Far more interesting than this is what will happen down the line with the money ESPN pours into college sports, the NFL, and the NBA for broadcast rights. ESPN hit its peak, and has nowhere else to go but down. It's inevitable, because you have 10's of millions of people who aren't really interested in sports who are no longer willing to subsidize ESPN via paying a bloated basic cable bill every month. We could be seeing, for really the first time ever, where the ceiling is on the absurd economics of professional and big-time college sports. We could actual see a reduction in salaries within the next 10 years.
So much of the money in sports comes from TV now that it's hard to see how it's sustainable. Turner and ESPN are paying the NBA 2.6 billion dollars this year, which is over 85 million per team. That type of money, on a contract signed relatively recently, was a desperation maneuver by those networks, because live sports is about the only thing left that guarantees viewers.
But what happens when that desperation maneuver proves an unsustainable failure? NBA arenas generally seat 16-20,000. Even if they manage to get an average of $100 per seat per game (which they generally don't), that's still only 80 million dollars from ticket sales for the regular season, max. Yet the NBA salary cap this year was 94 million.
