mayor asked in a viral video. He made three demands in a petition: end dynamic pricing, restore the cap on resale prices, and set aside 15 percent of all tickets for locals at a discount. He pressed the case on podcasts, noting that the last World Cup in the U.S. offered tickets that, adjusted for inflation, cost under $200. He decried the billionaire-first, fans-last mindset.

FIFA was forced into responding, and capped a small number of “entry tier” tickets for each game at $60, while waiving administrative fees. But the entry tier represents less than 2 percent of total tickets on sale, as Mamdani pointed out. It doesn’t seem like the end of the fight. “The working people of New York City should get to participate in the life of New York City and all the things that make New York a world-class destination,” said Julie Su, former acting U.S. labor secretary and Mamdani’s deputy mayor for economic justice.

What policy options can protect fans? Britain has fully capped reselling tickets above face value, something even Trump supporter Kid Rock has endorsed. Last June, Maine passed a resale cap limiting price markups to 10 percent. If widely adopted, it would make scalping uneconomical and eliminate the excuse teams use to raise ticket prices. “We have a law on the books now,” said Kevin Erickson of the Future of Music Coalition, who has been working on ticketing issues. “I would expect a number of states to introduce price cap bills in 2026.”

Groundwork has recommended using “street pricing” at all publicly funded arenas, lowering concession prices to what you would pay if you were not a captive audience. Mayor Mamdani has another option in New York: a city law against “unconscionable” business practices that could be applied to stadium pricing.

Teams can be decent to fans without sacrificing profitability. The Atlanta Falcons decided on “Fan First” concession pricing when it moved into Mercedes-Benz Stadium in 2017, with hot dogs at $2, a 12-ounce draft beer at $5, and free soda refills. The affordable options led to an increase in fan spending that year—getting people in the building for cheap eats led to more merchandise sales—as well as high ratings for game day experience. Prices have stayed low ever since, even for major events like the Super Bowl, and other teams have followed the Falcons’ lead. This success recapitulates a basic principle of business that has somehow gotten lost over the years: Delivering good service at an affordable price keeps people coming back.

I WENT TO THE ROSE BOWL GAME on New Year’s Day 2024, thrust together with Michigan fans I either barely knew or had never met. By the end of the game, we were hugging, high-fiving, and vibing off the energy of a big win. An acquaintance sold me the tickets at face value—about $350. Lots of Americans would have to swallow hard to manage that. When we price out sports, we lose one of life’s emotional currents, a shared piece of community that used to bridge social and economic divides.

It’s possible that leagues will continue abusing fans. They may continue splitting them into tiers, with the rich afforded the full experience and the rest juggling streaming apps. They may take for granted that supporters will always stand loyally behind the team.

But they should read up on history.

“If we were having this conversation 100 years ago, you would ask, ‘What are the big three sports in the U.S.?’” said Matheson. “And I would say boxing, horse racing, and baseball.” Horse racing fell off once new and varied ways to gamble proliferated. But boxing suffered a largely self-inflicted wound, Matheson explained. It was the first sport to truly embrace pay-per-view (PPV) television for its biggest fights, either on services like HBO or through closed-circuit events, where fans paid $50 or more to watch.

Even the biggest PPV matches didn’t draw more than 4.6 million buys, a profitable sum but not enough to penetrate the national consciousness. Over time, boxing drifted from free TV because the championships were segregated. Today, the only fights you hear about are publicity stunts with right-wing influencers. “Without anyone watching, general interest is lost,” said Matheson. “No one’s a boxing fan anymore.”

Other sports may not believe they can drop off people’s radar screens. “The lords of capital think it’s part of the laws of thermodynamics that 100,000 people show up for Michigan–Ohio State, but it’s not,” said Campos. “Short-term considerations can end up trumping the long-term enterprise.” Another way of putting the question is: If sports fandom is all about loyalty to a team, what happens when the team isn’t loyal to its fans?

There are some indications of leagues understanding this. Baseball’s greatest innovation of the past few decades is the pitch clock, reducing the downtime in game play. This shortened games by 25 to 30 minutes without taking away any actual action. Television ratings and attendance went way up. The fans were being listened to, and they responded.

Even boxing’s main successor has started to rethink the logic of fan exploitation. The Ultimate Fighting Championship will stop running matches on pay-per-view this year. But the news isn’t all positive: Instead, mixed martial arts will run on Paramount+. The streaming network costs $13 a month, or $8 if you don’t mind ads.

This article appears in Feb 2026 Issue.