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Opinion for The Latino Newsletter
Editor’s Note: The following is a co-authored opinion piece by Amy Hinojosa and Félix Sánchez
This op-ed is submitted on behalf of SeenPartners and its coalition of creators, producers, advocates, and industry professionals committed to ensuring the full breadth of the American audience is visible, served, and heard.
For generations, watching your favorite team play was one of America’s great equalizers. Accessible, affordable, and as simple as turning on the television.
That America is disappearing.
The excitement of the recent World Baseball Classic and the anticipation of the 2026 FIFA World Cup, set to be played on American soil for the first time in decades, remind us how powerfully live sports unite communities across cultures, languages, and generations.
Yet even as these landmark events capture the nation’s imagination, the infrastructure that once delivered them to every household is being quietly dismantled.
Live Sports and Big Tech
The real threat is not cable or broadband. It is the migration of live sports rights to Big Tech streaming platforms that operate outside any public interest framework. Amazon Prime, Google/YouTube, Apple, and Netflix have used live sports as a loss leader, pulling games behind exclusive paywalls with no obligation to the communities they serve.
As the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) warned the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in March, watching televised sports has transformed from an experience that bound us together into a maddening one that damages the entire video ecosystem.
The evidence is already in plain view:
In 2025, National Football League (NFL) games aired across 10 different services, costing fans over $1,500 to watch the full season.
Sinclair Broadcast Group told the FCC that a Yankees fan following the team through the playoffs would need to navigate 10 networks and five or more subscriptions at a cost approaching $1,000.
U.S. sports rights fees, projected at $29.2 billion in 2025, are expected to reach $37.1 billion by 2030. Consumers will absorb every dollar of that increase.
The Masters Tournament this month was split across CBS, Paramount+, Prime Video, and multiple streaming services, requiring several subscriptions just to follow all four rounds.
The 2026 FIFA World Cup, beginning June 11 across 11 American cities, will have games available on FOX’s broadcast network, though complete coverage across all matches will require additional subscriptions.
The NBA Playoffs mark a new and troubling threshold. For the first time in league history, local TV rights holders cannot broadcast any first-round playoff games. The Play-In Tournament ran exclusively on Amazon Prime Video, entirely stripped from traditional television.
As Knicks play-by-play announcer Mike Breen put it during his final regular-season broadcast on MSG Networks: “Fans want to hear their teams’ announcers. For so many of us, they become part of the family, such a big part of why you root for the team.”
No Connection
That connection is now gone.
While the NFL has survived fragmentation because it functions as a national event, most sports do not work that way. Baseball, basketball, and soccer fans follow their team, not the league.
When Apple locked Major League Soccer (MLS) behind its Season Pass paywall, the 2024 MLS Cup final drew just 65,000 streaming viewers, a record low, while the same final had averaged over 2 million viewers on traditional television two years earlier. Amazon’s Prime Video NBA games this season are averaging 1.12 million viewers, a fraction of what traditional television draws.
The numbers are unambiguous: when you move a regional sport’s fan base behind an exclusive tech paywall, audiences do not follow. They disappear.
In February, FCC Chairman Brendan Carr opened a formal public inquiry, MB Docket No. 26-45, examining how sports broadcasting affects consumers and local stations. The inquiry drew more than 8,600 public comments, with Americans of all backgrounds making clear that losing affordable access to live sports is not a minor inconvenience.
The NAB, Fox Corporation, and Sinclair all filed detailed comments by the March 27 deadline, urging the FCC to reexamine antitrust exemptions that allow leagues to collectively negotiate media rights, and to examine the role trillion-dollar tech platforms now play in locking communities out of content they have watched for generations.
Carr has already warned the NFL that its antitrust exemptions may be at risk. Senator Mike Lee has opened a parallel investigation. The Consumer Technology Association argues the market is working fine and the FCC has no business here. That argument might hold weight if every American could afford five separate subscriptions on top of their existing pay-TV or broadband bill. Most cannot. These are the right questions. Now they need answers.
Latinos and Live Sports
For Latino families, this fight is not abstract. It is personal. Latino households are among the most passionate sports fans in America, with viewership that exceeds national averages across football, baseball, soccer, and boxing. The 2026 World Cup will resonate in our community — unlike almost any other event in recent memory.
Sports are not a luxury. They are a cultural lifeline, a shared language, and a way for families and neighborhoods to bond across generations.
Our community is also disproportionately affected by cost. Broadband and pay-TV providers have made real investments in affordable access, and their competitive pricing has helped millions of Latino households stay connected. But when sports rights disappear behind exclusive Big Tech paywalls that add to the cost of existing bills, those gains evaporate. Subscription costs accumulate fast. When a game moves behind yet another paywall, it is not a minor inconvenience. It is a door closing on families who can least afford to lose access. This is an equity issue, and Congress should name it as one.
The consolidation of sports media rights in the hands of a few dominant tech platforms mirrors a broader and troubling pattern: the concentration of media power in fewer and fewer hands, with no local accountability. In 2025, 96 of the 100 most-watched U.S. telecasts were sports events.
Live sports on television are not just entertainment. They are the economic engine that funds local journalism and keeps communities connected. The collapse of Main Street Sports Group, parent of FanDuel Sports Network, makes this concrete. Every MLB team previously carried on that network has already cut ties. Thirteen NBA teams will enter the 2026-27 season without a local broadcast home. Those are real communities that will lose the local voices that made their teams part of daily life.
The FCC’s inquiry is an important first step, but it must lead to action. Congress should examine whether the Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961, written for a world of three television networks, is remotely adequate for an era of algorithmic platforms and exclusive streaming deals. The leagues themselves, which have grown enormously on the strength of public goodwill and the audiences built by traditional television and local cable, have a responsibility to ensure that their games remain accessible to the communities that built them up.
A child in a working-class Latino household should be able to watch the World Cup on American soil the same way his grandmother did: affordably, at home, without navigating a maze of competing app subscriptions.
In the spirit of Yogi Berra, “when you come to a fork in the road, take it.” Congress and the FCC are at that fork right now.
The American public is watching.
If they can still afford to.
Amy Hinojosa, President & CEO, MANA — A National Latina Organization
Félix Sánchez, Chair & Co-founder, National Hispanic Foundation for the Arts
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The Latino Newsletter welcomes opinion pieces in English and/or Spanish from community voices. Submission guidelines are here. The views expressed by outside opinion contributors do not necessarily reflect the editorial views of this outlet or its employees.