When billionaires fight over TV sports rights, Chiefs fans are the losers | Opinion
I’m a YouTube TV subscriber and a lifelong football fan, and right now I’m furious.
In my house, fall weekends are sacred. I grew up in Kansas, where football isn’t just entertainment — it’s a way of life. The Pacific Northwest is my home for now. Yet on the weekends, it’s all about purple and red — the Kansas State Wildcats and Kansas City Chiefs.
Recently, our screens went dark. ESPN vanished from YouTube TV after a standoff between two giants: Disney, which owns ESPN, and Google, which owns YouTube. Both claim to be negotiating fairly. In reality, they’re fighting over a bigger slice of a multibillion-dollar pie while millions of paying customers get left behind.
We’re caught in the middle — loyal fans who did everything right. We ditched cable, paid for YouTube TV and trusted that we’d get the channels we love. Instead, our $80-a-month subscription now gets us apologies, excuses and “extended negotiations.”
It’s hard not to see this for what it is: greed, plain and simple.
Disney wants higher fees for its channels. Google doesn’t want to pay them. ESPN is using its grip on live sports as leverage, and YouTube TV is using its subscriber base as a bargaining chip. Both companies are massive. Alphabet, Google’s parent company, is worth more than $3 trillion. Disney, at roughly $200 billion, hardly qualifies as the underdog. The companies are arguing over numbers that don’t even register to them but matter to millions of households already stretched thin by inflation.
Once, streaming services promised to save us from cable’s rising costs. Instead, they’ve become cable’s greedy replacement. The average subscription price for the 10 biggest streaming services — Netflix, Disney+, Hulu, Apple TV+, Peacock and others — jumped roughly 12% this year, according to Convergence Research Group. Prices have gone up by double digits every year since 2022. Everyone blames the cost of creating content, but it’s the same handful of corporations driving those costs by bidding against one another for the same shows, sports rights and franchises.
And we’re footing the bill.
Many of my family members and friends still live in Kansas and across the Midwest, thousands of miles away. Football is one way we stay connected — a few hours each weekend to unwind together, debate play calls and forget about everything else. When that disappears because billionaires can’t agree on how to split advertising dollars, it feels personal.
Even more insulting is how temporary these blackouts always are. Once the outrage hits, the companies quietly settle, sign a new deal and issue some statement about their professed commitment to their viewers. Then they raise our monthly rate. It’s a game both sides know how to play — and the fans never win.
I get that business is business. Networks pay huge sums for sports rights, and distributors have to balance costs. But this fight isn’t about survival — it’s about domination. These companies don’t just want a fair deal. They want full control. They’re gambling with the loyalty of viewers who can’t do much except yell at their blank screens.
We live in a moment when everything — groceries, gas, rent — costs more, and even the escape of a Sunday game comes with fine print. Sports used to be the one thing you could count on. Now, even that feels like it’s up for negotiation.
I don’t care which side “wins” this fight. Both companies will walk away richer. The only people losing are the fans who love the game — people like me who just want to watch Patrick Mahomes ball out on a Sunday.
Originally from Newton, Kansas, Jacy Gomez is a public relations professional based in the Pacific Northwest.