The lineup of sporting events this summer has been an embarrassment of riches. This morning, the number 1 men’s tennis player in the world (Jannik Sinner) and the all-time winningest men’s tennis player (Novak Djokovic) played in the semifinals of the biggest tennis tournament in the world (Wimbledon). In the afternoon, Spain and Belgium begin their World Cup quarter-final match. If that wasn’t enough, the evening will feature a full schedule of Major League Baseball games, as well as NBA Summer League debuts for half of the league’s big names. All of this comes after a packed June where, at one point, the World Cup, NBA finals, and NHL finals all overlapped in short order.
If it feels like there are more games to watch than ever, that’s because there is. This year’s World Cup is the biggest ever, with the tournament growing from 32 to 48 teams. It may happen every four years, but the sporting calendar never stops. The MLB, NHL, and NBA have all added games in the past few years. In 2020, the NFL played two additional playoff games; the following year, the league added an extra regular season game for the first time almost 50 years. Since then, it has dominated more areas of the calendar, rescheduling games from its usual Sunday slot to the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, Black Friday, Christmas Day, and several late-season Saturdays. Every major league has expanded in the past few years, Stephen Master, assistant professor of sports media at NYU and former head of global sports for Nielsen, told me: “There’s not a league that hasn’t been touched.” And while this isn’t the first time these leagues have grown, the recent increase in board expansion is unusual, the experts I spoke with all said.
If you’re a sports fan like me, watching a lot of sports can seem like a good idea. You don’t get the tiny African island nation of Cape Verde holding on to a miraculous draw against mighty Spain without a 48-team World Cup. When leagues expand their playoffs — like, say, MLB did in 2022 — it gives more teams a chance to qualify and more fans something to focus on. But the amount of games can also be overwhelming, even if you are not someone who eats three different leagues. There’s just too much.
The overwhelming feeling has to do in part with the changing sports media ecosystem. Before streaming, most viewers had access to local, in-market games only and a few national broadcasts each week. Now die-hard fans can watch everything (although doing so may need three different streaming subscriptions over a cable package). If you want to watch all 570 hours of Spanish top-flight football over the course of a season, that’s an option available to you.
But much of the blame falls on the sports leagues themselves. More games mean more money: more ticket sales, more corporate sponsorship opportunities, and more valuable media rights packages. The teacher suspects that the last factor in particular may go a long way in explaining the balloon schedules. In 2005, 14 out of the top 100 live TV broadcasts were for sports, according to Nielsen; in 2025, they made up 95 of the top 100. Since the bar has dropped from almost all other live TV programming, networks have come to rely on sports—and will pay through the teeth to keep them. Meanwhile, they are now competing for media rights against pocket-sized streaming giants like Netflix, Apple, and Amazon.
As the value of TV deals increases, Mwalimu said, the more big-money leagues are off the table by not expanding. In 2024, the NFL sold the rights to broadcast a few games to Netflix for $ 75 million a year – this season, Netflix will do it. advertisements the first ever NFL game on Thanksgiving Day.
Overall, the expansion contributes to a sense of excess, excess. For a fanatic, you either miss something or sports will dominate your whole life. How are you supposed to have a normal, social and family-friendly Christmas while also catching five NBA games and three NFL games? For the average viewer, the proliferation of sports can reduce the utility of watching any individual game.
Consider the NBA. The league introduced a pre-playoff tournament in 2021 and another postseason tournament in 2023. However, for years now, fans have complained that the 82-game season is too long, as have LeBron James and Golden State Warriors coach Steve Kerr. To preserve their bodies, players end up taking frequent nights off (“load management,” to use the term), making it difficult for fans to predict whether the player they’re buying a ticket to see will even be fit that night. The length of the season and the inclusion of the postseason (two-thirds of the teams enter) ensure that many games are meaningless.
The nature and extent of the problem varies from league to league. But the drive to grow is universal, and so is resistance. The move to expand the World Cup caused a stir, in part because the tournament’s group stage has been low and hopeless. And apparently no one favors the planned expansion of the College Football Playoff from 12 to 24 teams, because it would make the regular season games irrelevant and reduce the quality of the playoffs themselves. A number of MLB stars, too, have called to short season, because 162 games is too much. Unlike basketball or baseball, football is far from a place where the regular season is meaningless, but that hasn’t stopped its fans from coming out. discussion like the NFL is reducing some of the magic that comes from the lack of football.
Whatever fans think about this expansion, chances are they’ll listen. Sure, they’ll complain about how the extra games dilute the product, but “everyone says that,” Mwalimu said. “And then the estimates come out and they’re amazing.” This is not a volatile issue; it is a fundamental distortion of the free market. In general, if a business offers a product and sells it, that means consumers want it. But as sports leagues add games, the fan experience degrades in a way that isn’t always reflected in dollars and cents. Just because a fan watches an 82-game NBA regular season doesn’t mean he wouldn’t prefer, say, a 70-game season where every game was more competitive.
There is no turning back. FIFA is taking note further expand the World Cup for 64 teams, and strong performances overall from first-timers at this year’s tournament will only strengthen that momentum. Despite being only three times the last few years, the plans twice the size of the College Football Playoff already seems to be underway. And NFL owners are struggling for another week of games. “In the NFL, there’s an inevitability that it’s going to go to 18 games,” Scott Rosner, a professor of sports management at Columbia University, told me. “There is almost too much money at stake not to.” The owners will not go far with extras $1 billion in income, and most players won’t go far with the extra salary. The experts I spoke to couldn’t think of a single example of that happening.
Sports have always been a business, but it can feel these days as if we’re entering an era of hard-hitting, break-every-penny dance. Ever-increasing microfinance, split-screen breaks, carving out media rights, extended schedules—it’s all lost, little by little, in the viewership. Add all that to the way gambling is reshaping the landscape, and in the process something intangible about sports fandom is lost. Ultimately, every business has one destiny: to grow.
