As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve recently gotten back into the habit of following various sports. From not watching any sports for years, I now regularly watch:
- MLS (FC Cincinnati)
- NFL (Bengals, Steelers)
- MLB (Reds, Pirates)
- NHL (Penguins)
- Premier League (Aston Villa)
One major different in watching sports as compared to basically anything else is that it can be so painful to be able to watch exactly what you want. For each league, I denoted the team(s) that I like to follow. That has shockingly big implications to it.
Let’s start with the best viewing experience and work our way down to the worst.
Major League Soccer
This is the first season I ever followed MLS. It was before I got back into hockey at the start of this season, and I was looking for something to hold me over between the end of the NFL season and the start of the MLB season. When I started watching, I honestly didn’t even know the rules of the game, though I was able to pick them up pretty easily.
MLS has easily the best viewing experience of any sport. It’s dead simple; you pay for MLS Season Pass (either monthly or annually) and then you have access to everything. Every single game? You can stream it. Matches outside of MLS like Leagues Cup? You can stream it. In-market games? Out of market games? You can stream it. Playoffs? Finals? You can stream it. You buy one thing and can watch every game for every team. It’s a breath of fresh air.
Even better is that they don’t try to be scummy on the renewal. I had been paying monthly, and this coming month will be the last one of the season. Instead of charging me for months of nothing, it doesn’t renew again until the start of the next season.
Major League Baseball
The MLB viewing experience is so close yet so far away. It’s almost as though you can simply subscribe to MLB.tv and you also have access to everything… almost. On the surface, you can stream any game you like, and with their Apple TV app you can even pull up two streams at the same time for a picture-in-picture experience that only gives you the audio for the “primary” stream. The two places this falls apart are:
- Local games
- Postseason games
Local games are subject to blackouts. Basically if you want to watch your local team, you’re supposed to have a cable subscription to watch via a local cable station. MLB.tv is only targeting out of market games. For people like me, that means I can watch the Pirates whenever I want, but I can’t watch the Reds. Similarly, I can’t watch the Pirates if they happen to be playing against the Reds. The model just feel antiquated to me in 2024, though we’ll see this model again later on. If you still don’t want cable, things like Fubo.tv are an option, though the price tag is fairly high.
Note: There are technical ways of working around the blackouts that I’m not going to cover in this post.
Postseason games are all also sold to the highest bidder. This generally means you need cable to watch them, though at least the World Series ends up on broadcast TV. You can snag an indoor antenna on Amazon on the cheap for that.
Premier League
The Premier League features some of the best football/soccer in the world, and I found myself getting into it after I happened to have a Peacock subscription for something else and knew how much I was enjoying MLS. Though I have no affiliation with the UK, I just picked a team (Aston Villa because they’re from Birmingham, so it fits with the whole theme of the site) and started watching.
In the States, Premier League games are mostly streamed on Peacock. However, select games are only available on USA Network. This is annoying because there’s no dedicated streaming option for USA; I can only stream it if I have either an existing cable subscription or a subscription to something like Fubo. Since I’m not paying for either of those, it means watching those matches is mostly a wash for me. The problem occurs when you end up with games for your preferred team that end up in that situation.
The good news is that if you’ve got any English-style or Irish-style pubs in your area, it’s often popular for folks to show up early and support their Premier League teams. A local Irish pub here plays every Premier League match, and planning to catch matches I can’t stream myself there is a much more appealing option to dropping $80+ USD per month for a handful of Aston Villa fixtures.
National Hockey League
This current season is my first paying attention to the NHL since before I graduated from high school. The main method for streaming hockey in the US is ESPN+. Similar to MLB.tv, this allows for the streaming of most out of market games. The caveats are:
- Unless your out of market team is playing an in-market team
- Unless the game is randomly on something else
The first point is the exact same as it was with watching MLB.tv. The oddity is that the markets are quite strange. I live outside of Cincinnati and we have no local NHL team, so it makes sense that the Columbus Blue Jackets are in-market for me. The Nashville Predators are also in-market for me, which is bizarre.
More annoying, though, is that a mix of games are also on either NHL Network or TBS/HBO Max. For NHL Network games, you’re basically screwed without a cable subscription (or again something like Fubo.) For ones on TBS/Max, you can use an existing HBO Max subscription to stream them.
National Football League
The NFL is a weird one for me because on the surface it’s the opposite from most other sports. While baseball and hockey make it difficult to stream games for local teams due to blackouts, the NFL makes local games easy because you can watch most of them on broadcast television for free. I have an indoor antenna connected to my TV that works great for watching games on CBS, NBC, and Fox. There are still two major pain points for the NFL, though.
First, not every game is on broadcast television. Thursday night games are on Prime Video, for example. Other random games end up exclusively on Peacock or Paramount+. Select Monday night games are exclusive to ESPN, and some of them are not on ESPN+. Even weirder games, like the ones being played in the UK and Germany, are exclusive to NFL Network. For those, we’ll have to go out somewhere to watch them. Going out to watch games can be fun and we do it occasionally regardless, so it’s not the worst thing ever, but it’s still annoying that it’s a requirement rather than an option… Again, unless you want to shell out the money for cable/Fubo.
The other problem for the NFL is that watching out of market games is significantly more difficult. I also follow the Steelers, and it’s generally a crapshoot if I can watch them play. Prime-time games tend to get a national broadcast, but other games tend to not be broadcast in my area unless the Bengals don’t play in a conflicting slot. For example, this week the Bengals played on Thursday night, meaning that I’m actually in the broadcast area for the Steelers game on Sunday afternoon. That’s not frequently the case. The fix for this is to get NFL Sunday Ticket, but the cost is literally absurd. The current price for this season of Sunday Ticket with YouTube TV is four payments of $158 USD, coming to a total of $635. That’s insane to me unless you’re buying it for your sports bar.
The one weird semi-fix for both problems with the NFL is NFL+. It’s a cheap streaming solution ($7 USD per month) that allows you to stream games, but only:
- On a mobile device
- If they’re in your market
For a mobile device, this could mean a phone or a tablet. The tablet viewing experience on something like an iPad is actually pretty good… assuming the app isn’t completely broken. The last time I used it, landscape mode on iPads was completely broken, and all of the comments in the App Store were complaining about the same thing. I don’t understand how a company making as much money each year as the NFL can’t have a functioning app.
The concept of games being “in-market” for NFL+ is also not quite what you may expect. Along with meaning games you could watch via normal broadcast TV, it also includes games that would otherwise be exclusive to services like ESPN or NFL Network.
So while the NFL makes it the easiest to watch games for free, it’s also the most difficult if you want to ensure that you can watch all of the games for your team(s) of choice, and even more difficult if those teams are out of market. For better or for worse, it also has the smallest number of games in the season out of any other sport listed here, so at least the annoyance is less prominent.