It does matter, actually. I know most people on Lemmy don’t care about sports, but bear with me.

Look at Disney’s ownership of ESPN, for example. Zooming in a bit more, look at what ESPN owns, specifically to do with college football, say. They own most TV stations playing various games, they control most of the talking heads spinning ‘narratives’ of teams all season, various contracts with different ‘divisions’ in the sport on what channels they can broadcast on (SEC being the biggest, most profitable) and have several executives on the Playoffs Committee (they determine who plays in the playoffs). This all came to a head this season, when the Committee decided to omit a team from the playoffs that had an undefeated record (Florida State) in favor of a team that DID have a loss (Alabama), seemingly because that team would have a higher viewership and therefore make them more money in advertising.

This set the college football community ON FIRE. You even had articles about it popping up on CNN. Suddenly the mask was off, and ESPN clearly showed that they do not care about how the games are played or even who wins, they’re going to give spots to who they view as the most profitable teams. Basically rendering the whole sport useless. They tried, on their channels, to have their talking heads spin it every which way, but the real reasons they picked who they picked were pretty obvious to see. But what could anyone do? ESPN owns everything and calls all the shots, pays just about everyone’s salary.

What’s also extremely heinous is that, this year, they opened up their own sports betting service. That is a huge conflict of interest, considering that they own everything else to do with most sportsball stuff.

Anyway. Rant over.

TLDR: Monopolies are a problem, no matter what industry they’re in.