The next World Baseball Classic won’t be sold separately, according to Sports Media Watch.
Rights to the 2028 tournament will be negotiated alongside MLB’s broader media rights talks. Every national contract the league currently holds — Fox, ESPN, NBC, Netflix, Apple, TBS — expires that same year, and rather than negotiate WBC rights separately, the league is bundling the tournament into those larger conversations. Fox has held WBC rights since the event’s revival and carries them through 2028 as part of its existing MLB package.
The 2026 WBC was a commercial success by nearly every measure — viewership was up 142% across Fox, FS1, and FS2 compared to 2023 — and the United States-Venezuela final drew 10.87 million viewers on Fox and Fox Deportes, shattering every record in the tournament’s history. For context, the 2023 final between Japan and the United States — itself a record at the time — averaged just under five million. The WBC is now a demonstrably valuable property, and folding it into the broader package rather than negotiating it piecemeal lets the league use that value as leverage in the larger conversation.
The current MLB media landscape — the most fragmented and arguably most interesting in the sport’s history, with Netflix, NBC, ESPN, Fox, TBS, Apple, and MLB Network all carrying games simultaneously — was set in motion 14 months ago when Manfred called ESPN a “shrinking platform,” opted out of a $550 million-per-year deal, and touched off a scramble that reshaped how baseball will be watched through 2028. Every contract that resulted from that reshuffle — including the existing Fox and TBS deals — expires after 2028, when baseball gets to renegotiate everything at once. Manfred has pointed to that moment for years as the opportunity to meaningfully increase rights fees, expand national game inventory, and potentially centralize local rights into a single streamable package. Adding WBC rights to that negotiation rather than handling them separately gives the league one more valuable property to bring to the table when those conversations begin in earnest.
About Sam Neumann
Since the beginning of 2023, Sam has been a staff writer for Awful Announcing and The Comeback. A 2021 graduate of Temple University, Sam is a Charlotte native, who currently calls Greenville, South Carolina his home. He also has a love/hate relationship with the New York Mets and Jets.