Few things bring Americans together the way sports can: Regardless of cultural, political and generational divides, we love to get together for 'the big game,' to cheer on our teams and follow along with the victories and heartbreaks that are part of the sports narrative. But with the business side of sports evolving, fans have been subject to notable cost increases in ticket prices and home viewing access. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported this year that prices for admission to sporting events increased by 123% from 2000 to 2025. This month on Navigating Our Financial Times, hosts Linda O'Bryon and Nicole Cox speak with Alex Jacquez, Chief of Policy and Advocacy at Groundwork Collaborative, former White House Economic Council staffer and writer of the opinion piece, Happy Opening Day! Now get out your wallet for MS Now, who breaks down some of the factors influencing the rapidly-changing fan experience.
Linda O’Bryon: Nicole, I have a question for you. What has more than doubled in price from the year 2000 to 2025, rising twice as fast as consumer inflation in just 19 years, and is now subject to dynamic pricing?
Nicole Cox: I'm guessing fuel.
LO: Actually, the answer is tickets to sporting events, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In February, they reported prices for admission to sporting events increased by 123% from 2000 to 2025. Meanwhile, over the same 25-year period, prices for items such as televisions, sporting goods, and recreational reading materials went up by just 37%.
I'm Linda O'Bryon. Thanks for joining us for Navigating Our Financial Times.
NC: And I'm Nicole Cox. Sports not only connects us as Americans and across generations, but these events also transcend borders, culture, and language by offering a way to celebrate together. So, what happens when the cost of admission pushes sporting events out of reach for fans?
LO: Here to tell us is our guest, Alex Jacquez, Chief of Policy and Advocacy at Groundwork Collaborative, former White House Economic Council staffer and writer of the opinion piece, Happy Opening Day! Now get out your wallet for MS Now. Thanks for joining us.
Alex Jacquez: Thanks so much for having me.
NC: According to an article you co-wrote with David Dayen, Behind the Bleachers, on prospect.org, over 80% of Americans surveyed in 2025 believe sporting events are too expensive for them to attend. And in Behind the Bleachers, you discuss how the top five professional sports leagues in North America brought in more than $50 billion combined in 2024, yet it has become increasingly unaffordable for an average American family to catch a game. How and why are fans being priced out of the arena?
AJ: It's exactly right. It's kind of happening everywhere and across all sports. If you've been watching the news recently, you've likely heard about the sky-high ticket prices for all the World Cup events, as well as the recent NBA championship of the New York Knicks selling their courtside seats for upwards of $200,000. And even just to get in arena and sit in the upper decks costs anywhere from $8,000 to $10,000, I mean, really just an unaffordable experience for so many people today.
And it didn't used to be like that. The price of attending an NFL or an MLB game rose on average about 300% from 1991 to 2023. And the average NFL ticket goes for more than $300 now. If you're a family of four and you have to think about getting tickets for all four members of your family, you get parking, you get maybe a hot dog, a soda, maybe you drink a beer or two for Sunday afternoon at the ballpark, you're looking at upwards of $1,000 just to get your family in for one day.
And I think that is emblematic of the entire economy right now and how things have really shifted into what economists are calling right now the K-shaped economy, where things are going pretty well if you are doing well already, if you're wealthier and richer, you have more opportunities, you are making more money through the stock market.
But if you are middle class or working class, the opportunities just are not there for you anymore. Wages aren't keeping up with inflation. And even these little things that I think are so important, a trip to Disneyland or an MLB stadium for a ballpark, they're just getting out of reach for the average family today.
LO: Well, you know, Alex, another item is not just going to the game or the event, but finding your favorite team to watch. You know, it used to be you could watch on free over-the-air TV. You could listen to major sports over AM/FM radio in most markets, which you can now in many places, but watching a game is more complicated. There are currently six streaming services for Major League Baseball games, not counting your local broadcast option, if available. So with so many dizzying options, most with a price tag, Atlantic Magazine recently quipped, "It shouldn't be that hard to be a fan." Why is finding your team to watch on television so difficult?
AJ: It's the same answer at the root of it, which is money. And these are extremely lucrative contracts that the leagues are signing with deep-pocketed streaming services. These are all the major tech companies: Amazon, Netflix, YouTube, that have billions and even trillions of dollars in their pockets, even more so than the traditional media conglomerates that used to air these games. And I think what we're seeing right now is just a fragmentation of the market that is going to really drive some changes. You mentioned the various streaming services to watch your favorite MLB team.
If you wanted to watch a full season of football, I think last year you would have needed something like six different streaming services and $1,200 at minimum to access all of them. And so you're watching on TV, you're watching on Amazon Prime, Peacock, NFL Network, Netflix has a special holiday game. And it's the frictions that I think are most frustrating to people having to sign up and remember your login and having different logins for each one subscriptions.
And I think it's really driving people nuts. And again, the reason is because these streaming companies all want to take customers from each other and they have the money spend. Then you're seeing these massive lucrative contracts that are bringing exclusivity to some of these streaming platforms or different games, which of course used to be, you could turn on the TV over-the-air, get bunny ears on your TV if you had to and catch the over the air broadcast on ABC, Fox or NBC.
And so we've actually seen an investigation started by the FCC. They are the Federal Communications Commission. They are looking into whether the NFL is misusing its antitrust exemption for bundled TV packages. And so there might be change coming there soon, but if you're anything like my mom, I'm trying to get into whatever streaming service we need to watch the Washington Nationals this year. It's just been a nightmare.
LO: And what about, you mentioned this is going to have huge change, young people coming up, because it is so hard to find your team and consistently watch them, whether it's football or baseball, basketball.
AJ: The viewership getting more and more difficult to track. I think has definitely been some upswings in the in-person experience recently, as people come out of the back from the pandemic and get back to normal. But it's another problem with these streaming services, is they're often very private about their viewership numbers and they measure things very differently than the traditional Nielsen Ratings would for the over the air broadcasters. Heard something like billions of minutes of eyeballs is how Netflix and YouTube will categorize their streaming. And so I think this is, it's further kind of atomizing the sporting experience. It's making it more solitary.
The biggest thing right now of watching sports and the streaming service is that at bars, Direct TV used to offer a package for bars to show every football game that was on. So you could walk in and say, give me the Packers game and they'd be able to find it. This year, they've discontinued that as NFL has moved to Amazon Prime and Sunday ticket. And so I heard one bar here in DC, Walter’s Sports Bar, they disclosed that they would need $72,000 to upgrade system to be able to bring all the NFL games on this year.
I can't think of any word for it other than price gouging. And so that's a, to me, kind of a community interest that we have and being able to gather to watch the game, sit down, whether it's in your house or you go over to a barbecue or you go to the local watering hole and try to watch your favorite game. Sports is really, it might be the very last thing that brings us all together. Doesn't matter Democrat, Republican, Independent, you can all sit down and watch a game if you're a fan of the same team, but we're really kind of atomizing that experience and pushing it out from that community experience that it used to be. And so I think it's going to be a challenge to keep generations who grew up watching together, as kids are moving to screens and older folks necessarily have desire to keep up with all of these changes.
NC: So, Alex, what are you hearing from these sports bars? Is this something they’re willing to absorb up front to bring the customers in? And then what does that mean for people who want to go in and see the game and have a beverage and some fries or something?
AJ: They have to. I think these sports bars that rely on big Sundays or Monday nights for a lot of their revenue, they really have no other choice. And again, I think that's part of the motivation for these leagues and these streaming companies who know that they have captive audiences. They know that they are going to charge whatever they can and that these people, these fans or these businesses are going to be willing to pay. And so I think they're going to have no choice but upgrade facilities and TVs and get the new package hope that that will be paid for by the increase in volume that get from fans. But $72,000 for barely a standard sports bar here in Washington, DC, that's got to be a tough pill to swallow.
NC: Alex, you mentioned lucrative contracts, in addition to the goal of getting or convincing subscribers to stream their service or a different service? Certainly what translates to success is changing, with attendance not necessarily meaning what it used to. How has how people access media and content impacted engagement? And what about those who don't own a TV or have a cable service?
AJ: That's right. The incentives have shifted a lot of the dollars of course are coming in through lucrative TV deals. A lot of dollars are coming in from luxury box seats and corporate sponsorships and the ways that they can maximize revenue through their arenas or their stadiums and not necessarily, again, the product on the field.
There was a great Wall Street Journal article, I believe earlier this year or last year about the Atlanta Braves, who moved their stadium recently, Turner Field, out into the suburbs just outside of Atlanta and they were losing. They were not doing well last year but business had never been better. And the owners and the ownership group, actually it's a conglomerate, had nothing but optimism because what they did with the stadium was they bought all the real estate around it. And so they're making money off of parking. They're making money off of housing. They're making money off of bars and restaurants and things in the area.
Again, if you're looking at a whole portfolio where you're talking about media rights the real estate rights and all of these other options, it's just less of a concern to field a winning team. Of course, if the team is bad and perpetually bad and you can't get anybody to come in and watch, it's going to be hard maintain but there is certainly a disconnect now between trying to field the best team possible and trying to maximize revenue and return on your asset.
We just saw the New York Knicks, they just won an NBA championship; New York City, championship-starved town for 50+ years in basketball, ecstatic parade, everything. And the owner was already talking about how they wouldn't have enough money to bring back the star players for next year and would have to start cutting again. And this is a remarkably wealthy person. And it's just become more of a business, more of an asset class than ever before.
LO: You pointed out on prospect.org that there are more national sports networks on cable than news networks. And this statistic is amazing that 21% of US adults attend church once a week, but 56% watch a sporting event that regularly. So all of these changes you're mentioning, the business of sports, how does that collide with the ideals and the spirit of fairness that America associates with sports?
AJ: I think there is a growing dissatisfaction with how these leagues have been operating. And of course what we detailed in the magazine as the business of sports. Again, the nostalgia here, people can remember what it was like to be able to go to a game for a couple bucks on a weekend, to take your family, to go with your dad and your mom and have a good affordable time. And something broken contract.
Of course, you see the NFL continues to grow, the MLB attendance has never been better. The fans are still there, but it's a different mix maybe in and certainly generationally, I think we might start to see some changes here where our kids aren't as interested in sports. And this goes all the way down to the bottom. It's not just the pros at the top, but we're seeing the increased financialization of youth sports. Private equity firms are buying up hockey leagues and baseball leagues and trying to get as much money out of parents and kids as young as eight or nine years old, for again, little leagues or Babe Ruth leagues, things that used to be free, they used to be community-oriented.
I think there's just a shifting relationship with this cultural touchstone of sports, whether it's growing up and playing them or growing up and watching them, that really kind of changing the contract here. And I think there's a possibility in the way that fewer and fewer people been going to church over the last several decades, that this could have an impact on certainly the types of fans. If sports is only available to the wealthy or those who have the disposable income to be able to go out and watch or to watch at home, I think you're just going to see less and less interest from those who don't have the same opportunities.
NC: With sports stadiums almost always backed by taxpayer funds, fans are paying on both ends. You say in Behind the Bleachers, the floor plan of a stadium mirrors America's legacy of inequality with decreased seating for ordinary fans and more luxury suites and premium club seating. What does this say to consumers whose tax dollars funded those sports stadiums?
AJ: I think this is the biggest piece that we keep coming back to because people will ask us, “why should the government or why should policy makers step in and try to regulate sports? This is not a top priority for Congress or your mayor or city council.”
What we keep coming back to is the amount of taxpayer funding that so many of these sports teams and these stadiums get. We see it in nearly every single sport and of course in the NFL where these mega stadiums keep being built and built bigger and bigger, but again as pointed out with fewer opportunities for regular fans, And they get runaway tax breaks to provide for economic development that often doesn't materialize. This is one of the most studied aspects of sports economics, is “do stadium subsidies pay for themselves?” And the answer is no, they do not. They do not bring additional economic development. Sometimes they'll switch, they'll move economic development or incomes around from one part of the city to the other. But far and away we find that these subsidies they just go to owners who are billionaires themselves.
There was an article in the New Yorker about the luxuriation of these NFL stadiums and these arenas and you see at the new SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles, club a seat can go for $2,000 a game. A suite can go for $50,000 a game. And the venue has 260 premium suites. They are prioritizing those access levels over the bleachers, the cheap seats where they're not making as much revenue and where they have a harder time selling season tickets. If you're a corporation that is buying out a suite for consultants or your executives you'll pay the full season. Full season access for the suite, deduct it from your business expenses and they can count on that revenue over and over again, versus having to find somebody to fill $20, $50, $100 seat every single game.
So we're really seeing the buildings are becoming larger, and the suites and the premium and luxury offerings getting bigger than the regular offerings. And they hold fewer people just in total but they're making way more revenue per seat. And again, it’s a stratification of the economy that we're seeing everywhere between the haves and the have-nots.
LO: You mentioned the economic development question, but there have been cases where a formerly blighted area really changed once a stadium was built. And that did help the growth and development in those particular communities. So there are times when it has helped with the economy, but are you saying it's shifting it?
AJ: The economic literature that we find on whether or not these subsidies pay for themselves…And look, I live in Washington DC right by the Nationals’ stadium which took a place that was badly needed of development and was able to really capitalize around it is now built up quite different from how it used to look. But the vast, vast majority is that the promise is much stronger than the evidence. And so as a public-private partnership it is really not worth the investment that you're making in tax dollars. Again if you're a city or a locality that's looking to put stadium in one part of town versus the other, the bulk of the evidence that we have shows that instead of generating new economic activity you're just taking spending or taking tax dollars that would have been spent elsewhere in the city and shifting them around to a different part.
LO: What about the rivalry between cities when they worry that they may lose a team and then they lose part of their economic base? I mean, those issues are very real when communities are worried about losing a team, so they will go and build a bigger stadium.
AJ: The leagues and the owners really play cities and towns off of each other to try to bid up their prices and try to bid up what they're getting from taxpayer to be able finance these things. These are lucrative investments for these sports teams owners. The number of billionaires who own sports teams has proliferated tremendously over the last several years and decades. Valuations of these teams just skyrocketed when you see how much they are worth versus how much some of these families originally paid for them.
I think the case is just that none of these stadiums need public funds be in red, to be able to pencil or be able to make money for their owners. They’re using a lot of these negotiations and these arguments about economic development to try to lower their tax liabilities and get the best deal that they can for themselves.
NC: Well, there has been pushback from fans and various communities, especially when it comes to ticket pricing. In your MSNow article, Happy Opening Day! Now get out your wallet, you mentioned there is a way to rein in some of the price gouging. What is street pricing and how could it make things more reasonable?
AJ: Street pricing is a proposal that we put forward for stadiums that, primarily those that have received federal funding because we believe that there needs to be some return for the public and for the fans if taxpayers are going to be funding these stadiums. What street pricing is, is essentially a requirement for concessions, for the vending inside of the stadium: You cannot charge prices that are higher than what they would be on the street.
This is something that many airports and transit authorities in the United States already use. Some of them have allowances of 10 or 15 or 20% get a little bit outside pure street pricing definition. But what we found is that airports in particular who have really started the—if you've ever been in an airport, I'm sure you've had to buy a $9 bottle of water the second you get past security when just outside, at a CVS that same bottle of water is selling for $2 or less.
It’s just the same in the sports stadiums. You see sodas and the beers and the popcorn and hot dogs just going for an inflated amount that you wouldn't see anywhere else. And so we've seen some success in airports. If you look at Portland Airport in Oregon, it has been ranked the top airport in the United States consumers, for flyers for many, many years. They own their own concessions. Usually airports will rent them out or they will lease them out to an operator. But Portland owns its own vending and concessions and they offer strict street pricing. You won't find anything in there that is more expensive than what you find outside. Ton of local businesses that they have and consistently has been rated one of the top airports the country. People love it. They do great revenue. They often were finding that Salt Lake City another one, Utah, that does this. And they say that their revenue is better when they offer better prices than it is when they're more expensive.
And so we propose this for sports stadiums too. In the Atlanta Falcons in Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta, they have offered a fan friendly menu where you can find a list of things like hot dogs, soda, chips, fries, domestic beer for prices essentially which you would find outside. And that's exactly what they say too. They say that their revenue has never been higher on concessions because people are more likely buy other merchandise or buy other things in the stadium when they don't feel like they're getting ripped off at the counter.
And so we think it's not just good for consumers, not just good for fans. We think it can be good business too. And I think that there's a bigger and bigger movement. We've seen more and more teams move toward these affordable options. Some of them are only on certain days. Some of them are only on certain items, but there is a growing realization maybe that we've taken it too far on prices.
LO: So you're saying a fan-friendly movement is starting.
AJ: That's right.
LO: So when did all this get started, this big push for sports becoming sort of an asset class? Number crunchers, consultants, efficiency experts: When did all this start?
AJ: It's hard to pinpoint exactly when this blew up, but I think, and my co-author on this piece make the argument that if you remember Moneyball, which is a Michael Lewis book and then an Oscar winning movie about how sports and baseball in particular were really taken over by analysts. And this is in 2003, so the early 2000s—taken over by analysts who started looking at data and started to evaluate players and evaluate teams based on things that Wall Street traders or management consultants would look at and not what the old school scouts would see at the ballpark or the sandlot one of their trips in middle America. And this really brought about a revolution in baseball that has since spread to basically every professional sport.
Data, analytics and hard numbers, probabilities and statistics being used in ways that are much more sophisticated than they used to be. And it brought a new type of person into baseball, the business of baseball as well. And that type of person came from Wall Street. They went to Ivy League schools. They had business degrees and they really took to the field with these analytics with gusto. And it does seem that that mindset then made it to the front office and to the executives. You started seeing more management consultants, more bankers being brought in in front offices. You started seeing these valuations go way, way up.
In the 80s, 90s and before sports team owners were kind of a punchline. They were vanity investments. A local tycoon would buy local team or stadium to try to garner community goodwill because they were big fans. Now they're just being treated more and more like an asset class. And we've seen the number of billionaires go up dramatically who own sports teams. We've seen private equity get into the game here and leagues recently made it easier for private equity to go in and buy shares of these teams. And so it's really been, I think, over the last, let's say, 25 years or so since the early 2000s, where we've really seen a shift in kind of how people think about sports.
And Mark Cuban had an interview. He was the former owner of the Dallas Mavericks. He talked about this, too, when he sold the team, he said in the beginning days when he owned the Mavericks, all the owners were talking about the fan experience and the competitiveness and getting the best team on the floor. And he said in recent years that it really started to shift and they’d go to these ownership meetings and he would have the owners and they'd be talking about maximizing revenue or revenue per seat and really focus more on the financials more than the game on the court.
NC: Big business is affecting all levels of sports. You wrote 43% of minor league baseball teams have private equity ownership investments, with 48 teams owned by diamond baseball holdings. Earlier, you said how sports business is investing in real estate earlier in the conversation. Not even youth sports are immune to this business model. How has this corporate belief system infected all levels of sports?
AJ: Really, I think the youth sports angle is the clearest to see and maybe will be source of backlash for people where they used to be local, volunteer, nonprofit, public. You'd have church leagues, you'd have community leagues, little leagues. And now you have these specialized travel teams, tournaments, private stadiums and facilities. You have apparel deals and sponsors, video deals, streaming deals that have all been become an opportunity for roll ups and for these investors and Wall Street in particular. This is now a $40 billion a year industry, youth sports is, and family spending rose nearly 50 % on youth sports from 2019 to 2024.
There was a recent story where Senator Chris Murphy, the senator from Connecticut, was filming his child at a hockey arena just getting some footage of his teenage kid. And somebody from the team came over and said he was not allowed to film his child because the hockey team had an exclusive deal with the streaming platform, that broadcast the games for parents that then they would have to pay a subscription for. I mean, it's just getting outrageous. And so I think that's where really where it's the extraction, right? It's where they have private facilities that they jacked up the usage fees for or make you pay for the apparel and the bundles, the streaming services, again, just to get your kid out of the house. And if you don't have the means to be able to pay for this, you're increasingly not able to access sports or at least play them with your friends or your neighbors or the community.
LO: Well, speaking of Senator Chris Murphy, along with Cory Booker and Representative Chris Deluzio, they've introduced Let Kids Play. That act is aimed at stopping private equity from investing in youth sports, as you've talked about. They contend a ban would curb predatory practices that drive up the costs and would result in returning more dollars to families. Is that realistic that that legislation could put the brakes on these costs?
AJ: It really could. And they've done a good job of targeting and really digging into the ways that financial firms extract profits and get the revenue out of teams and out of parents. And I think the reason I'd be optimistic for this legislation, again, where it's hard to get things these days in Congress harder to get Democrats or Republicans to work together. But this could be an issue where partisanship really doesn't matter.
If you are a parent and you are seeing this, then it can really radicalize you. I told the story about Chris Murphy. He introduced a bill. Not every parent is able to fix their problems and annoyances by actually literally changing the law. But it certainly seems Senator Murphy and Congressman Deluzio, who is a congressman who has also experienced the same thing. He had field hearings and asked for testimony for people in his district to talk about how youth sports were getting overpriced and how the value was getting out of the community and to Wall Street and really cares deeply about this issue. So I think that there's an opportunity here for people to put their differences on partisanship aside and maybe come together on an opportunity to get money out of youth sports.
Again, if you're a parent, you have a kid playing, it really doesn't matter whether you're a Republican or a Democrat. I think that this is an issue that really resonates with people.
NC: You have parents investing heavily in the sports experience for kids. Maybe a chance for a scholarship or with the hopes their child will play professionally. Meanwhile, what has happened to the players, both men and women, on their share of profits and team valuations? How are players being tempted with these financial deals, including college?
AJ: So now there is a real shift in how players are able to profit off of their opportunities. And I think, of course, some good and some bad. But really with the shift from college, which has really been an amateur lead for so long, and now the ability for what's called NIL or Name, Image and Likeness deals where star athletes can market themselves. They can't take a salary or a contract from college team, but they can an NIL deal where they can use their face, their jersey, their image for things like advertisements, car dealerships, crypto coins; we're seeing all kinds of things out there. And so now you have a system where boosters or fans of the teams are raising tremendous sums of money for programs like Ohio State and Michigan to be able to attract these players based on a deal that may not end up panning out.
And so at the college level, I think there's some real concern whether we've kind of opened the floodgates opportunities that are ripe for exploitation and even corruption. And then I think that there is a broader challenge when you're talking about trying to make it to the major leagues, you're trying to make it to the pros and some of the opportunities that are arising with, deals where broker will give you some money upfront for a cut of your lifetime earnings. We've seen particularly for foreign players, this has become extremely exploitative, almost like a loan shark.
And then even once you get to pros, I think there’s no guarantee. Of course, many of these industries are billions and billions of dollars. Plus, it's difficult sometimes to say that millionaire star players should be getting even more share of that pie compared to the billionaires. But what we're seeing is at the established pro sports with strong unions, they get about 50% the profits. The owners, of course, get the others. There are negotiations in between. But some of these other sports, the WNBA, for instance, before the contract that they just signed, they got 9% of the overall revenue that the WNBA made. You have star players who are making less than they would make at a part-time job in the offseason and often having to pick those up and not being able to make money while the owners are making all the rest.
LO: Is this union driven then, in terms of who's making a lot of money if you have a strong union?
AJ: Absolutely right. The MLB, the NFL, the NBA, they have strong players unions and they've been established for a long time. They have fought tenaciously for their right for collective bargaining and have come away with a better deal than certainly the WNBA had. The players had little leverage for some time. The owners had had most of it. And so this is a shift. signed a new contract and hoping to see some of those minimum salary floors to allow the WNBA players to get just as much of their share of the revenue as the men do. I think it's only fair.
LO: But looking at college sports, the bipartisan Senate bill Protect College Sports Act of 2026 has been introduced to create uniformity. Will that help?
AJ: The real problems, national standards might help. I think for college athletes in particular, there are concerns and maybe there are opportunities for collective bargaining and for unionization in the same way that the professionals are treated. If we're going to treat these college kids just like these star players in the pro sports, I think they need to have the same rights to determine their own futures as well. But there are certainly, I think it's good that the Congress is trying to get involved and regulate athlete payments and transfers and these things that are really causing a lot of consternation. It's certainly good to have out there and good for bipartisan lawmakers to continue to work on.
LO: Well, this is a big topic, and just ahead we’ll talk about dynamic pricing, and how prediction markets play into the business side of sports. You’re listening to Navigating Our Financial Times.
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NC: Welcome back to Navigating Our Financial Times. I’m Nicole Cox.
LO: And I’m Linda O’Bryon. Our guest is Alex Jacquez, Chief of Policy and Advocacy at Groundwork Collaborative, and former White House Economic Council staffer. The US regulatory environment generally allows dynamic pricing, which enables automated systems to adjust prices in response to market demand. Some observers are concerned that this flexibility can create opportunities for predatory pricing practices. This pricing strategy really took off for sports in 2009. In May of this year, the New York and New Jersey attorneys general announced an investigation into FIFA's ticketing practices for the 2026 World Cup and other states have also announced. How are states in general reacting to dynamic pricing, Alex?
AJ: It's really tough. The World Cup, I think, is a great example here. And you mentioned that the first dynamic pricing for tickets in the MLB was in 2013. The San Francisco Giants partnered with technology startup that helped them set up their ticket prices, helped them maximize the revenue. In a couple of years, every single team had adopted it. And it's really been norm here. You see different prices every single day. Before that, 2012 was not that long ago. But before that, you could get a ticket any day for a set price. And that ticket would generally not change.
How this has changed things is it allows teams to be more flexible and for them to maximize revenue. If they know that they're not getting a lot of attendance they can actually reduce the number of seats that they have in the stadium. You've seen tarps on the upper decks and closed seating sections so that they're driving up the value of those remaining seats.
And the World Cup, I mean, really has taken it to another level. The dynamic pricing of course, they have 500 million people who want tickets. There are only about four million tickets for the entire World Cup tournament. And so, of course, they have a ton of demands. But this is the first World Cup that is used dynamic pricing. They've had just alternative systems in other countries. And many countries regulate the resale markets and the ticket market in ways that we don't. And so now we've seen prices for these tickets are going again for thousands of dollars just to get in the cheapest ones across the stages and the most expensive are going for $80,000, $90,000 and the reason is revenue maximization. The World Cup, FIFA, is getting a ton of money off of this. And so now we started to see some states crack down and really, if not in the dynamic pricing itself, then in the resale market, which is a whole other category of price gouging, corruption in many ways.
Maine has put a 10% cap on the amount that you can sell over the face value in the resale market. And so I think you're going to see some changes either by state legislators or by attorneys general. Again, this is this is not unusual in the rest of the world. There are regulations for these things and at other sporting events you could get run out of town if you tried to sell championship soccer, football matches in Europe for the prices that we do in the United States.
LO: So what do they do? Do they put a cap on the price? In other words, some dynamic pricing, but only up to a certain point?
AJ: You could put a cap on it. You can cap resale prices. You can do lotteries. You could set aside a number of affordable tickets like many football clubs in Europe do, they give their fans, the ones who show up to most amount of games, they have preferential rights for ticketing. It's not the same free-for-all-whoever-has-the-most-money can have the ticket that you have in the U.S.
NC: With younger generations spending more time on their mobile devices, but not necessarily watching the games on them, what do we know about any connection between the surge in online betting and the marketing and the tactics of online gambling to crowds that tend not to watch sports? People may not pay to watch a game, but they may still try and bet on them.
AJ: The sports gambling industry has just exploded since the Supreme Court ruling that made it legal for states to allow online gambling in 2018. And we've seen something that has gone from, you know, a small single-digit billions-of-dollars-per-year, mostly wagered in Las Vegas or in places where you had to physically be present, to now hundreds of billions of dollars, I think $160 billion last year wagered. And you can do it from your pocket.
And these apps, it's really DraftKings and FanDuel that are biggest drivers of sports gambling today. They're phone apps that you are able use at any time. And they use these algorithmic tactics to keep people betting and to keep people, especially those people who are losing, to keep spending money. They make the most of their revenue from a small number of gamblers who, for one reason or another, are really not able to stop. The vast majority of people can bet on a game once in a while and be just fine. But I think there's protections that we need to put in place. We're seeing some of those regulations now start be introduced in states and cities. But I mean, it's really been a dramatic change in the size of the industry just over the last eight years or so.
LO: Well, one of the issues that is very much in the news, earlier this year, Brendan Sorsby, then Texas Tech quarterback, was the subject of an NCAA investigation. He had been ruled ineligible after it was discovered he had placed bets, more than 9,000 bets, totaling $90,000 on college and pro sports.
There are a lot of layers to this story, but initially, was granted a temporary injunction eligible to play college football because he had gone through gambling addiction, inpatient rehab. There were a number of issues discussed. Then the Big 12 Conference opposed the decision, others opposed it. June, it was announced he planned to apply for the NFL supplemental draft. So what impact will this case have on sports as a whole?
AJ: It's been very detrimental to sports. We all know that Pete Rose very famously was banned for life for gambling on his team. The more that it's become normalized these days, particularly for college athletes, think it's just slippery slope for these leagues to go down because what they really rely on is the trust and the trust from the fan that they are viewing a product that has integrity and calls balls and strikes, to use the metaphor, fairly. What you're seeing with cases like this where you have players actively betting and betting frequently and all the time is really just degrading the trust in those sports.
I had written an article that called for at least a reining in of what are called "prop bets," which bets that are on very specific outcomes within a game or how one specific player would do in a particular game. We've seen that this is really the biggest opportunity malfeasance. So when you see players who are betting on themselves to play under a certain amount of minutes and then fake injuries pulled off the court so they can win that bet, this is the stuff that is really dangerous to normalize. So I think there's a number of ways to crack down on even the illusion or the possibility of impropriety in sports gambling in sports.
NC: So you mentioned not the first time, since we've obviously heard of sports betting scandals. Is the outcome still based on talent overall? Is it business overall, or is something else going on that so many more people are growing up on phones and gambling has been gamified? What's going on here?
AJ: I think it's both. It's the gamification, the financialization of sports. I think certainly sports are still, it's not WWE wrestling. There are not scripts or preordained outcomes, but the more the gambling has really gotten integrated with the leagues and all of the ads. You see athletes getting death threats online when they don't perform, if people miss their bets, it's really, I think, gone too far and we should see some separation between the leagues and their embrace of these gambling apps.
LO: Public opinion organization Navigator Research finds that young men are especially likely to gamble or engage in prediction markets. 53% of men ages 18 to 34 report betting on sports online, compared to 38% of women in the same age group. Young men were also more likely to use prediction markets.
Those prediction markets, such as Kalshi and Polymarket, allow users to bet on a wide range of what could happen next. In sports, public affairs, a big range of topics. How does this play into the business side of sports and who is reaping the benefits?
AJ: Yeah, and the prediction markets, market themselves as a way to gather information about the financial markets and all kinds of things. But what they're primarily used for is sports betting. It's by far the biggest volume of activity on their platforms. And it's the exact same issues only at this point even less regulated than the sports gambling apps are. And so I think you're going to have to bring in prediction markets in the same way that you do sports gambling, because if you're reducing all of these games, all of these sports to a bet or to transaction or an event that will resolve within the time frame for money, I think you're really taking out some of what makes sports special and the community and of course the fairness and all the rest. And so I really do, I'm concerned about intertwining of these companies and the leagues in particular.
NC: What is the impact all of this is having on athletes playing the game?
AJ: What we're seeing is opportunity for corruption and for point shaving. And so I think that that's it at its core. It's the opportunity to cheat, the opportunity to make money off of a bet that you know is going to hit and to rig the outcome of a game or an event to be able to do so. So I really think the incentives shifted somewhat and the leagues really need to make sure that they're taking absolutely no tolerance approach.
LO: The Wall Street Journal reported the bipartisan Senate bill, Protect College Sports Act of 2026 was introduced by Senators Ted Cruz and Maria Cantwell to bring uniformity to college sports.
NC: Meanwhile, Senator Chris Murphy, who we referenced earlier in the interview, is raising concerns about the current aspects of the bill. Senator Murphy wrote in a social media post, "It seems to limit the compensation of athletes while protecting the huge salaries of all the adults, coaches, and sports industry executives who are getting rich off the performance of the players."
LO: Hearing about all this, the Protect College Sports Act of 2026, FIFA needing to answer questions after allegations of artificially inflating prices, even reports of Maryland being the first state to ban surveillance pricing at grocery stores and antitrust lawsuits that have alleged unlawful market power over the past few years in mixed martial arts, NASCAR, tennis, even chess. Is there hope for fans and consumers for what your article describes as a dark period of cronyism and oligarchy?
AJ: Of course. Of course there's hope. And while I've been fairly negative on the business of sports and how it's evolved, I think it's just the case that there's nothing like sports to bring people together. And we saw it just recently, we see seeing the World Cup people from all over the world coming together. We saw it in New York City and the Knicks and that city just really coming together in this championship run. And I think there are fans and there are teams who are concerned about where sports are going, the business side of sports, and are looking for change.
So we've had policymakers, lawmakers, we've had fans weigh in on almost every single issue that we've talked about today, trying to get fixes. We've seen some movement in the states in particular, and hopefully some movement in the national level to be able to rein in some of the worst practices. And I think just make it a little more affordable to go catch a ball game with the family, which is I think what it really comes down to.
NC: Despite all these pricing and accessibility hurdles, as you mentioned, Alex, sprots remains one of the most unifying activities in the nation. You said people can put political differences aside when they join together to watch a sporting event. Let’s hope that continues.
LO: Game on!
You can find Alex Jacquez’s articles Behind the Bleachers at prospect.org and Happy Opening Day! at MS.Now. Alex Jaquez, Chief of Policy and Advocacy at Groundworks Collaborative. Thank you for taking the time to join is.
AJ: Thank you so much, this was a blast.
Thank you for listening to Navigating Our Financial Times. This program is not intended to provide investment, tax, or financial advice. You should consult your own tax, legal, and accounting advisors before engaging in any transaction. The views and opinions expressed by guests are their own and do not imply an endorsement or recommendation, or necessarily reflect the views of AZPM.
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