I completely get where you’re coming from. These leagues and teams seem to penalize the home base, because they think they can.
In the states, the Premier League is streamed on Peacock. I can pay $109 per year for a full year of Peacock, which includes the PL, but it also includes a lot of other sports as well as movies and TV shows.
Meanwhile, I moved from Chicago to another part of the country a few years ago. Since I left, it has become infinitely easier to watch all of my teams on TV. Major League Baseball has draconian blackout restrictions that made it virtually impossible for me to watch Cubs games for a few years, because they started their own network that wasn’t available to all local providers. This year, I paid $70 (when MLB was running a sale) and have access to virtually every Cubs game as well as every other team minus the local team here whose fans have their own gauntlet to run to watch their team. The same is true with the Chicago Blackhawks. Now that I’m no longer in the local market, I get every Blackhawks game as part of ESPN.
Leagues and networks are counting on local fanaticism to prevail, but they need to be cautious and learn from boxing. When I was a kid, boxing was one of the biggest sports on the planet. Over time, they moved all the marquee bouts to a ridiculous pay-per-view model, and within a generation, their greed relegated their sport to the margins. The vast majority of people couldn’t name the current heavyweight champion of the world if you asked them. When I was growing up, those guys were household names.
