Welcome back to The Varsity. I’m John Ourand, coming to you from Washington, D.C.

My focus this week is on Austin, where all-stars from the MLS and Mexico’s Liga MX will face off tomorrow night. You’ll be able to watch the game on Apple TV+, as well as MLS Season Pass via DirecTV, Xfinity, and Amazon Prime Video. When MLS signed its 10-year, $2.5 billion deal with Apple in 2022, league officials believed that it would be the linchpin of the deep-pocketed streaming service’s sports strategy. But in the ensuing three years, Apple has more or less stood pat—which is why MLS execs, perhaps more than anyone, have to be encouraged by Apple’s current activity. It’s rumored to be close to a deal for Formula 1 rights, and is one of three media companies in the running for ESPN’s package of MLB rights.

Speaking of streamers’ sports strategies, Julia Alexander is using tonight’s private email to dive into Netflix’s viewership stats and determine what sports content is working (the WWE and feel-good docs) and what isn’t (the audience for Drive to Survive, while still popular, is dropping). This is a must-read story that is available only to Inner Circle members, so click here to upgrade.

Now, here’s Julia…

That’s the average audience for last week’s ESPYs, the lowest (excluding the Covid years of 2020 and 2021) since 2011, when it was just shy of 2 million. It begs the question: Why are we still doing this? The ESPYs made sense back when broadcast accounted for more than 18.5 percent of all TV activity in the U.S. (as of June, per Nielsen), before algorithmic recommendations stopped us from channel-surfing, and when monoculture opportunities were less risky to bet on. One could argue the ESPYs were even a great brand vehicle at one point—but if fewer people are watching each year, does an event like this still matter? Going forward, maybe the ESPYs will be an ESPN app exclusive for a couple hundred thousand bored fans, but it’s probably time to throw in the proverbial towel.

And now, on to the main event…

One of the main themes of Netflix’s famous Culture Memo is the premium the company puts on data: using “data to inform intuition,” for instance, and making candid decisions based on performance and information. And true to form, over its 20 years, the streamer has collected an enormous amount of audience data. And in the process, a lot has been learned about what co-C.E.O. Ted Sarandos likes to call “sports-adjacent” programming. With shows like Drive to Survive and Break Point, Netflix has carved out a role as sports’ benevolent parasite, creating content that boosts interest in leagues whose live games, matches, or races are broadcast elsewhere.

While live sports are still the premium experience, sports-adjacent content is much cheaper. Sarandos, his co-C.E.O. Greg Peters, and chief content officer Bela Bajaria have spent years trying to find the right—and the right amount of—sports-related content to meaningfully engage fans in all the countries Netflix serves. Do they need F1 rights if they have Drive to Survive? Why pay top dollar for the U.S. Open if you have Full Swing?

For the past two years, Netflix has released in-depth viewership data, which not only lets us track how well a show did in its first few months, but also the decay rate (or loss in audience over time). So despite some limitations with the data—Netflix’s report is global, and most fans are regional—it’s possible to conduct a meaningful analysis of their sports programming over that time span. Here are the three key takeaways.

Another genre that’s worked for Netflix is feel-good American sports stories. Simone Biles: Rising and America’s Sweethearts, which follows the Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders, are two of its best performers. (The latter was also one of the few docuseries to land on Nielsen’s top 10 in the U.S.) Sweethearts’ entire second season (6.4 million views) dropped in mid-June, just a couple weeks before the first-half report’s cutoff, but was nonetheless up 7 percent compared to Season 1 in its own debut frame. If it follows the trajectory of the first season, which saw viewership increase 1.6x in the second half of 2024, Sweethearts will be a hit for Netflix.

Meanwhile, Simone Biles: Rising collected 12.5 million views, placing it in the top 100 global Netflix titles in the second half of 2024. Rising peaked around the Olympics, then suffered a significant drop-off in the first half of 2025, losing more than 90 percent of its audience, demonstrating both the power and high decay rate of especially timely titles like a docuseries about an Olympian. Still, Rising and other star-powered Olympic docuseries like Court of Gold, which pulled 6.6 million views in its release window, are probably the best examples of Netflix successfully tying content to a major event that it doesn’t own the rights to.

Perhaps the largest takeaway from Netflix’s data is also the simplest: Actual sports can generate ratings no docuseries ever will, but a solid sports docuseries can keep finding new viewers for months or even years past the final whistle or checkered flag.

Let me be clear: It’s impressive for a streaming original show of any genre to reach a seventh season. But you can already see the steady decline of Drive to Survive. The seventh season of Netflix’s F1 docuseries collected 10.4 million views in the first half of 2025, down about 23 percent from the fifth season and 10 percent from the sixth in their respective debut frames. Yet Drive to Survive Season 7 was also the most-watched season of a sports docuseries season in the first half of 2025.

When Netflix first started streaming Drive to Survive, in 2019, live sports wasn’t part of the company’s public plans. Since then, Netflix has experimented with one-off tournaments that haven’t performed well, including the Netflix Cup (700,000 views total in the second half of 2023), and some bigger bets that have done exceptionally well, like Jake Paul’s depressing (and worse, boring) fight with Mike Tyson, which generated 49.1 million total views between December 2024 and June 2025, and the two NFL Christmas games, which combined for 28.7 million views. But picking up F1 rights would be much riskier, and much more expensive—especially considering that advertising inventory for F1 races is practically nonexistent. Not to mention that, although overall F1 viewership has more than doubled in the U.S. since 2018, it has stagnated over the past few years on ESPN.

If viewership for a sport isn’t going to hit NFL numbers, and if running ads during the actual event is a challenge, why wouldn’t Netflix focus on sports and sports docuseries that attract advertisers? Drive to Survive is still big enough that advertisers will flock to new seasons. And if Netflix were to bid on, say, an NFL package, not only is that guaranteed appointment viewing, it’s also advertising gold. All this may help explain why WWE was the first “major” sports acquisition Netflix decided to pursue.

Before WWE Raw moved to Netflix in January, it was averaging 1.66 million viewers in the U.S. on USA Network. On Netflix (bearing in mind that the platform’s viewership is global), Raw is now averaging about 3.4 million views. WWE Raw has also appeared on Netflix’s weekly top 10 list in the United States every week so far this year.

The WWE provides a glimpse of Netflix’s sports future: It gives the streamer sought-after advertising inventory, which it has sold out for the next few quarters. It also creates opportunities for ancillary content focused on characters and engaging controversies. Take Netflix’s high-performing docuseries Mr. McMahon, which followed Vince McMahon from his role in shaping the WWE into a multibillion-dollar business through the sexual misconduct charges that led to his exit from the company his father founded. The series amassed 13.5 million views in the back half of 2024, putting it in the top 90 titles for that frame, and added another 2.4 million views in the first half of this year.

There are plenty of ways to interrogate the performance of Netflix’s sports documentaries and docuseries, but one truth stands above all else: These series will never replace the audience engagement, advertising potential, and cultural prowess of actual live sports. Nor are they driving anywhere close to the engagement achieved by definitive Netflix hits, like Stranger Things or Love Is Blind. But that may not matter to Netflix.

Nevertheless, Netflix executives don’t want to rent the rights to leagues where tonnage is the main advantage: Netflix doesn’t need the NBA in the way that Peacock might. Instead, their docuseries titles are appealing, cheap, and brand safe. As Netflix enters its next phase as an ad-first company, maybe that’s all these shows need to be. But with a bigger supply of sports docs in recent years—the number of orders more than doubling between 2019 and 2025, per Ampere Analysis—we may also watch Netflix pull back on its own orders, hunting down more Beckhams as executives start to better understand their investment in sports overall. If Sarandos, Peters, and Bajaria are focused on event tentpole strategies for sports, maybe the same can be said for its sports docs.

Thanks, Julia. See you all on Thursday.

John

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.

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