Dollar Sign Eyesores

It’s not like the league or its teams have been hurting for cash. While pro sports suffered during the pandemic — a result of postponed or canceled games and the resulting drop in ticket revenue — they’ve since bounced back as fans have returned to arenas.

Revenue for the National Hockey League (NHL) has reached an all-time high of $6.2 billion, in part thanks to the digital billboards and uniform ad placements, which drew roughly seven hundred sponsors upon introduction. And owners are rolling in the new dough. The average value of a team last year was $1.33 billion, up nearly 30 percent from 2022. The Toronto Maple Leafs alone, who haven’t won a championship since 1967, are worth a whopping $2.8 billion, the highest in the league.

Ad revenue comprises a significant — and growing — share of the NHL’s total yearly haul. According to Statista, the NHL took in $1.4 billion in ad bucks in 2023, up from $1.28 billion in 2022 and $1.06 billion in 2021. Still, the biggest driver of revenue is ticket sales, which make up 44 percent of earnings.

Such ticket sales are no mere trifle. As the Hockey Writers report, the NHL is the only pro league for which tickets compromise more than 40 percent of total revenue — but, of course, that’s not quite enough for owners to turn away from a chance to cram one more ad in a viewer’s face. Not while there’s another dollar to be made.

Team owners and investors are wealthy people. Pro teams are the playthings of billionaires, who collect sports franchises in the same way that a middle-class suburban dad might collect Lego. Last year, Forbes reported that the wealthiest twenty team owners across all pro leagues in the United States were worth a collective $382 billion.

Among the NHL’s richest owners is Philip Anschutz, with a net worth of $14.8 billion. Anschutz owns both the Los Angeles Kings and Major League Soccer’s LA Galaxy. In 2012, the New Yorker called him “the man who owns LA” But he looks like a near-pauper next to Winnipeg Jets owner David Thomson — of Thomson Reuters fame. The 2024 Online Betting Guide’s “Sport Club Owner Rich List” puts Thomson as the fourth wealthiest club owner, with a massive $66 billion to his name.

For the Love of the Game — and Your Last Dollar

Sure, the ubiquity of ads is annoying and we’re all familiar with the anti-consumerist argument that ads turn us into passive sheeple, mindlessly grazing on salty snacks while watching ads for more snacks. Yet, there is also a case to be made for ads in our lives: some genuinely help by introducing us to useful services and products we would otherwise never know about.

But even if we see ads as the root of all that is wrong with the modern world, we don’t need to imagine a world without them to take issue with the NHL’s all-out ad blitz. The growth in NHL ads, which have come to occupy more and more space through the years, is a telltale mark of the enshitification of the league. Broadcasts have become monstrosities filled with distracting attempts to draw a fan’s attention away from the players, the play-by-play, and the commentary, redirecting it instead toward brands.

The puck never crosses a line without a viewer being bombarded with a garish billboard. No face-off is free of a reminder to support a national telecom monopoly or crack a cold one from a megabrewer. No close-up of a player is free from an inducement to bank with this behemoth or take out life insurance with that one.

With the ad blitz, the NHL is displaying utter contempt for those who support it, treating them as units of infinite profit maximization rather than fans. This is why the league is willing to make broadcasts less entertaining and more annoying in order to make more money. It’s no surprise that profit-seeking entities would do such a thing. What is surprising, however, is the brazen and extreme nature of it all — how over the top it has become.

Skating to the Bottom Line

Fans are being forced to put up with an enshitified watching experience, but where else can they go? Professional hockey in North America operates as an effective monopoly. The NHL competes with other pro sports leagues, like the National Football League and National Basketball Association, rather than with other pro hockey leagues, and those competitor leagues are plagued by a similar ad-drenched experience.

If you love the game, the ritual of watching, the visceral attachment to your favorite team — the communal force of one of the things we do together and about which we share common knowledge and bonds — where else are you going to go? In Canada, much of the national ethos is bound up with the sport. It’s more than a sport. It’s a cultural touchstone and a core part of the national identity. But outside of playing in a local beer league, the NHL is really the only option for watching the game.

While players may see benefits as team wealth grows — higher contracts funded partly by ad revenue and their own sponsorships deals — fans gain nothing. Team owners, who benefit most, are only too happy to sell out the game, and the fan experience, for more cash.

As leagues push the boundaries of ad prevalence and placement, each following the other, fans are left watching a sport driven, team by team and league by league, into an ugly, distracting, profit-maximizing race to the bottom.