If President Donald Trump’s address to the nation on Wednesday night was designed to assuage Americans’ anxieties about the status of the war in Iran and the economic implications of that military intervention, the 19-minute speech seems to have missed the mark. Indeed, the president at one point spoke of bombing Iran “back to the stone ages, where they belong.”
This would qualify as bulletin-board material if the ayatollah’s locker room hadn’t been blown up. That said, the threat only exacerbated fears that a war which has already cost taxpayers nearly $40 billion will drag on well beyond the White House’s initial projection of “four to five weeks.”
Which brings us to the sports industry, and what may lie ahead here at home.
The fog of war is getting soupier, and the lack of visibility is exacerbating an already uncertain economic outlook in the U.S. Prices at the pump have increased 36% since the war began on Feb. 28, with the average cost of a gallon of unleaded regular reaching $4.08. While Trump on Wednesday boasted that his administration had revived what was a “dead and crippled country” under the previous management, consumer confidence has dropped to its lowest level since 2014.
Moody’s Analytics now puts the probability of a recession developing within the next 12 months at 49%, and while that’s a less-than-cheery outlook—it’s a bit like playing Russian Roulette with three live bullets in your six-shooter—Americans may find some comfort in the knowledge that the economy has shrugged off similar portents in each of the last eight years.
One year ago, the president’s “Liberation Day” tariff hikes spooked consumers and set U.S. markets staggering down a historically volatile stretch, and yet the economy managed to sidestep a downturn. (The Supreme Court struck down many of those import levies a week before the bombs started falling on Iran, whereupon Trump vowed to institute a new worldwide tax of 15%.) As much as our financial systems seems to be stuck in a doom loop, the economy has been remarkably resilient. Whether that resilience persists is likely a function of how long the war lasts, but in the near term, the U.S. sports-industrial complex continues to power its way through the dubiety.
While the latest fusillade of ambiguity couldn’t have come at a worse time for the advertising market—brands have yet to register their budgets for the 2026-27 upfront bazaar, in which they’re expected to commit to some $17 billion in broadcast and cable inventory—early sports sales remain brisk.
It would be foolhardy to suggest that sports are entirely recession-proof, yet football is all but immune to the yips. This is largely a function of the NFL’s matchless monopoly over our collective imaginations during the fall boom cycle; when football season is underway, American consumers spend about $300 billion more than they do throughout the other nine months of the year.
Beyond the $1 million units costs, the tradeoff for securing time in the most-scrutinized programming on the dial is that there is very little “leakage” in the fourth-quarter TV market. A commitment to buy time in NFL or or World Series broadcasts is effectively iron-clad; while cancellation options are available in advance of the other three periods—broadly speaking, advertisers may back out of between 25% and 50% of their Q1, Q2 and Q3 upfront allocations—the ontological status of fall buys is a whole lot less equivocal.
If you’re an automaker and you’re concerned about how rising inflation and unemployment rates may impact consumer behavior, skipping out on the fall sports schedule may only cost you more in the long run. While your mileage may vary—in Q4 of 2025, GM sales fell 7%, while Ford was up 3%—the voluntary removal of your brand from the cultural conversation likely won’t do you any favors among the remaining lot browsers, and sitting out the upfront is a one-way ticket to spending a bundle in scatter once the skies have cleared.
If, for example, you pass up a $750,000 in-game NFL unit that trades on the upfront market, you’re looking at spending $925,000 for that very same asset if you snatch it up a few days before the broadcast kicks off.
And that’s if the unit is even available when you come calling in fall scatter. Given that the NFL in 2025 posted its highest deliveries in 36 years, the networks are likely to sell out much of their allotted inventory before they present their formal pitches to Madison Ave. in mid-May.
A similar dynamic is expected to hold sway in the college game (although the rates are significantly less dear than what the NFL commands), but everything downstream of the fourth quarter could take a hit if economic conditions continue to deteriorate. While advertisers this spring are likely to spend even more on regular-season MLB, NBA and NHL games than they did during last year’s upfront, it’s worth noting that those early commitments are placeholders until the checks clear. Given the choice of pulling out of half of their in-game buys during the sleepier quarters, marketers may choose to exercise those options if a recession is in full, sickly bloom.
Of course, advertisers who target sports audiences are more likely to dump their primetime entertainment buys before they start eyeing their spring hoops commitments, especially as the gap between live and scripted deliveries continues to expand. Per Nielsen, the average episode of an entertainment series on the Big Four broadcast nets now serves up 398,420 adults 18-49 per week, as viewers in the dollar demo now account for just 12.2% of all primetime impressions. By way of comparison, NBC’s March 29 presentation of the Knicks-Thunder game drew 955,000 members of the under-50 set, with 31% of the audience falling under the advertiser-coveted cohort.
Naturally, a recessionary economy is marked by vast uncertainty and can lead to great upheavals in the quotidian. In the worst cases, we’ve seen historic disruptions in how business is conducted here in the U.S.; during the 2009-10 upfront, broadcasters booked $2 billion fewer cash commitments than was the case in the previous year’s bazaar, as sales fell 22% at the tail end of the Great Recession. A buoyant scatter market that emerged in the fourth quarter of 2009 went a long way toward helping sellers recoup a big chunk of those dollars, and while sports weren’t entirely unscathed, the segment rebounded faster and stronger than the primetime entertainment space.
Stadium traffic obviously didn’t hold up nearly as well as the TV deliveries. Excursions to the ballpark are one of the first luxuries to go when consumers suddenly find themselves having to curb their spending on non-essentials. MLB attendance fell 7% in 2009, while NBA arenas weathered a 2% decline during the same period and even the mighty NFL dipped 1%. In a cash crunch, streaming subscriptions also tend to be casualties, which only bolsters the value of over-the-air TV when Americans are keeping a tight grip on their checkbooks.
If the state of play in April 2025 doesn’t entirely line up with the hot-war reality of our present day, it’s probably worth noting that some of the early prognostications around last year’s upfront sales never materialized. While media buyers thought the broadcast and cable market could face an 8%-10% year-over-year decline in dollar volume, the overall drop in the 2025-26 bazaar came in at a more palatable -3%.
Even during the lockdown stage of the pandemic, when American consumption was largely limited to how many rolls of Charmin you could carry out of the grocery store and whatever off-brand sanitizer was left on the virtual shelves of Amazon, TV viewing remained the cheapest form of self-diversion. Sports didn’t come back onto our screens until July 2020, when MLB took the field after a long hiatus, but once the games started up again, the ad money began pouring in.
Even when the crowds were limited to cardboard cutouts and digital projections, sports served as a rare constant in American life once the restrictions on staging games were lifted.
Right now, marketers are still trying to get a read on how economic conditions may shake out, and there won’t be much clarity in the ad market until budgets are registered—a process that itself will be complicated by the ongoing geopolitical upheavals. Nothing is entirely immune from the vicissitudes of global and domestic intrigue, but until the “GAME OVER” message is superimposed over the 8-bit mushroom clouds, sports are still the closest thing we have to a safe economic bet.