Sports podcaster Pablo Torre explains how streaming is affecting viewership

It’s been a wild year in the sports business, from a surge in popularity for women’s sports to the eye-watering deals in NBA broadcasting rights. Sports journalist and podcaster Pablo Torre, host of “Pablo Torre Finds Out,” dives into this past year. Torre unpacks the impact of streaming services on viewership, the curious decisions of sport owners, and the striking metaphors found in athlete finances.

This is an abridged transcript of an interview from Rapid Response, hosted by the former editor-in-chief of Fast Company Bob Safian. From the team behind the Masters of Scale podcast, Rapid Response features candid conversations with today’s top business leaders navigating real-time challenges. Subscribe to Rapid Response wherever you get your podcasts to ensure you never miss an episode.

TV deals are the lifeblood of sports business, and streaming services are kind of ratcheting things up that much more. You’ve got Peacock scoring big with the Olympics, Amazon taking over some NBA coverage from Turner, Netflix has a slate of NFL games for Christmas. Not to mention the Jake Paul-Mike Tyson fight. I’m not sure if that’s sports or not, but it does feel like we’re at an inflection point in sports broadcasting. Are we?

Do we want to subscribe to Netflix and Peacock and Amazon and Apple and Disney Plus and go down the line? What has been true since the beginning of that golden era of cable TV, which John [Skipper] presided over at ESPN, is still true now, but just diminishingly, which there is nothing more valuable than these games when it comes to drawing mass quantities of Americans together under what still remains the biggest tent in American life. 

So if you’re the NFL, you feel fantastic because every time you put a playoff game on Peacock or certainly on Amazon, you are breaking records for those streaming platforms because people still watch, regardless of your politics.

The tech platforms, the tech companies, as is true across so many aspects of media, are penny-pinching and optimizing, big scare quotes there, in a way that the linear cable television business, media companies of the industry, never had to.

What you’re seeing is the beginnings of a turn towards a world in which the tripling of NBA rights, and the unending fountain of money, will be tightening. Apple and Netflix and Amazon, for as much money as they have — they have more money than God at this point — they don’t need it in the way that cable television needed it, that Disney needed it, that Comcast and CBS needed it. 

And so that’s going to be the big inflection point when the actual cable television and linear television in general eventually does give way.

And from a customer point of view, I think about this too. Do fans care about what the network is? Like, do you care whether it’s on TNT or ESPN or Amazon? You don’t necessarily have any loyalty to that brand.

Not at all, and you can see that in the extreme popularity of pirated content. I mean, look, at a certain point, I’m talking to you in the same era when Juan Soto, the new New York Met slugger, just signed a $765 million contract, the richest contract in the history of sports over 15 years. 

The reason he has gotten that contract is because his boss is Steve Cohen, one of the 100 richest billionaires on Earth. And so the point is we have gotten to a place where big money has begun to eat away at the fiction that sports was a mom-and-pop business in which we needed everybody to civically feel like we were on the same team. 

Everything is suggesting that to be an athlete in professional sports and to watch them in the modern Coliseum is to watch something so alien from your day-to-day life that you’re just trying to figure out: How can I watch this? Can I watch this? Do I really need to pay an arm and a leg to watch it? 

So we are testing the tolerance of common people, of everyday Americans, to support something that feels increasingly divorced from the thing they, certainly their parents, had signed up for.

You wrote a terrific breakthrough piece for Sports Illustrated way back in 2009 called “How and Why Athletes Go Broke” about athletes losing their money to mismanagement and financial naivete. I remember that you reported that most former NFL players were bankrupt or under stress. Most NBA players were broke within five years of retirement. I’m curious, have you continued to follow this? Have things changed in the 15 years since then?

I recently did an episode on the 15-year anniversary of this story, which still remains the thing that I think I still get the most incoming messages about of all the stories I’ve written. 

Sports business to me is a deep abiding curiosity, and it goes down to the personal finances of players who are now making money earlier in the college system, and yet are not supported in the ways you might expect. Athletes are often metaphors for the normal mistakes of us normal people who don’t have those athletic gifts or those bank accounts, but they’re exaggerated because of the funhouse mirror of celebrity and wealth.

So for me, business and sports are inextricable from one another. That is the era that I grew up in, and that’s the era that I remain super, super interested in.

Is there a common mentality like that you see for sports owners as opposed to athletes?

The reason sport owners get into owning a team is that they want to be winners. I did a story once about the Philadelphia 76ers. In the NBA, like many professional sports, if you lose more, you get a better draft pick. It’s a funny form of socialism in an otherwise capitalistic enterprise. 

The worst get the most in order to level the playing field. And the Sixers, under Josh Harris, an aforementioned Apollo Global Management, what he decided to do was co-sign a plan to tank. We’re going to lose games, effectively, on purpose to get the worst record for several years in a row, and in that way, we would get better draft picks and save our franchise. 

It was a better system that way. And his logic was not wrong. What was underestimated, though, was that people, these fans, cared so much more about the Philadelphia 76ers than they did about the cost of polypropylene or any of these other things that Josh Harris was trading.

And he realized the public pressure on this, the attention, and the spotlight has made it so that my logical brain cannot function in the same way. 

Which is to say that sports is both a beautiful thing, a metaphor for the human condition, especially among Americans. It is also something that eats away at your brain. And I caution everybody who looks to sports for those lessons, because sometimes sports are extreme in ways that you should not follow when it comes to lessons you want to apply in the rest of your life.

It’s like it is a business. And it’s run in business-like ways, and it has a business impact. And yet at the same time, it’s emotional, right? And it has its own sort of reasons for being that even if you’re trying to approach it in a financial way, you kind of can’t. You get distracted.

Yeah, go talk to the head coach of Ohio State right now, by the way, who has had a great season, and this program is rolling in money and all of that is so. But he couldn’t beat Michigan, the hated rival. Hasn’t done it in four years, and that dude is probably going to get fired, right? 

And by the way, Michigan, whose new booster, Larry Ellison, has just paid for the acquisition of the new star quarterback coming in next year as a freshman because his partner, his romantic partner in life, is a Michigan superfan. That’s why that happened. That is not a logic that accompanies rational decision-making. That is a logic that accompanies mania. And the mania is the magic that is underpinning the entire economy that sometimes is anti-economic.