With new deals, ‘Pay Per View' has lost by knockout. ‘Pay Per Month' has won
Name-dropped today: David Ellison, Travis Kelce, Taylor Swift, Scott Hanson, Villareal, Jon Gruden, Madeline Hill, Matthew and Brady Tkachuk, Jen Pawol, Ralph Russo and more. Let's go:
The end of sports' pay-per-view era
Pay-per-view (PPV) events — an old staple of sports TV, ranging from big boxing matches to monthly UFC spectacles to scripted annuities like WrestleMania — feels archaic when matched up with the strategic imperatives of the companies bidding for those broadcast rights, not to mention the event companies themselves.
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Monday, UFC announced it is taking its 43 live events per year from ESPN+ to Paramount+ in a seven-year/$7.7 billion deal with Paramount (officially acquired by Skydance and its CEO David Ellison last week).
The upshot: Pay-per-view has lost by knockout. Pay-per-month has won.
Distributors would rather use UFC or WWE (or NFL or NBA or MLB or MLS or … or … or …) to get consumers to stick year-round while paying monthly (or, better yet, annually) instead of trying to get consumers to keep buying one-off events.
To watch UFC previously, you had to have a monthly subscription to ESPN+ ($12/month) and still pay an $80-per-event fee to access each UFC event.
The old annual total to watch every UFC event in a year: $1,184.
In 2026, your Paramount+ monthly $8 (with ads) or $13 (ad-free-ish) subscription gets you access to all of the UFC events as part of your fee.
That's now $96 for every UFC event over a year, plus the other content offered by Paramount+, which seems like a rare W for fans in the 'fans are paying too much for sports TV' era.
This follows ESPN's announced deal with WWE last week to make all WWE 'premium live events' (such as WrestleMania and Summer Slam) part of the monthly $29.99 fee for ESPN's new direct-to-consumer service, launching August 21.
(Although WWE has a long history of successful pay-per-view events, in WWE's previous media deal, those events had been available through Peacock's monthly paid subscription, anywhere from $6 to $12 per month. WWE also has a long-term deal with Netflix for its 'Raw' weekly live show, accessible as part of Netflix's monthly subscription fee, which ranges from $8 to $25 per month.)
To be sure, streaming distributors still really want 'eventized' sports programming; they simply want to stack enough of those events all year to help keep subscribers from ever leaving.
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From the perspective of TKO Holdings (which owns both UFC and WWE) or any other owner licensing IP, the wider distribution, lower barrier-to-access and succulent rights fees more than makes up the incremental PPV sales. Some smaller companies (like AEW) remain in the PPV business, but the model is otherwise on its way out.
For more, my colleague Andrew Marchand has a must-read analysis of the state of play between the networks, the streamers and leagues.
Big talkers from the sports business industry:
'College Football RedZone?' Mr. RedZone himself, Scott Hanson, is a big fan of the idea, but — as a massive RedZone fan myself — I laid out five reasons why the show's unique DNA makes it very challenging to replicate for college football.
La Liga coming to the U.S.?: Imagine if the Texas-Georgia game on November 15 were moved from Athens, Georgia to Athens, Greece. How would Dawgs season-ticket holders react? Not well!
That's a bit of the flavor of the sentiment among La Liga fans in Spain for the plan — approved this week by the Spanish Football Federation — to move the December regular-season league match between Villareal and Barcelona (top-five teams in La Liga in 2024-25) to Miami, the first time any European top-flight league match would be played outside Europe.
It still requires UEFA and FIFA to take steps to give final approval, but Villareal supporters are livid, to say the least. (So is Real Madrid.) Villareal's president is pre-emptively offering free flights to the U.S. or huge rebates on supporter season tickets. What do you think?
Cincinnati Open: Tennis' new 'Fifth Slam?' I love the ambition here, a model for any event that wants to crack an otherwise locked-in league landscape. (Unexpected power outages aren't a great start this week, but the point stands.)
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Jon Gruden's lawsuit vs. the NFL can continue: Much more to come on this, with the biggest question being whether there is a number the league can offer to get the former Raiders coach to settle or if he is absolutely committed to getting Roger Goodell in a deposition. (Per ESPN's Don Van Natta Jr., the NFL will appeal to the Nevada Supreme Court.)
WNBA's sex-toy court-tossing imbroglio: It should not surprise you at all to learn that my colleague Ben Pickman traced it back to a crypto meme-coin promotion effort.
The Oklahoma QB Venmo situation: John Mateer acknowledged the posts in his Venmo account referencing gambling but insisted they were inside jokes. Talk to any Gen Z person in your life about whether people joke around with Venmo entries, and you'll get a ton of examples. Obviously, the optics are terrible, but with Venmo, 'jk' is reasonable. More on this one if new reporting emerges.
Other current obsessions: NBA schedule release … Premier League kit rankings … college football preseason polls (even if they don't impact the playoff) … Sunderland back in the Premier League … old-school print college football preview magazines …
Travis Kelce x Taylor Swift podcast collab
Dropping 7 p.m. ET tonight, the appearance of uber-star Taylor Swift on boyfriend Travis Kelce's already-popular podcast 'New Heights' is the sports-culture 'attention economy' crossover event of the summer… arguably the year… perhaps the century.
How big is it?
I defer to my new colleague, Madeline Hill of The Athletic's 'Sports Gossip Show' podcast, who wrote yesterday in her excellent Impersonal Foul newsletter:
'The hype around this viewing event feels like if the finales of Succession/Game of Thrones/Sopranos and the Oscars/Super Bowl all happened on the same night.'
'It surely will be the most-streamed podcast episode in history and probably one of the most-viewed YouTube videos in the platform's history.'
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(Per FOS, the most-viewed podcast episode ever is from Thmanyah, a Saudi show that once hit 144 million views. For context, New Heights has 2.6M YouTube subscribers, 4.6M TikTok followers, 3M followers on Instagram and is currently the No. 1 show on Apple Podcasts. Taylor Swift's audience size is, of course, essentially infinite.)
Hill is a longtime Swiftologist, and she gave valuable context: Other than a virtual appearance during the pandemic to promote 'evermore,' Swift has never done a pod, and now she's in-studio with Kelce — arguably the biggest celebrity couple in the world — and his brother Jason, including the formal announcement of her new 12th album.
You might not be paying attention. You might not want to be paying attention. You might roll your eyes at the attention that inundates your feeds today, tonight, tomorrow and the rest of the week.
But in an era of atomized attention, it is a fun return to a monoculture moment, with a sports star not quite at the very center of it, but sitting right next to the center and certainly on the screen.
Quote of the Week
'You know, you guys have a lot of male sports fans who listen to your podcast, and I think we all know that if there's one thing that male sports fans want to see in their spaces and on their screens… is more of me.' — Taylor Swift, quipping on this morning's promo for her appearance on 'New Heights.'
Branding: Tkachuk Bros.
Being the cover on the upcoming NHL 26 video game is great, but can Matthew and Brady Tkachuk become the NHL's version of Travis and Jason Kelce?
(Speaking of the Kelces, between T. Swift appearing on New Heights tonight and Travis on the cover of GQ this month, the Kelce Bros. remain the sports sibling gold standard.)
Name to Know: Jen Pawol
As my colleague Brett Ghiroli wrote, MLB needed Pawol to break the umpiring gender barrier last weekend, but Pawol deserved the opportunity.
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What I'm Watching: Sports docs
Currently:
Hard Knocks: Bills (HBO)
SEC: Any Given Saturday (Netflix)
In the queue:
The KC Chiefs one (8/14, ESPN+)
The Dallas Cowboys one (8/19, Netflix)
Great business-adjacent reads for your downtime or commute:
Inside sports' escalating stalking problem. (Part of a week-long series from The Athletic's Enterprise team.)
Two more:
(1) How beauty brands are activating within women's sports.
(2) This delightful column from my colleague Ralph Russo, who ran the AP Top 25 college football media poll for years, and now finally is a voter himself.
Back next Wednesday! MoneyCall's pay-per-view fee has been and always is 'FREE 99.' That's a great reason to please forward this to a couple friends or colleagues with your recommendation to subscribe! And, as always, give a (free!) try to all The Athletic's other newsletters.
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