Last year, Andrew Marchand paid good money for a ticket to see Victor Wembanyama play in Dallas. Wembanyama didn't play. He texted someone he knew at the NBA afterward: "You owe me some money."
That story isn't really about load management. It's about something Andrew spent most of our conversation circling without quite naming it directly — the thing underneath the ESPN deal, underneath the UFC deal, underneath baseball's scramble to piece together $550 million from whoever will take the call. The thing that makes all of it complicated in a way that a rights fee number can't capture.
The product is fine. The problem is whether anyone still needs to watch it happen live.
Andrew Marchand covers sports media for The Athletic. He's been on every major rights deal as it broke — the ESPN-NFL structure, UFC going to Paramount, MLB trying to figure out what comes after ESPN opted out, Apple sitting on the sideline with a device in every pocket and somehow still not a coherent sports strategy. He knows where the money is going. He also knows what's threatening to make the money less certain than any of the executives negotiating these deals want to admit.
What the ESPN deal actually is
The headline number is $2.5 billion. That's the estimated value of the 10% ownership stake the NFL is taking in ESPN as part of a deal that also gives ESPN 28 games, two Super Bowls in the next five years — the first one in February 2027 with Buck and Aikman on the call — and a direct-to-consumer product that doesn't require cable, satellite, or any bundle. Thirty dollars a month. Disney+ and Hulu folded in.
Four separate agreements. A lot of lawyers. And at the center of it: the NFL needed a media partner with staying power, and ESPN needed to stop losing subscribers without a reason to keep paying.
The ownership stake is the part that made people raise their eyebrows. The NFL, through its owners, now holds equity in the network that covers it. Andrew's take was careful but direct: the networks that have agreements with the leagues for billions and billions of dollars, they're already somewhat compromised. CBS, NBC, ESPN — their most important programming is already NFL games. The relationship was already the relationship. The 10% formalizes something that was functionally true before anyone signed anything.
For players, he's clear that this is net positive. The value flows through the salary cap. You add $2.5 billion in equity to what the league is worth, that eventually becomes cap dollars, and cap dollars become contracts. The NFLPA is in disarray right now — no real leadership, nobody minding the details on deals this complicated — but the underlying math still works in the players' favor. The pie got bigger. The players get their percentage of the pie.
What Andrew didn't say, but what I kept thinking about: the players who benefit most are the ones playing in five years when those deals start fully kicking in. The ones on rookie contracts right now. Which means understanding what this deal actually does matters most to the people who currently have the least leverage to ask about it.
The leverage nobody talks about
Seventy-two of the top 100 Nielsen-rated shows last year were NFL games. Some years it's been 90 out of 100. The Super Bowl is in a category by itself. Andrew said it plainly: the NFL always has the leverage because they have the most important programming on TV.
That leverage is what explains why ESPN agreed to the deal. They're going direct-to-consumer — which they had to do eventually — and they needed an anchor. If you're asking someone to pay $30 a month for a streaming service when they're already paying for Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, YouTube TV, Peacock, Paramount+, and Apple TV+, you need to give them a reason they can't get anywhere else. The NFL is the reason. Monday Night Football, 28 games, a Super Bowl — that's the answer to why do I need this one too.
ESPN needed the NFL more than the NFL needed ESPN. Which is why the NFL got equity. When you have the thing everyone else needs, you don't have to accept money for it. You can accept ownership.
I've seen this dynamic in business deals I've been involved in and ones I've watched from the outside. The party with the irreplaceable asset almost always underestimates what it's worth — early. They take the cash, they take the flat fee, they don't ask for a seat at the table. The NFL has been doing this long enough that they've stopped leaving that equity on the floor. Players and their agents should be watching how it's done.
What baseball got wrong, and what it cost them
Baseball's situation is the cautionary version of everything ESPN and the NFL got right.
ESPN was paying $550 million a year for a package that included Sunday Night Baseball, the Home Run Derby, and eight to twelve playoff games — not the championship series, not the semis. Andrew's assessment was blunt: ESPN was way overpaying for that package. So they opted out. Now baseball is trying to find $550 million somewhere else, and it isn't there in one place. Netflix is probably getting the Home Run Derby. ESPN is still likely to be involved in a midweek package. NBC and Apple are competing for Sunday nights. The Yankees, on any given week, might be on Amazon, YES Network, Fox Sports, TBS, ESPN, Apple, or Roku. Sometimes different days of the same week.
PULL QUOTE: "You make it hard for people to find their sports, eventually they'll say, 'You know what? Eh, it's not that important to me.'" — Andrew Marchand
That sentence is the whole lesson. The NFL has never made it hard to find the game. There's a channel. It's on. You know where it is. Baseball, in trying to maximize rights revenue across as many platforms as possible, has made finding the product feel like homework. And when something feels like homework, the casual fan — the person who isn't already committed — defaults to just watching the highlight later.
The UFC deal, by contrast, Paramount coming in at $1.1 billion — more than double what ESPN was paying — actually simplified things for the fan. Biggest events on CBS broadcast. No pay-per-view upcharge. $60 a year for Paramount+. Andrew called it a win for fans, and I think he's right. When the distribution strategy and the fan experience point in the same direction, the product grows. When they work against each other, you're just moving money around while the audience quietly shrinks.
The 12-year-old problem nobody has solved
Here's the thing Andrew said that I haven't stopped thinking about.
When he was growing up, if you wanted to watch Michael Jordan, you had to be in front of NBC at 1:00 PM. Live. If you missed it, you caught the highlights on local news or you stayed up for SportsCenter. Those were the three options. Missing the game meant missing it.
Now Messi makes a great play and you see it ten different ways on Twitter within three minutes. With music on it. And you didn't have to watch the game. My own kids — I don't let them watch a lot of TV, but when sports is on, they'll watch it with me because that's what I'm watching. Left to their own devices, they go straight to YouTube. They know exactly which creator they want and they're going there. The idea of sitting down at a specific time to watch a specific game because there's no other way to see what happened — that's not their reality.
Andrew put the question directly: that kid who's 12, who in a decade will be 22, are they gonna be sitting down to watch games? Maybe, but they also might just say, 'I'll just wait for the highlight to come on TikTok.'
ESPN's answer is to build a TikTok-adjacent experience inside their own app — a scroll-through highlight reel that keeps you in the ESPN ecosystem instead of losing you to the feed. That's smart as far as it goes. The gambling angle is another piece of it — get people invested in outcomes in a way that makes the live game worth watching. Fantasy already does this to some extent. Legalized gambling accelerates it.
But none of that fully solves the problem. The problem is structural: the value of live rights is built on the assumption that live is the only way to see it. Every year that assumption weakens slightly for every sport except the NFL, and even for the NFL it's weaker than it was a decade ago. The rights deals signed today are enormous because today's audience still shows up live. What those deals look like in 2035 depends on whether the kid who's 12 right now forms the same habits his parents did.
What I'd actually pay attention to, going forward
Three things from this conversation that I'm going to keep tracking:
- Watch the direct-to-consumer transition as a business model test, not just a distribution shift. ESPN going to $30 a month without a cable bundle is a real experiment in whether sports rights can anchor a standalone streaming product. If it works — if the subscriber numbers justify the NFL's asking price when the next deal comes up — every other league uses it as a template. If it doesn't work, the leverage calculus changes, and the rights fees that are driving player salaries upward start to flatten. As a player or as someone whose income is tied to league revenue, that outcome matters to you directly.
- The platforms that are winning are the ones making it easier to find the game, not harder. UFC to Paramount is the clearest recent example. NFL to ESPN with a direct app and a clear monthly price is another. The leagues that fragment their rights across six platforms in search of maximum fee revenue are training their audiences to not bother. That's a short-term revenue gain with a long-term audience cost, and the bill for it comes due around the time the next CBA is being negotiated.
- The highlight being free changes what live is worth — but it doesn't make live worthless. Andrew's Michael Jordan point cuts both ways. Yes, the next generation can watch every great moment without watching a single game. But gambling, fantasy, social experience, and the specific anxiety of not knowing the outcome yet — those things still pull people to live viewing in a way that no highlight can replicate. The leagues that figure out how to make the live experience feel irreplaceable, rather than just convenient, are the ones whose rights deals hold their value. The ones that don't are going to find out that $2.5 billion in ESPN equity is worth less than projected if nobody's watching.
The NFL is in the best position of any league to weather what's coming. The leverage is real, the ratings are real, and the ownership stake in ESPN means they're now betting on the same outcome ESPN is betting on. Aligned incentives.
But the 12-year-old with the TikTok feed isn't going to care about aligned incentives. He's going to care about whether watching the game live is worth it.
Nobody's solved that yet. Every deal being signed right now is a bet that they will.