In 2025, it’s expensive to be a sports fan and watch your favorite teams or leagues. There seems to be no other option than to shell out hundreds of dollars for these services that you’ll only use to watch a handful of games or just one event. Well, at least no other legal option.
For sports like the UFC, watching every fight in a calendar year requires buying a pay-per-view ticket, and a subscription to the ESPN streaming service. An annual subscription to the service is $119.99, with each of the 13 marquee numbered events’ pay-per-views costing $79.99. The total cost comes out to around $1,160 per year. And it only gets worse from here for other sports.
Leagues like the NFL or MLB have subscription services such as NFL Sunday Ticket or MLBTV so viewers can watch any game they want. However, fans of local teams are unable to watch their games on those services as regional sports networks own exclusive rights. These networks own the broadcasting rights to a team and geographic location, meaning local blackouts are put in place to protect them and cable companies.
So if you’re a Boston sports fan living in Massachusetts and want to be able to watch the Patriots from your living room, as well as any other NFL games on Sunday, you’re going to have to jump through some hoops. First, you need cable or a cable alternative such as YoutubeTV to watch that Pats game on Fox or CBS, then you need Sunday Ticket or NFL Redzone to catch all the other games.
But those Thursday night games that used to be on Fox are now on Amazon Prime, so you have to pay for that, too. If you want to watch the Red Sox on a Friday night after a long day of work, you better hope the game isn’t on AppleTV+, another subscription you need to buy. Ready for some football to throw on the background during Christmas dinner? You better have Netflix, or you’ll be stuck watching another rerun of “A Christmas Story.”
For fans of one of the four major U.S. sports leagues, the surplus of necessary services and channels leave them confused and frustrated. However, in light of these costs and numerous viewing platforms, the rise of streaming has also created its own worst enemy: piracy websites.
With piracy, all the worries about paying for subscriptions are thrown out the window. Minus the occasional lag spikes, delays, and pop-up advertisements, the process is fairly straightforward. For the most popular website, Streameast, any regular Joe or even NBA superstar LeBron James could use it.
It makes sense when there’s a shopping list worth of services needed to keep up with your favorite leagues live. 59% of respondents from a 2023 survey attributed high costs and viewing availability as to why they illegally stream sports.
Illegal streaming as a whole has only been increasing during the 2020s. A 2024 report shows that viewership from piracy websites across the globe were up 13% from 2019, an increase from 125 billion to 141 billion website visits.
The damage that illegal streaming has done to sports leagues and streaming companies is irreparable. In a 2023 letter submitted to the United States Patent and Trademark Office, the UFC, NFL, and NBA all stated their worries about the regulation of these illegal streaming websites.
In the letter, the leagues claim the global sports industry as a whole is losing “up to $28 billion in additional potential annual revenue from sports fans who would be ‘converting’ from pirated content to paid content.” For the largest events in sports, such as the Super Bowl, it was estimated that around 17 million people illegally streamed the game in 2024.
So, what changes are happening in the industry in order to sway fans to stop illegally streaming and pay for the services the right way? The government has started that process with the shutdown and blocking of popular streaming websites. Just earlier this month, Streameast had one of its most popular domains officially shut down in an undercover takedown operation in Egypt.
After that, there have been changes in payment models. In the UFC’s new media rights deal with Paramount, the company is abandoning the pay-per-view model and making all 43 yearly events available with a basic subscription to Paramount+. Looking at boxing, the “Once In A Lifetime” fight between Canelo Álvarez and Terence Crawford was available to anyone with a subscription to Netflix and drew in 41.4 million viewers to become the highest-watched men’s championship boxing fight of the 21st century.
Combat sports seem to be trending in the correct direction for increasing their viewership numbers, but the rest of the major sports leagues, like the NFL and NBA, are staying put with their current models. Unless there are major crackdowns on illegal streaming websites, the problem will only linger and cost leagues more and more money.
The problems with containing illegal streaming are just as complicated as the services leagues are offering fans. There needs to be an overhaul on both sides of the issue in order to see change, as fans will only continue to feel torn on whether or not to pay for a mountain of underused subscriptions or pirate those games. Fans want to support their teams and leagues, but no one wants to pay an arm and a leg.
