The top sports media story of 2025: The evolution of ESPN

This week, we’re celebrating the highs, the lows, the best, and the worst of the year with The Awfulies. Today, we dive into our winner for the top sports media story of 2025: ESPN’s evolution. 

2025 has been one of the most critical years for ESPN in recent memory. It’s perhaps fitting that the Worldwide Leader in Sports spent the final portion of this quarter-century preparing for the next quarter-century. ESPN made several industry-defining moves this year with a focused eye towards the future. And when media observers look back on ESPN’s history many years from now, they’ll circle 2025 as a turning point for the network.

This year alone, ESPN finally took its cable networks over-the-top, making the ESPN family of networks available to consumers without a pay TV subscription for the first time in its history. As one of the last holdouts without a direct-to-consumer offering for its flagship channels, ESPN’s escape from the bundle marks the true beginning of the late-stage cable and satellite businesses.

The network also inked a ginormous deal with the NFL, which will see the behemoth league take a 10% equity stake in ESPN, paving the way for a long and fruitful partnership between the two sports giants.

They also made a savvy move with Major League Baseball, ditching its national Sunday Night Baseball package in favor of a local-focused package centered on MLB.tv. This deal could help ESPN secure a foothold in the lucrative local sports broadcasting market over time.

But 2025 didn’t come without its warts. ESPN continues to move further into opinion and sports debate programming, often at the expense of newsgathering and reporting. Pat McAfee’s influence on the network’s daytime lineup remains evident. However, these decisions indicate how ESPN views its future in vying for consumer attention.

Let’s take a deeper look at just how meaningful this year was for ESPN.

Launch of ESPN Unlimited

After many years of speculation about when ESPN would finally take its core product directly to consumers, the new ESPN app launched in August, just in time for football season. The move had wide-ranging implications not only for ESPN, but for the pay TV business writ large.

ESPN has long been the most critical channel in the pay TV bundle. Without it, cable and satellite distributors like Comcast and DirecTV wouldn’t have a viable product to offer consumers. Before August, the only way to access ESPN, ESPN2, ESPNU, etc., was to purchase a subscription from one of those companies (or a virtual alternative like YouTube TV). Consumers can now buy these channels directly from ESPN.

In the long term, the move will upend the pay TV bundle as we know it. But priced strategically at $30 per month, ESPN isn’t trying to kill the golden goose of cable yet. The network knows that the 65 million-odd households that still subscribe to the bundle (and thereby indirectly pay ESPN between $10 and $15 per month) are still their most valuable customers. What ESPN is doing with its new app is preparing for the future.

The app’s slogan, “All of ESPN. All in one place,” precisely reflects what the network aims to deliver. That doesn’t simply mean it’s linear networks. That means the treasure trove of live sports programming that was formerly behind the ESPN+ paywall (think PGA Tour golf, countless college sports, local NHL games, international soccer, etc.), exclusive live studio programming (like The Rich Eisen Show), and Zoomer bait in the form of a new “Verts” feature meant to emulate a TikTok experience but for sports fans.

By making its app all-encompassing, ESPN is trying to replicate the economics of the pay-TV bundle in the modern era. Perhaps the biggest indicator on this front was ESPN’s deal with WWE, which will make the pro wrestling circuit’s Premium Live Events (PLEs) available exclusively through the ESPN app. By placing exclusive programming on the app, ESPN can treat it as it would another cable channel when negotiating with distributors.

See, ESPN is agnostic about how you pay for its services. It only cares that you pay for them. This is why anyone who subscribes to a pay TV bundle will (eventually) have full access to the app. That rollout has been slow, much to the chagrin of WWE fans. But by next year, anyone who subscribes to ESPN—whether through a cable, satellite, or virtual provider, or directly from ESPN— will be able to access all ESPN has to offer. By placing exclusive programming on the app, ESPN can sell distributors wholesale access to it, essentially the same way it charges distributors for a linear network. After all, no one will purchase a pay TV bundle if it doesn’t include access to ESPN’s flagship programming. Distributors practically have to buy it.

So while it’s pretty clear that the launch of ESPN’s app to coincide with football season was hastily done (the network didn’t anticipate the technological challenges of allowing tens of millions of bundle subscribers to authenticate into the app right away), ESPN is gearing up to try its best at replicating the old bundle model, which made it billions.

Equity deal with the NFL

As if a complete upheaval of its business model wasn’t enough for one year, ESPN decided to sell part of itself to the most significant sports enterprise in the world. Should the transaction pass regulatory muster (which could take up to two years), ESPN will acquire NFL Network and the linear distribution rights for NFL RedZone. In return, the NFL will receive a 10% equity stake in ESPN.

A deal of this scale is unprecedented in sports media history. Never before has the industry seen a major media company sell a portion of itself to one of the leagues it covers. And not just any league, but the NFL.

Most of the time, these equity deals go the other way, with media companies purchasing stakes in smaller upstart leagues, such as TNT Sports’ partnership with Unrivaled. This time, it’s the league buying the media company.

There are numerous knock-on effects this transaction could have on ESPN’s future. For starters, there are editorial implications. ESPN already covers the NFL a lot, but it will likely cover the league even more once this deal closes. Some of that is simply because it’ll be programming NFL Network, a 24/7 channel dedicated to the league. But there’s also a soft influence that comes with being partially owned by the league itself. It’s in both sides’ best interests to promote the other, so ESPN won’t miss any opportunity to talk pro football.

Of course, the more serious editorial implications center on ESPN’s journalistic independence. The network and league have reiterated since the deal was announced that ESPN’s editorial apparatus will not change as a result of the agreement. But that’s easier said than done. ESPN will have every incentive to keep its minority owner happy. What’s good for the NFL is good for ESPN. And what’s good for ESPN is good for the NFL.

Sure, this partnership might not stop ESPN from doing some of its larger investigative or enterprise pieces on the league, but what about the smaller, everyday editorial decisions the network will have to make? Would ESPN be as willing to criticize officiating? How about an owner? What about the league’s decision to suspend a player?

That’s not to mention any bigger picture stories. How would an ESPN partly owned by the NFL have handled the concussion discourse several years ago? Or players protesting racial injustice? Or negotiation over a collective bargaining agreement? The conflicts of interest will be numerous, and how ESPN’s coverage of these events plays out is TBD.

Beyond the purely journalistic implications, this deal will be an enormous boon for ESPN from a business perspective. It’s no exaggeration to say that NFL broadcast rights are among the most valuable assets a media company can possess in today’s fragmented attention landscape. The NFL is the only league capable of regularly drawing eight-figure audiences week in and week out. And as much as ESPN and the NFL may argue to regulators that this transaction will have no impact on the future market for NFL broadcast rights, or ESPN’s place in that market, one would be naive to think that ESPN would ever get iced out of an NFL package if/when this deal gets approved.

In many ways, ESPN may have just secured its long-term future by linking up with the NFL. So long as ESPN maintains an NFL broadcast package, it retains much of its value. Sooner or later, as legacy media companies continue to decline and tech companies like Netflix, Google, and Amazon become more aggressive in the sports rights marketplace, ESPN could find itself competing with companies many times its size. A partnership with the NFL makes it highly unlikely that ESPN will lose an NFL package anytime soon.

Local MLB rights

Alongside two major moves to launch a direct-to-consumer app and partner with the NFL, ESPN made several smaller, yet still significant, forward-looking business decisions. The first to come to mind is its newfangled media rights agreement with MLB.

In February, ESPN opted out of its Sunday Night Baseball deal with the league. In doing so, the network left MLB in a lurch, looking for a new media partner (or, ultimately, partners) to swoop in to buy the package and recoup some of the $550 million in annual revenue ESPN was initially providing.

The decision was a shrewd one from ESPN at the time. The network realized that the contents of its baseball package — which included the Sunday Night Baseball regular-season games, the Wild Card round, Opening Night, and the Home Run Derby — didn’t justify the cost. Baseball, after all, is a local sport. Broader interest doesn’t pick up until the postseason, and ESPN only had a small piece of fall baseball.

It would’ve been fine if ESPN had simply used its $550 million annually for other purposes. That in itself would’ve been smart. But the network did one better and entered into a new deal with MLB for the same price. Only this time, ESPN gained the ability to license MLB.tv, which will complement its new direct-to-consumer app, along with a package of exclusive regular-season games.

ESPN currently has out-of-market rights to local MLB and NHL games (under a prior deal) on its app. In a few years, both MLB and the NBA will look to centralize local broadcast rights, presumably to sell to a single streaming entity. ESPN has made clear that it wants to be the hub for local sports broadcasts, both in-market and out-of-market, once these rights become available. The network’s MLB deal gives it a real head start on making that happen.

Pat McAfee unknowingly shapes ESPN in his image

It wouldn’t be an ESPN 2025 retrospective without a mention of Pat McAfee. It’s hard to believe that it has been over two years since McAfee’s show first graced ESPN airwaves. But his influence on the network has only grown since then and likely serves as a harbinger of what’s to come.

It’s clear that ESPN is shifting toward a more podcast-like format for its daytime programming. Even more traditional shows, such as Get Up, are leveraging podcast talent, including Taylor Lewan and Will Compton from Bussin’ with the Boys, to reach a broader, younger audience.

Most of the time, this is fine. Regardless of one’s opinions on the sports debate or podcast chatter formats, one can’t fault ESPN for trying to appeal to a younger demographic. But it is a decided move away from what was once at the core of ESPN’s studio programming: journalism.

In the past couple of months, ESPN has repeatedly shown it is no longer well-equipped to handle breaking news as it once was. First came the FBI’s bombshell gambling probe into an active NBA player and head coach. Instead of relying on its newsgathering apparatus to handle developing coverage, ESPN let Stephen A. Smith and First Take take the reins. It went about how one might expect, with Smith resorting to nonsensical political talking points about Bad Bunny, ICE deportations, and Donald Trump, rather than anchoring coverage like a newsman. Just last week, as former Michigan head coach Sherrone Moore’s arrest was unfolding, ESPN similarly resorted to First Take for coverage, where Adam Schefter provided a bizarre defense of Moore despite apparent conflicts of interest. Gone are the days of Bob Ley anchoring a special edition of SportsCenter in these situations.

Those are once-in-a-while scenarios, however. Perhaps the bigger story is ESPN’s increased willingness to surrender editorial control over its airwaves, as it has done for McAfee. The former Indianapolis Colts punter continued to stir controversy this year, maybe most notably during the Mary Kate Cornett situation in which he facilitated the spread of a false and salacious rumor about the Ole Miss freshman.

McAfee remains somewhat unique in ESPN’s daytime programming lineup. His show is licensed. He has final say over what is discussed, while ESPN has none. But other shows are taking notes. Get Up and First Take increasingly operate like their own fiefdoms within the greater ESPN empire, with the decision-making authority stopping with Stephen A. Smith or Mike Greenberg rather than with one of their bosses.

The network is willing to give its superstars more leeway to craft a show in their image. For some longtime viewers, that means an ESPN that looks increasingly unfamiliar to the days of yore. But the network must adapt to the ever-competitive attention marketplace. Personalities like McAfee make that battle a bit easier.