Sportsflation Starts With the Leagues: SFC and Public Knowledge Tell the FCC to Follow the Money
Last week, Sports Fans Coalition and Public Knowledge filed joint comments in the FCC's inquiry into sports broadcasting practices. We told the Commission what fans already know: the reason you're paying more to watch less isn't because of "market evolution" or "technological disruption." It's because professional sports leagues are running a cartel, and the government has let them get away with it for decades.
But here's what's new: after more than 15 years of SFC calling for reforms to the Sports Broadcasting Act, we're no longer a lonely voice. Commenters from across the political and industry spectrum, including broadcasters, conservative and progressive advocacy groups, think tanks, and even Fox Corporation, are now saying what we've been saying all along: the SBA is broken, and it's time for Congress to act. We called for repealing the outdated Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961 and taking away the leagues’ broadcast antitrust exemption.
For years, fans have complained that sports are more expensive, harder to find, and scattered across more platforms than ever. The FCC’s inquiry, however, focused on distributors and broadcasters, not the sports leagues, which are the real culprits.
In 2025, NFL games aired on ten different services. Watching every game costs fans an estimated $1,500 or more. The RSN model collapsed, leaving fans of dozens of MLB, NBA, and NHL teams without reliable access to their local teams. Diamond Sports filed for bankruptcy with $8.67 billion in debt. Its successor, Main Street Sports Group, announced it would dissolve entirely at the end of the 2025–26 season after a proposed sale to DAZN fell apart. Nine MLB teams had to bail on their deals.
None of this happened by accident. The leagues designed this system. They slice rights into exclusive packages, pit distributors against each other, and pass every dollar of inflated cost straight through to you.
Don't take our word for it — take it from Lachlan Murdoch, the CEO of Fox Corporation. He told investors in March that the NFL raised Fox's prices by over 100%, but not to worry: "that incremental cost would flow through to local affiliates, to our distributors, and ultimately, to consumers and the fans."
Thanks, Lachlan. At least you’re telling investors the truth that fans get ripped off.
The Law the Leagues Have Been Hiding Behind
Here's the part the leagues don't want you to understand: the antitrust exemption they rely on doesn't actually cover what they're doing.
The Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961 allows leagues to pool their teams' TV rights. Congress intended for his exemption to only apply to "sponsored telecasting," meaning free, over-the-air broadcasts. The statute explicitly does not cover cable, satellite, or streaming. Congress made that crystal clear in the legislative record: NFL Commissioner Pete Rozelle himself confirmed under questioning that the bill covered "only the free telecasting of professional sports contests, and does not cover pay TV."
So when leagues collectively sell streaming packages, negotiate exclusive cable deals, and carve up digital rights among a half-dozen subscription platforms? That's not protected by the SBA. The leagues have simply expanded their collective control well beyond what Congress authorized, and nobody in government has called them on it.
The Tide Is Turning
For more than 15 years, SFC has been making this argument: the Sports Broadcasting Act's antitrust exemption is an anachronism that lets leagues collude at fans' expense. For most of that time, we were one of the few organizations willing to say it out loud.
Not anymore. The FCC's docket shows more and more advocates agree with us.
The National Association of Broadcasters, representing the very industry the SBA was originally designed to protect, asked policymakers to convene experts to evaluate whether the law still serves the public interest, noting that leagues now use the exemption to extract billions from broadcasters while simultaneously shipping content to unregulated streaming platforms.
The Fox Corporation who pays billions for NFL rights signaled that the SBA's rationale doesn't extend to streaming. Fox stopped short of calling for repeal, but its implication was unmistakable: the antitrust exemption was created to support the relationship between leagues and free broadcast TV, and it shouldn't provide cover for leagues to move games behind paywalls.
The Center for American Rights and Bull Moose, conservative advocacy groups, jointly framed the issue through the lens of affordability, documented how blackout policies are destroying baseball fandom. Using Iowa as a case study where fans are blacked out from six surrounding MLB teams they called on the FCC to recognize local sports access as a public interest priority.
The International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, representing over 887,000 broadcast workers, echoed the concern that migrating sports off free TV threatens not just fans but the workers and local newsrooms that depend on sports-driven revenue.
The International Center for Law & Economics (ICLE) explicitly called for Congress to repeal the SBA and subject league media deals to standard antitrust scrutiny.
Two Paths Forward
Our filing laid out two options for Congress:
Option 1: Repeal the Sports Broadcasting Act. End the antitrust exemption entirely. Let teams compete to sell their own games. Enforce the antitrust laws. The college football market shows exactly what happens when centralized league control over broadcasts gets broken up — fans get more games, on more platforms, at lower prices. Leagues could still share revenue among teams to keep small markets competitive; they just couldn't collude to jack up prices and restrict access.
Option 2: Require leagues to make home games free to local fans. If Congress won't repeal the SBA, the next-best option is to require leagues to distribute the home team's games for free in the local market. The NFL voluntarily does this already, the other leagues should too. We also told the FCC to use its existing authority over broadcast networks. When a network like NBC has the right to air a game on local broadcast television but instead locks it behind Peacock, the Commission should step in. Its network/affiliate rules should prohibit networks from taking broadcast-eligible games and hiding them behind a paywall.
The full filing is available here.