Must-See Appointment Viewing Is the Future of Live Sports

I can’t recall the last time my entire sports social feed was focused on hockey. But it happened twice in the past week: First when the U.S. and Canada played in Montréal last Saturday night, then when they met again in the final Thursday night in Boston. Everyone in my feed was watching—and remarking on the fact that everyone else they knew was watching, too.  

 The 4 Nations Face-Off final pulled an enormous number of eyeballs. The NHL won the week in sports. It stole the buzz from the NBA’s All-Star weekend, then it kept the sustained excitement going all week leading into the championship. 

But it’s not so shocking that a new international best-on-best tournament (which replaced this year’s NHL All-Star Game) was a hit and, as my colleague Meredith Turits wrote, made the existing NHL All-Star Game “look limp” by comparison. As NHL player-turned-color-analyst P.K. Subban said on SportsCenter Saturday, “I don’t think we can ever go back to All-Star Weekend. I don’t. I really believe that after this, we have to consider doing this or something like this in replace of it.” The event played off our patriotism and—here’s the key—it felt like there was something at stake. 

What was at stake in the NBA All-Star Game? Nothing, especially now that the format isn’t even East vs. West. Players weren’t invested, fans knew it, and the viewership reflected it: the second-least-watched All-Star Game, down 13% from last year. 

When the NBA saw a 28% dip on ESPN for its first month of this season, everyone debated why. Too many three-pointers? Too many stars sitting out? Not enough rivalries and dramatic storylines? My theory was simple: the season is too long. It should start at Christmas. I’d say recent trends have continued to bear this out. Fans wait to tune in until there’s a must-see event. The NHL just gave us one.

Other leagues would kill for their own version of 4 Nations. Now the NHL is wisely doubling down on this kind of competition: NHL players will compete in the 2026 Winter Olympics for the first time since Sochi in 2014, and the league is bringing back the World Cup of Hockey in 2028, which will establish a rotating international best-on-best schedule that promises a nationalistic skirmish on ice every two years.

Sports fans will tune in for must-see, appointment-viewing events that others are all watching at the same time. (Those moments are when X/Twitter still shines, too, by the way, more than any other social app—sorry, Bluesky.) 

That’s why viewership for the Super Bowl is still going up: 135.7 million people at peak of this year’s, making it the most-watched ever despite the lopsided score. It’s the last bastion of communal watching on a massive scale. The Tyson-Paul fight on Netflix saw 38 million concurrent streams—a wild number. And it’s why all the buzzy new upstart leagues and models have limited seasons, from Unrivaled basketball to TGL golf to the rumored Maverick Carter–backed international basketball league, which aims to be an “F1 for basketball.”

That’s the advantage the NFL has over the NBA, MLB, NHL, and MLS: scarcity of its games. You know your team plays only once a week, and you have to see it. There’s simply not as much motivation to catch an early-season NBA or MLB game.

In the next few years, I expect regular-season viewership for almost everything to keep waning. (Even the NFL saw a 2% ratings dip overall this season.) On any given night, there’s too much other TV to watch, unless a game has something fresh to it that makes it must-see-live.

Of course, none of the leagues with long seasons are about to shrink. None of these huge, multibillion-dollar businesses will offer less of their product anytime soon—they want more, more, more. 

So they’re striving to create newness. They’re trying to inject breaks or new formats into their existing models. Unrivaled got its biggest ratings yet on TNT last weekend thanks to a new one-on-one format with a $200,000 prize for the winner. The NBA has tried with the in-season tournament (it hasn’t really hit so far). MLS is shooting for the same effect, commissioner Don Garber told me this week: “We have a very long season… There is the uniqueness of other tournaments that take place within our season. Hockey just did that, the NHL and the Nations Cup was brilliant, brilliant. And I think we’re all looking at that… All of us are looking for different moments to be able to keep fans’ attention.”

Hockey brought that with 4 Nations Face-Off, and there will be a longtail effect, too: I’m going to make sure to watch every game of the next Stanley Cup.