Welcome back to The Varsity. I’m John Ourand in D.C., where tonight
marks the official start of the NBA season, and my Wizards are projected for yet another last-place finish.
Tonight’s games will be carried on NBC and Peacock; the games tomorrow and Thursday night are on ESPN; and then it’s over to Amazon Prime Video on Friday. Later in the season, we’ll have games on ABC, the ESPN app, regional sports networks, local broadcasters, NBA TV, and Apple TV. Needless to say, it’s become a lot harder to find games.
I asked Adam
Silver about potential consumer confusion at Puck’s In the Arena sports media conference last week, and he acknowledged that it was a real issue. But the commish also said that discoverability would get easier as the season progresses. “I analogize it a bit to, if anybody’s ever been a season ticket holder, and the team opens a new arena, and there’s a traffic jam getting in, and the lines are really long to get the food, and you can’t find the bathroom,” he said. “By the
fourth game, everybody has new patterns, and it all resolves itself.” We’ll see.
In today’s issue, the incomparable Julia Alexander takes a deep dive into Apple’s Formula 1 deal, which is predicated on the sport’s continued growth in the U.S. But what if interest in F1 has already peaked on this side of the pond? As always, Julia’s stories are only available to Inner Circle members, so click here to upgrade. |
Stat of the
Week: 969,000
|
That’s the average viewership for nationally televised regular season WNBA games in
2025—a record—according to Nielsen. Finals viewership averaged 1.5 million across ESPN and ABC—down slightly from last year’s 1.6 million but still the second-most-watched series in 25 years. After Caitlin Clark missed much of the season, everyone was speculating about what ratings would look like without the league’s biggest draw. Now we have an answer, and one indicating that Clark is just one factor in the league’s meteoric rise. |
|
|
A MESSAGE FROM OUR SPONSOR |
Forever at the top of its game, the trailblazing BMW 7 Series. Engineered to win. Learn more at
BMWUSA.com |
|
|
- Dave Portnoy’s ratings nightmare: Given the chance to address the abysmal numbers for FS1’s Wake Up Barstool on Barstool’s The Unnamed Show podcast, Dave Portnoy chose the path of most resistance. Instead of trying to defend the lackluster viewership, and perhaps acknowledging the ongoing support of Fox Sports C.E.O. Eric Shanks while the morning show finds its footing, Portnoy questioned the veracity of the “minuscule” ratings, contending that they must be “wildly inaccurate because they’re so small.” Not exactly something that would have made it past the Fox Sports comms team. Just to put those “minuscule” numbers in perspective: Wake Up Barstool reportedly attracted fewer than 15,000 viewers, on average, in its debut week, according to TV Media Blog, while fewer than 13,000 stuck around for week two. Comparatively, ESPN’s Get Up averaged around 450,000 viewers in
September.
Portnoy did acknowledge that it’s a new show that features a different cast each day, and that it can take time to build an audience. But he went on to compare Wake Up Barstool’s FS1 and YouTube viewership, arguing that the latter is a more accurate reflection of interest in the show. Well… maybe. In fact, there are only about 22,000 subscribers on that channel. And as Portnoy should know, a YouTube view (30 seconds of a video played) is hardly comparable to a viewer
as defined by Nielsen. Alas, halfway into the college season, Wake Up Barstool is far from a success story—on television or on YouTube. - Etsy witches fail to spook the Jays: For those who aren’t terminally online, there’s a whole community of people who attempt to sway the outcome of sports games by hiring self-proclaimed witches on Etsy to grant wishes or place curses on teams. And some fans appear to be getting desperate. Search
queries for “Etsy witch” and “witch spells” in the U.S. spiked to five-year highs in the past few weeks. Why? Based on the top related queries—“mariners” and “Seattle Mariners”—it may have been a case of Ms fans looking for any and all help in getting to the World Series for the first time in franchise history. Either that or
vindictive Blue Jays fans. If your Etsy witch promised a Mariners win, maybe see if she can pay it forward and start putting curses on the Los Angeles Dodgers.
- Apple on the pitch: Remember when MLS commissioner Don Garber was telling journalists and analysts that the league wasn’t concerned about the viewership hurdles it might face on Apple TV, a streamer that few people were watching? Viewership was growing, Garber would insist, even
as various team owners kept expressing concerns about the league’s visibility.
Well, when the MLS playoffs kick off tomorrow, Apple TV subscribers won’t need the MLS Season Pass add-on to watch. Meanwhile, Apple has been finding other ways to make its content more discoverable. Earlier this year, Apple made MLS Pass available on Android devices, and Apple TV+ available through Amazon Prime Video Channels, which drove a significant number of new sign-ups to the service, according to
Antenna. Also recently, Apple partnered with Spectrum and NBCUniversal (via Peacock) so that people who aren’t aware of what Apple TV offers can stumble on a new show, movie, or match.
|
Speaking of Apple’s sports decisions… |
|
|
Apple’s $140 million annual investment in F1 is a huge bet on its
future, even as the data suggests its U.S. popularity may have already peaked. Did Liberty Media pull off the deal of the century? Or does F1 make sense for Apple in ways that it didn’t for ESPN? |
|
|
On Friday, after months of negotiation, Apple TV+ finalized its deal for exclusive
domestic rights to F1 starting with the 2026 season. It is, by far, the biggest sports investment Apple has ever made—worth a reported $700 million over five years. In its official release, Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior V.P. of services, described F1 as “one of the most exciting and fastest-growing sports on the planet.” But… is it? Or did Apple pay up at the very moment that its domestic growth spurt is petering out?
Yes, F1 viewership increased by more than 100
percent between 2018, when ESPN secured domestic rights from NBC Sports, and 2024, per Blackbook Motorsports. And the U.S. audience for the Monaco Grand Prix—perhaps the circuit’s signature race—jumped 140 percent in the same period. But there were a lot of external factors boosting the sport’s reach. The move to ESPN put F1 in front of 88 million paying customers at the time of the deal—and that doesn’t factor in the added reach of ABC, which was able to simulcast the ESPN races.
In 2019, Netflix debuted Drive to Survive, the popular F1 docuseries that is often cited as the largest catalyst for Americans’ newfound love for the sport. Also, don’t forget that Nielsen changed its reporting between 2020 and 2021 to better capture out-of-home viewing, boosting the numbers from previous years. The result is a chart that shows massive viewership growth on ESPN through 2022, after which the audience started to taper off. |
But Cue is paying for the bigger-picture growth story, not the slump. The sport’s
2018-22 growth trajectory is also why Jimmy Pitaro, who has been paying an estimated $80 million to $90 million a year for rights, considered extending ESPN’s contract. But the question of whether domestic viewership has plateaued was certainly top of mind amid reports that Liberty Media, which owns F1, was seeking double that amount beginning in 2026. Likewise, Netflix, Amazon, and even upstart DAZN showed little interest in paying anything close to Apple’s $140
million per annum. |
The F1-Apple deal raises a few obvious red flags. In the official press release
announcing the new rights partnership, there was no mention of viewership numbers for the actual races. In 2024, an average F1 race netted around 1.13 million viewers, per ESPN. That’s less than the average WNBA game on ESPN (1.19 million), an average NBA game (1.53 million), and nowhere near the viewership for other event-driven sports, like the PGA Tour during its summer season (roughly 3 million for Sunday events). Instead, the joint statement from Cue and Stefano Domenicali, the president
and C.E.O. of Formula 1, cited a 2025 global fan survey that found “47 percent of new U.S. Formula 1 fans, who have been following the sport for five years or less, are aged 18 to 24 and over half are female, underlining the partnership’s huge potential.” |
|
|
A MESSAGE FROM OUR SPONSOR |
Forever at the top of its game, the trailblazing BMW 7 Series. Engineered to win. Learn more at
BMWUSA.com |
|
|
Meanwhile, the ratings for Drive to Survive are also down. Although Netflix
doesn’t break out regional viewing, the past few seasons have seen a steady decline in viewership. Another sobering fact: At the height of Drive to Survive mania in 2021, Nielsen estimated that only about 360,000 Drive to Survive viewers also watched F1 races on ESPN, representing a small fraction of total viewers.
Another inconvenient truth
for Apple is that Drive to Survive likely wouldn’t have been as successful had it aired on any other platform. Remember, Netflix has around 90 million customers in the U.S. and Canada, and accounts for about 8 percent of total TV viewing in the U.S. each month, per Nielsen’s Gauge report. Apple doesn’t disclose how many subscribers it has globally, let alone in the U.S., but the streamer has failed to appear on Nielsen’s Gauge since the measurement firm introduced it in 2022, meaning it
has never accounted for more than a single percentage point of total viewing. It might be a longshot to bet on Drive to Survive fans signing up for yet another service at a time when all the data points to American households trying to cut down on their total subscriptions.
Also, F1 is hardly the only option for racing fans in the U.S.: Viewership of IndyCar on Fox is about on par with F1, but NASCAR’s Prime Video audience is about twice the the size of its rival circuits’, on average. I don’t want to suggest that Drive to Survive fans who tune in to see Max Verstappen, Lewis Hamilton, or Charles Leclerc for the drama on and off the track are going to be sated by IndyCar or NASCAR, but it’s worth remembering that F1 is far from the most popular racing series in the U.S. Removing ESPN and ABC as distribution channels isn’t going to increase F1’s fan base, and any claim otherwise
from Apple, which can’t even tout numbers on MLS viewership three years after acquiring those rights, is misplaced. |
On the flip side, sports are proving to be strong acquisition targets for
Apple TV. Three of the eight top sign-up drivers to the service in June were baseball games, per new data from Antenna. In a month where Apple TV drove 2 million new sign-ups, MLB games drove about 780,000, or roughly 40 percent of all new sign-ups. |
The trouble with relying on seasonal sports as a subscription driver, of course, is the
inevitable churn. And the incentive to churn is especially high when you have to maintain so many different subscriptions to watch any given sport. As Cue told my colleague Matt Belloni on his podcast, The Town, recently, “It’s not fun to be a sports fan right now—when you have 12 different
subscriptions to try to figure out where the game is.”
The good news for Apple is that they will own the U.S. rights to stream every single F1 race, so fans won’t have much to figure out. (Starting in 2026, the F1 TV streaming service will cease to exist as a stand-alone app in the U.S., and will instead be folded into Apple TV.) Also, the F1 season is long—stretching from March into December, with a winter break between seasons and only a couple weeks off during the
summer.
And this is where the F1 deal may make the most sense. Years of exclusive races will give Apple’s hardware engineers the latitude to play with and promote their latest innovations—an especially intriguing proposition for John Ternus, Apple’s senior V.P. of engineering, who may be in line to succeed Tim Cook. Already, Apple’s NBA deal is giving it a place to integrate its VisionPro technology, with simulcasts of Laker games for the few tens of thousands of Americans who own the pricey headsets. Apple will almost certainly conduct similar experiments and product integrations with F1, too—especially its spatial camera capabilities.
Indeed, even if Apple overpaid, F1 may fit in perfectly with Cue and Cook’s crawl-walk-run approach
to sports—experimenting with a few smaller leagues before deciding whether they want to go all in on the bigger ones. (The NFL’s rights are up in a few years, of course.) This isn’t a truly significant risk for Apple. After all, this is a company whose estimated earnings for its most recent quarter are around $100 billion. If anything, the deal reads to me as an understanding between Apple, which wanted a high-profile, premium league that would tolerate experimentation, and Liberty Media, which,
cognizant that viewership had stalled, was extremely happy to trade the reach of ESPN for a bigger check. Sometimes recognizing the limitations of a partner is all it takes for a new relationship to bloom. |
Thanks, Julia. See you all on Thursday,
John |
|
|
Ace media reporter Dylan Byers brings readers into the C-suite as he chronicles the biggest stories in the industry:
the future of cable news in the streaming era, the transformation of legacy publishers, the tech giants remaking the market, and all the egos involved. |
|
|
Puck sports correspondent John Ourand and a rotating cast of industry insiders take you inside the executive suites
and owners boxes where the decisions that shape the entire sports business are made. You’ll hear interviews with players, network execs, and everyone in between. The Varsity is an extension of John’s private email for Puck by the same name. New episodes publish every Wednesday and Sunday. |
|
|
Need help? Review our FAQ page or contact us for assistance. For brand partnerships, email ads@puck.news. You received this email because you signed up to receive emails from Puck, or as part of your Puck account associated with {{customer.email}}. To stop receiving this newsletter and/or manage all your email preferences, click here. |
Puck is published by Heat Media LLC. 107 Greenwich St, New York, NY 10006
|
|
|
|
