Ahh, the summer of 2005, as far as I can remember the sun never stopped shining and the sport went on forever. And then it stopped. Forever.
2005 was the last time the Ashes were on terrestrial TV. We’d already had over a decade of top flight football behind a paywall, since then F1, Darts and now cycling are subscription only.
The Tour De France was an outlier, ITV’s highlights show, every night at 7 during the Tour is gone with Discovery / TNT buying the rights from 2026.
Originally it was just one subscription service, but now it’s many, with single sports split across multiple providers. When I turned on Sky Sports for the first test of the 25/26 Ashes in Australia it wasn’t there, Sky lost the rights to TNT. The Premier League is on Sky and Amazon with the Champions League and Europa leagues on TNT - something like that anyway. It will probably have changed by the time this goes out.
The Cost
So, let’s see what sport costs in the UK in 2025:
Sky Sports from around £20 a month = £240
TNT Sports £18 a month = £216
Amazon Prime £10 depending on adverts = £120
And then if you want to watch any boxing or MMA – PPVs are £20 - £25 a time, let’s be conservative and say 3 boxing and 3 MMA – that’s £120 in PPV
= £696 a year
If you want to watch 3pm kick offs you need a season ticket to your club, for me and my son last year it was around £1300 (+ travel and food)
Over £2000 a year.
It’s not just the cost, the move to subscriptions has caused more problems, games are frequently moved so that they can be shown on TV often meaning late Saturday or Sunday travel for away fans. Lastly here, Boxing Day used to be a feast of football, no matter how bad the family had got on Christmas day, you knew you had the Boxing Day fixtures to look forward to. In 2025 – a single Premier League game.
What have we lost?
For most of the 20th Century, sport was a shared cultural institution, it was there in the background, available to everyone, part of the fabric of society. I remember the FA Cup, right at the end of the season starting at about 10am live from Wembley, I used to sit there with my grandad back in the 80s all day watching the buildup, waiting for 3 o’clock. Now it’s moved to fit an ever more congested season, sometimes 3pm, other times 5pm, sometimes before the Premier League has even finished.
Frank Bruno vs Mike Tyson, live on ITV, the Ashes on Channel 4. F1 on the BBC, then ITV. All free to air, available to all of us, even if you didn’t watch it, sport cut across society, a common reference and shared cultural space.
The Squeeze
Over the past decade wages have stagnated, housing takes a greater share of income, energy and food costs have risen dramatically, squeezing disposable income. The cost of watching sport has increased with every bid and tender, Sky, Amazon, TNT, outdoing each other to secure the rights, each million pushing the price up for the consumer. I was going to write ‘fan’ but we are not treated like fans, we are consumers of products. The question isn’t whether we value sport, but whether the controllers of sport value us.
The Free Market?
The broadcasters will argue that the product they produce is superior to what would be available for free, and in some small ways they may be right, Hawkeye and Snicko are great technological additions, as is the in-car cameras and side by side views in F1, or stats and analysis in-game in the Premier League, but are they worth it? Not for the millions of kids who will never get into cricket or get to watch a Merseyside derby. This is not the free market – this is not freedom to choose, it’s coercion by exclusivity, its multinational corporations competing against each other.
Cycling is the perfect example, it requires ambient watching, the story has continuity from Tour to Tour, year to year and it converts casual viewers into riders, or did. Now you have to pay £18 a month for TNT (or £31.99 a month if you consume over the internet) on top of a Sky subscription and Amazon and everything else. This is a destructive model that prioritises short-term gain over long term sustainability.
Commonwealth in name only
The Commonwealth games is in Glasgow this year, and for the first time ever is not available on free to air TV. Already this seems like a bad deal for the UK, but consider this: the major funding for the Games comes from the UK government, through general taxation (so you and I), next, funding comes through the Scottish Government and Glasgow City council and also there is a cost to public services; police, the NHS. There is a commercial element that is used to offset the costs, but the key point here is that the public pays for the games, the private broadcasters monetise it and then sell it back to us.
Participation
Participation does not collapse overnight, and it would be dishonest to claim a single cause, but visibility matters, and it always has.
British Cycling’s membership has declined in recent years, and wider survey data paints a similar picture across sport. A YouGov study found that only 23% of Britons take part in sport in a typical month, while around a third say they used to play but no longer do. Those figures reflect many pressures, time, money, ageing, but access is one of them.
When the Tour de France was free on ITV, it sat in the background of summer. Children saw Wiggins, Froome, Cavendish, and cycling felt present, familiar, possible. Today, watching the same race online requires a subscription of £31.99 a month. The effect of that shift is impossible to quantify precisely, but the direction is clear. Fewer casual viewers means fewer sparks of interest.
The same pattern applies elsewhere. Cricket struggles to reach beyond its existing base even with the Hundred appearing on terrestrial television. Here County Cricket is the biggest loser. Football’s entry point increasingly requires money before it requires love. These are not abstract losses; they are cumulative ones.
What we do know is that cost hits unevenly. Lower-income households are far more likely to cite expense as a barrier to watching or attending sport, and access to live sport now tracks income with remarkable consistency. What was once culturally shared is increasingly economically sorted.
This is what happens when a commons is privatised. Not all at once, but gradually, quietly, until the absence becomes normal. The children priced out today are not just missing entertainment; they are the future fans, players, volunteers, and shared culture that sport cannot survive without.