Imagine it’s 1927, you’re living in New York and you’re a Yankee’s fan, and Babe Ruth just hit his 60th career home run. However, even though you live 10 miles from the stadium, you weren’t able to see the game live because local games are blacked out. Well, that’s one of the problems with modern sports.
Since the creation of social media, we have slowly shifted from consuming long-form content to short-form content. This has also affected how we watch sports; most younger people prefer watching sports highlights over the actual full game. People resort to watching these clips because it’s easier to consume than a 2+ hour sports game, and there are many hassles that you have to go through to watch your favorite team, and that’s just wrong.
A 2023 YouGov study revealed that 34% of sports fans aged 18–24 preferred watching highlights over full matches, compared to 30% who favored live games.
Social media platforms like TikTok and Instagram that use short-form content cater to audiences with short attention spans. Young sports fans are desensitized to actual full games for any sport; it will continue to be a problem if these accounts keep posting highlights of games that just happened.
Possible reasons why people do this would be because of possible time constraints in personal life, or the multiple paywalls to watch their favorite teams. Most fans will skip games altogether if the game isn’t free or able to be pirated.
If I were an STL sports fan of all the teams and wanted to watch all the games, I would need to buy Bally Sports+ and MLB.TV, ESPN+, MLS Season Pass, which comes around to about $289/year, just to watch your favorite teams’ and only some home games, and all away games. A blackout game is when you’re a hometown sports fan and your team is playing at home–the game will be blocked from you.
A 2022 report by Synamedia and Ampere Analysis revealed that while 89% of sports fans subscribe to pay TV or streaming services, over half (51%) of pirate sports services are watched at least once a month.
Maybe if local sports teams weren’t so hard to watch, people wouldn’t resort to skipping games, watching highlights, or pirating?
But it’s not a problem for these leagues, they’re adapting to it by making their short-form content. But this doesn’t bring in as much money for the advertisers, maybe if they made games more interactive, or had alternative commentary like celebrities commentating. It would bring viewers to watch live games. Another solution would be to just drop the paywalls and make the games more affordable.
