Abstract
Contemporary sports scheduling increasingly treats the live audience as a set decoration rather than a customer. Two cases now on the table make the tension unusually clear. In the Mid-American Conference, November football has been deliberately shifted to Tuesday and Wednesday nights, trading local gate and student attendance for a national television window that no Saturday slot could provide. In heavyweight boxing, organizers of the proposed Tyson Fury–Anthony Joshua bout have sought ring walks at roughly 2 a.m. British time so that the fight lands in American prime time, which would require an exemption from Wembley Stadium’s ordinary curfew and would put ninety thousand paying British spectators in a stadium in the small hours of a winter morning. This paper argues that neither arrangement is straightforwardly wrong, that both are more defensible than their critics allow and less innocent than their defenders claim, and that the disputed question is not whether money should influence scheduling but whether the live attender holds any claim at all once the broadcast contract is signed. I distinguish four candidate grounds for such a claim — contract, reliance, reciprocity, and stewardship — and argue that the first is weak, the second is enforceable and already partly institutionalized, the third is real but unenforceable, and the fourth is the one most often invoked and least often specified. I close with six design proposals that would let rights holders keep nearly all of the broadcast revenue while restoring a measurable share of what the live constituency currently absorbs as uncompensated loss.
1. The Problem Stated
Every scheduling decision in commercial sport now allocates a scarce good — attention — between two audiences whose interests point in opposite directions. The first audience is physically present: it buys tickets, parks cars, books hotels, takes days off work, and produces the crowd noise that the second audience is partly paying to hear. The second audience is remote, vastly larger, and worth far more per unit of programming than the first is per unit of seat.
The two audiences are not merely different in size. They are different in kind. The remote audience’s preferences are aggregated by a broadcaster and expressed as a rights fee. The live audience’s preferences are expressed, if at all, through complaint, non-attendance, and the slow decay of a season-ticket base — signals that arrive late, register weakly, and are easily attributed to other causes. This asymmetry in how the two constituencies speak is the structural fact from which nearly everything else in this paper follows. The remote audience has a bargaining agent. The local audience has a Twitter account.
What follows examines two live cases, adds a third for pattern confirmation, and then asks the normative question directly.
2. Case One: MACtion and the Deliberate Sacrifice of the Gate
The Mid-American Conference plays its September and October football on Saturdays like everyone else. In November it moves most of its games to Tuesday and Wednesday nights. Of twenty-five MAC games in November 2025, nine fell on Tuesdays and seven on Wednesdays, with two on the Friday after Thanksgiving and seven on Saturdays; every one of the league’s thirteen schools played at least one midweek game, and seven played three or more. ESPN has carried midweek MAC football since the beginning of the century, and the two parties signed a thirteen-year extension a decade ago running through at least the 2026–27 season. Most midweek games appear on ESPN2 or ESPNU, with some on CBS Sports Network under a sublicensing arrangement.
The gain is real and quantified. Over recent seasons, MAC games shown on ESPN or ESPN2 have drawn linear television audiences roughly ten times larger than the conference’s Saturday games, which disappear into a crowded slate. Commissioner Jon Steinbrecher has described the effect as converting a strong regional conference into a national brand. That is not marketing patter. For a Group of Five league whose members lack the alumni density, media markets, and donor bases of the power conferences, national visibility is one of the few assets that can be manufactured rather than inherited.
The cost is equally real and falls almost entirely on one group. Attendance declines for weeknight games: students have class and homework, and working adults stay home because of the next morning. The magnitudes are not marginal. Miami (Ohio) averaged 7,397 for its midweek home games in 2023 against 17,393 for its other three home dates; the following year the split was 5,610 against 12,408. That is a home crowd cut by more than half. When Buffalo beat Ball State 51–48 in overtime on a Tuesday night, the announced figure was 12,708, a number that looked generous, with a visibly thinning stadium after halftime. There are secondary costs as well: recruiting suffers, because high school prospects generally cannot travel to games during the school week.
Two features of the MAC case deserve emphasis before we move on.
First, the sacrifice is openly acknowledged by the people making it. Buffalo’s coach at the time framed it plainly as a trade — the payment for national exposure is that the average fan watches from a couch. This is not a case of a league deceiving itself about consequences. It is a case of a league accepting a known cost because the alternative is invisibility.
Second, the model has been copied. Conference USA reached its own arrangement with CBS Sports and ESPN beginning in 2023, moving all of its October conference football to midweek evenings in explicit imitation of the MAC’s November approach. Imitation is the strongest available evidence that the underlying calculation is sound from the rights holder’s side. It is also the mechanism by which a defensible exception becomes a general condition — which is a different and worse thing.
The MAC case is therefore the sympathetic version of the problem. A small league with few assets sells the one thing it can sell — schedule flexibility — and the buyer is a broadcaster who wants a night with no competition. The people who pay are undergraduates, local families, and alumni within driving distance, none of whom were asked and none of whom are compensated.
3. Case Two: Fury–Joshua and the Two O’Clock Ring Walk
The boxing case is less sympathetic and, for that reason, more instructive.
The all-British heavyweight bout between Tyson Fury and Anthony Joshua is expected in November, with no date confirmed at the time of writing, and Joshua’s contract as it stands specifies a United Kingdom venue, though a move to the United States has been widely discussed. Wembley Stadium is the presumed site. Sky Sports News reported that main-event ring walks would need to begin at 2 a.m. if the fight is staged there, while other reporting put the target at approximately 1 a.m. local time; the difference matters less than the direction. A 2 a.m. British start corresponds to 9 p.m. Eastern and 6 p.m. Pacific. Turki Alalshikh, who is organizing the fight, has said he wants a time that serves a worldwide audience and has sought discussions with the Mayor of London to secure approval.
The scale of the departure from custom is worth stating precisely, because the argument is often conducted as though a 2 a.m. bell were a modest adjustment. The latest a fight has ever begun at Wembley was Fury against Dillian Whyte in April 2022, with a first bell at 10:50 p.m. The most recent Wembley fight, Usyk against Dubois in July 2025, rang at 10:20 p.m., and Joshua against Dubois in September 2024 rang at 10:10 p.m. before a crowd of ninety-six thousand. A 2 a.m. ring walk is therefore not an hour later than precedent; it is more than three hours later than anything the venue has done, and the undercard would begin far earlier still.
The institutional obstacle is a curfew, and the curfew is the interesting part. Wembley operates an 11 p.m. curfew for weekend events, and any exemption would have to be assessed by the stadium’s safety advisory group, of which Brent Council is a partner. The Mayor of London has said he supports ambitions to bring the fight to the capital, while Alalshikh has publicly reported being told that a later start was not possible.
Note what the curfew is and is not. It is not a fan-protection instrument. It exists to protect residents of Brent from noise, crowds, and transport chaos at hours when a residential borough is asleep. The people it shields are third parties who bought no ticket and will see no revenue. This is a point of some importance for the framework below: the only institutional actor with standing to say no in the boxing case is a local authority protecting non-participants, and the ninety thousand ticket buyers whose night is being restructured have no comparable representative in the room at all. Their interests are being defended, incidentally and imperfectly, by a noise ordinance.
Two further observations.
First, the precedent cuts against the outrage. Ricky Hatton fought Kostya Tszyu at Manchester Arena in 2005 with a start after 2 a.m. to reach American viewers, as did Joe Calzaghe against Jeff Lacy in 2006 and Mikkel Kessler in 2007. British boxing has done this before, in its most celebrated modern nights, and the fans who were there generally recall those events with affection rather than grievance. That history is a genuine problem for anyone who wants to call the practice self-evidently exploitative. Boxing crowds are self-selecting, the events are rare, and a once-in-a-decade night is precisely the sort of occasion for which reasonable people will lose a night’s sleep.
Second, the fighters’ consent has been offered as though it settled the matter. Joshua’s team is reported to have no objection to a 2 a.m. start if the necessary permissions can be arranged. The athletes are the parties bearing the most direct physical cost of a 2 a.m. exertion, and their agreement is genuinely relevant. But it is not the ticket buyer’s agreement, and the two are routinely conflated. A boxer consenting to fight at 2 a.m. has consented to something he is being paid a fortune for. A spectator paying several hundred pounds to sit in the cold until three in the morning, then discovering that the last train left four hours ago, has consented to something quite different at a price set before the time was known.
4. Case Three: The Premier League as Control Group
The two headline cases might be dismissed as peculiar — one a small league with no leverage, one a single event of unusual magnitude. English football supplies the pattern in its ordinary, recurring, high-leverage form, and it confirms that this is a structural condition rather than a set of anomalies.
More than half of the Premier League’s 380 annual fixtures are moved from the traditional Saturday afternoon slot for broadcast, and Sky’s five-year agreement with the English Football League moves 138 games with an option rising to 158 in the final two years. Monday night kick-offs are consistently the least popular slot among match-going supporters, and are hardest on away fans. The Everton Fan Advisory Board publicly objected to a seventh home fixture in a single season being moved to a Monday evening.
The costs here are itemizable in a way they rarely are elsewhere. Supporters lose deposits, cancel bookings, take additional time off work, and travel at unsociable hours; late changes also push fans out of public transport and into cars, which cuts against the sport’s own environmental commitments. The governing body has partially conceded the point through process reform. From the 2023–24 season the Premier League replaced its old system of large, irregular batches of television selections with a rolling six-week notice period, reducing to five weeks in January.
Most importantly for what follows, English football has produced the one genuine remedy in the whole field. Following a late kick-off change to the Sheffield United–Chelsea fixture of April 2024, a compensation scheme covering return travel was established, administered by the home club and initiated by the Chelsea Supporters’ Trust — the first arrangement of its type backed by the home club, the away club, and the league together. A supporters’ organization treated the disruption as a compensable loss rather than an inevitability, and the institutions agreed. That is a precedent with legs.
5. Why the Live Audience Loses by Default
Before asking what is owed, it is worth being clear about why the live audience loses so reliably, since the answer is not that anyone hates them.
The revenue ratio is not close. Broadcast money dwarfs gate money in nearly every property under discussion, and has since the 1980s. A conference that improves its television position by an order of magnitude has bought something no attendance figure can match. This is the honest core of the rights holder’s case and it should not be waved away.
The live audience is an input, not only an output. Here the standard economic framing misleads. The crowd is not merely a customer segment; it is a factor of production for the broadcast good. Atmosphere, noise, visible density, and the sense that the event matters are all manufactured by people who paid for the privilege of manufacturing them. A stadium visibly emptying after halftime degrades the very product being sold to the remote audience. The interests are therefore not purely opposed; there is a floor below which sacrificing the gate damages the broadcast asset. The trouble is that nobody knows where the floor is, and the incentive is always to test it one notch further.
Preferences are aggregated asymmetrically. The remote audience’s demand is measured by a rights fee negotiated by professionals. The live audience’s demand is measured, when at all, by attrition. Following Hirschman (1970), the remote audience has neither voice nor loyalty and needs neither, because its exit is instantly priced. The live audience has loyalty in abundance — which is precisely what makes its exit slow, its voice easy to discount, and its exploitation cheap. Loyalty, in this structure, functions as a discount coupon extended to the rights holder by the very people it disadvantages.
Categories of spectator are not interchangeable. Giulianotti’s (2002) taxonomy of supporters, followers, fans, and flâneurs is useful here. The traditional supporter is defined by topophilic attachment to a place and a long-term identification that does not respond to convenience. The flâneur consumes the sport as a mediated product and is indifferent to venue. A schedule optimized entirely for the second group slowly dismantles the conditions that produce the first — and the first is the group that generates the atmosphere, the continuity, and the story that makes the product worth mediating.
Empirical work supports the tension without resolving it. Forrest, Simmons, and Szymanski (2004) found that televising matches reduces attendance at those matches, and that leagues acting as cartels have historically underpriced the resulting harm. Buraimo and Simmons (2009) documented that the drivers of stadium attendance and television audience are not the same, which is exactly the finding that makes optimizing for one at the expense of the other so tempting and so hazardous.
6. Four Candidate Grounds for an Obligation
The question posed is what obligation, if any, is owed. I take it in four parts, from weakest to strongest.
6.1 Contract
The weakest ground, and the one most often assumed. A ticket is a revocable license to attend an event; season-ticket terms almost universally reserve the right to alter dates and times. A supporter who bought a Miami (Ohio) season ticket has no legal claim that games be played on Saturdays, and a spectator who buys a Wembley ticket after a 2 a.m. start is announced has consented to the 2 a.m. start.
But the boxing case exposes the limit of formal consent. Where the price is set and the ticket sold before the time is fixed, the buyer has consented to an unspecified term that the seller retains unilateral power to fill in — and to fill in against the buyer’s interest, for the seller’s benefit, at the request of a third party. That is not fraud, but it is a bargain with a structural defect, and Fuller’s (1964) requirements for the internal morality of rules apply here as much as to legislation: rules must be knowable in advance by those expected to conform to them. A kick-off time announced after the ticket is sold fails that test in a small way; a ring walk moved by three and a half hours fails it in a large one.
6.2 Reliance
This is the strongest enforceable ground, and it is where the argument should concentrate.
Attendance requires irreversible commitments made in advance: travel booked, leave requested, childcare arranged, accommodation paid for. These commitments are induced by the schedule and are made worthless by its alteration. The harm is concrete, itemizable, foreseeable, and caused by an identifiable party who profits from causing it. It is, in short, an externality of exactly the kind Coase (1960) taught us to look for — a cost imposed on a party outside the transaction that generated it, which the transacting parties have no incentive to internalize unless the entitlement is assigned.
The remedy follows directly from the diagnosis: assign the entitlement. The Sheffield United–Chelsea travel compensation scheme did precisely this, and the Premier League’s six-week notice rule reduces the frequency with which the entitlement is triggered. Neither measure asks the rights holder to give up broadcast revenue. Both ask it to pay a small fraction of that revenue to the people whose plans it disrupted. This is not charity; it is cost internalization, and its absence is a subsidy running from supporters to broadcasters.
6.3 Reciprocity
Reliance covers disruption. It does not cover the MAC case, where the schedule is published in advance and no promise is broken. Something else is at issue there, and it is closer to what Thompson (1971) described as a moral economy: a set of expectations about fair dealing that are not legally enforceable but whose violation is understood by the affected community as a breach rather than a misfortune.
The reciprocity claim runs roughly as follows. Local supporters have supplied, over decades, the attendance, the donations, the student fees, the municipal goodwill, and the atmosphere without which the property being sold to ESPN would not exist. They did so under an implicit understanding that the institution existed partly for them. When the institution converts that accumulated asset into a broadcast product and returns none of the resulting benefit to them in a form they can use — no fixture priority, no price relief, no compensation for the Tuesdays — it has treated a relationship as though it were a transaction.
This claim is real and unenforceable, which is an uncomfortable combination but not an unfamiliar one. Most obligations that hold communities together share it. Nathan’s own institutional analysis of college athletics — that what the governing structure principally produces is insulation for member institutions from the consequences of their own decisions — is directly applicable here: the reciprocity claim goes unanswered not because anyone rejects it, but because the structure is built so that no one must answer it.
Scripture speaks to this class of obligation more directly than most modern policy language does. The instruction not to withhold good from those to whom it is due when it is in the power of the hand to do it (Proverbs 3:27–28) addresses exactly the case of a party who possesses both the resources and the discretion to make a wronged party whole and declines because nothing compels it. The repeated insistence on honest weights and measures (Leviticus 19:35–36; Proverbs 11:1) is not merely about scales; it is about not structuring an exchange so that the counterparty cannot see what he is giving up. And the principle that the laborer is worthy of his hire (Luke 10:7; 1 Timothy 5:18) bears on a live audience that performs uncompensated productive work — producing the crowd — for a broadcast good it does not share in.
6.4 Stewardship
The broadest ground, and the one most often gestured at without specification. The claim is that a club, a conference, or a venue holds something in trust that it did not create and cannot rightfully consume: a local institution, a civic asset, a set of traditions with value to people who never buy a ticket.
Sandel (2012) and Anderson (1993) both argue that certain goods are degraded by being valued exclusively in market terms, and Walzer (1983) that goods properly distributed within one sphere are corrupted when the logic of another sphere is imported wholesale. Something like this is what people mean when they say a 2 a.m. ring walk at Wembley is not simply inconvenient but wrong — that a national stadium hosting a national event is not merely a venue for hire, and that the appropriate time for a British heavyweight championship in front of ninety thousand Britons is an hour at which Britons are awake.
The difficulty is that stewardship arguments prove too much when applied without discipline. They can be used to condemn every commercial adaptation, including many that saved the institutions in question. The MAC’s midweek scheduling is plausibly a survival strategy for programs with few alternatives, and a purist who insists on Saturday football may be insisting on a smaller, poorer, less visible conference. Stewardship claims are therefore best deployed narrowly: against irreversible changes, against changes that fall on non-consenting third parties, and against changes whose benefits accrue entirely outside the community bearing the cost. On that narrow reading, the boxing case is the stronger one — the curfew exists because a residential borough’s sleep is at stake, and no share of the American pay-per-view revenue reaches Brent.
7. The Objections, Taken Seriously
“The money funds the product the fans say they want.” Largely true, and decisive against the strongest version of the fan’s claim. A MAC program that refuses midweek television may not field a team the local fans would enjoy watching. The objection defeats an absolutist position; it does not defeat a claim for compensation or notice, since those cost a rounding error against the rights fee.
“Nobody is forced to attend.” True, and the reason exit is a poor remedy. Exit works when the exiting customer’s departure is priced. Here it is not: the marginal season-ticket holder’s non-renewal is invisible against a nine-figure television deal, and the fans most likely to leave are the ones whose attachment was weakest — leaving a residual base whose loyalty is even more reliable and therefore even cheaper to impose upon.
“The fighters agreed.” Addressed above. The party bearing the cost and the party consenting are different parties.
“There is precedent.” There is — 2005, 2006, 2007. Precedent establishes that a rare imposition for a genuinely exceptional event is tolerable. It establishes nothing about frequency, and frequency is the whole problem. One 2 a.m. fight a decade is an occasion; a seventh Monday home fixture in one season is a condition.
“Local fans get the games on television too.” They get a different good. The person who drives ninety minutes to Oxford, Ohio on a Tuesday is not seeking the same thing as the person on the couch, and telling him the couch is available is telling him the product he wanted has been discontinued.
8. Six Design Proposals
None of these requires a rights holder to forgo broadcast revenue. All of them assign the cost of scheduling to the party that captures the benefit.
- Compensation as standing policy, not exception. Extend the model of the Sheffield United–Chelsea travel scheme into a standing rule: any change inside the published notice window triggers reimbursement of documented, non-recoverable travel and accommodation costs, funded from the broadcast pool rather than the individual club.
- Notice periods with teeth. The Premier League’s rolling six-week window is the right instrument; what it lacks is a penalty. A liquidated sum per affected away ticket, payable on breach, converts a soft deadline into a priced one.
- A midweek cap with a price attached. In the MAC model, cap the number of midweek home dates per program per season and require that any date beyond the cap be purchased from the program at a rate reflecting its measured gate loss. The Miami (Ohio) differential — roughly seven thousand against seventeen thousand — is measurable, which means it is payable.
- Differential pricing as a matter of course. A Tuesday ticket that costs what a Saturday ticket costs is a price increase disguised as a schedule. Where the product is degraded for the attender, the price should reflect it, with the shortfall met from the rights fee that made the degradation worthwhile.
- Curfew relief conditioned on local benefit. In the Wembley case, any exemption from the 11 p.m. curfew runs through Brent Council and the safety advisory group. That is the right chokepoint, and it should be used as one: an exemption granted in exchange for guaranteed all-night transport provision, a resident compensation fund, and a hardship allocation of tickets is a better outcome than either a flat refusal or an unconditional grant.
- A standing seat for the match-going constituency. The asymmetry described in Section 5 is fixable by representation. Supporter representatives have already met broadcast executives directly through the Football Supporters’ Association’s Premier League Network, and have advanced concrete proposals such as fixture-linked rail tickets that would let fans book travel affordably in advance. The live audience’s problem is not that its arguments are weak; it is that it has no counterparty obliged to hear them.
9. Conclusion
The answer to the question posed is: yes, something is owed, but less than the aggrieved claim and more than the practice concedes.
Nothing is owed in the way of a veto. A conference that must choose between midweek television and obscurity is entitled to choose television, and the fans who dislike Tuesdays have no standing to condemn a program to invisibility on their behalf. A promoter who can multiply a fight’s global audience by moving the ring walk is doing what a promoter is for.
What is owed is narrower and harder to evade. It is owed because the live audience is not simply a customer whose preferences lost a contest; it is a supplier of an input, a bearer of foreseeable and calculable losses, and the accumulated source of the goodwill being monetized. When a rights holder converts that position into cash and returns nothing, it is not making a hard choice between competing constituencies. It is taking from a constituency that cannot bill it.
The Fury–Joshua case will resolve one way or another within months, and the MAC will play its Tuesdays in November regardless. The question worth watching in both is not whether the money wins — it will — but whether anyone thinks to write the losing side a check.
Notes
1. The two headline cases differ along a dimension the paper treats only implicitly: frequency. Boxing’s imposition is rare and enormous; college football’s is routine and moderate. Most intuitions about fairness in this area are really intuitions about frequency, and disputants who disagree loudly about principle often turn out to agree about principle and disagree about how often the exception is being invoked.
2. On the reported ring-walk time, sources differ between roughly 1 a.m. and 2 a.m. local. The discrepancy tracks a difference between targeting an 8 p.m. and a 9 p.m. Eastern start. Nothing in the argument turns on which figure is correct; both are more than two hours beyond any precedent at the venue.
3. The Wembley curfew’s function as an accidental protector of ticket buyers is worth a paper of its own. It is a general feature of institutional design that constraints written for one purpose come to serve another, and that the second function is often discovered only when someone proposes to remove the constraint. This connects to the broader argument that governance structures in sport principally produce insulation from consequence rather than the sporting outcomes they nominally regulate.
4. The claim that the crowd is an input rather than only an output has a testable implication: broadcasters should be willing to pay something for atmosphere. Camera framing practices, artificial crowd noise during the 2020 season, and the routine use of tarps to conceal empty upper decks all suggest they value it and would rather manufacture it than pay for it.
5. The scriptural material in §6.3 is offered as a framework for the class of obligation at issue, not as a proof text for any particular scheduling policy. The relevant principle is that a party with both the means and the discretion to make a counterparty whole, who declines solely because nothing compels it, has done something the moral tradition names rather than excuses.
6. A comparative case not treated here, and worth developing separately: World Series and NBA Finals start times that place decisive innings and quarters after midnight Eastern, with the affected constituency being children on the East Coast rather than travelers. The structure is identical — a diffuse, unrepresented group absorbing a cost so that an aggregated audience can be maximized — but the remedy set is different, since no compensation scheme reaches a nine-year-old sent to bed in the seventh inning.
7. The compensation proposals in §8 deliberately avoid the question of who pays within the sport. Funding them from a central broadcast pool rather than from individual clubs matters, because a club-level charge would fall hardest on the clubs least able to bear it — which are, predictably, the clubs whose fixtures are moved most often for being least commercially valuable.
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