How to Watch Sports While You Turn Off the Coronavirus
In response to the coronavirus pandemic, almost every major sports league on the planet has chosen to suspend or postpone operations indefinitely – and rightly so. But this decision made sports fans around the world wonder what their sports programming options would look like during mandatory self-isolation .
There won’t be any new games for a while, but luckily it’s easier than you think to stream sports and sports-related content right now. Whether you’re looking for full-length reruns, flashbacks, or immersive documentaries, there are tons of things that can fill the sports hole in your heart, even if you don’t subscribe to any streaming services.
Check your regular TV broadcasters for recent reruns
As a sports fan, it is likely that you already have several sites dedicated to your favorite league (s); If you’ve missed any matches in the last month or so, this is your best bet to catch some replays. ESPN and its subsidiaries broadcast past games to fill airtime during the league closure, while ESPN + offers a pretty good selection of on-demand replays – mainly soccer, rugby, hockey, baseball, and the UFC. (Seriously, there are so many UFCs .) NBC Sports offers an extensive catalog of events dating back roughly two months , including full Premier League matches and pretty much all winter sports where you can shake a ski pole. (More niche crap like track cycling and ice dancing is of course limited to NBC Sports Gold – so if you’re one of literally dozens of Gold subscribers, I suppose your moment has finally arrived.) And while it’s not entirely true. Major League Baseball’s baseball season is currently streaming one classic game per team on its website for free .
For (almost) everything else, YouTube supports
Once you’ve worked through all the games that were too busy to watch in the pre-coronavirus world, you’re probably in the mood for deeper cuts. This is where YouTube comes in. Some leagues actually upload tons of content to their official channels for free: the NFL maintains a playlist of classic games , the MLB channel has many streams of the game of the week , and the MLS streams regularly. Live streaming of the latest matches on his channel after the league suspended operations last week. And for a topic close and dear to my heart , almost every NWSL match that has ever been played is fully streamed on YouTube (until 2017) or on the NWSL website (2017 to present). (Hint: In the latter case, the videos are in the Game Info section.)
If your favorite league or tournament’s official channel flops, it’s not over yet. It doesn’t matter what you do – 80s NBA, Olympic shot put trials, FIFA Futsal matches, the iconic Australian Open Showdown, and literally anything else you can think of – I can guarantee that where- sometime there is a like-minded person. already downloaded it. I’m not linking directly to unofficial channels here because I don’t want to undermine anyone, but I promise that YouTube has all the classic sports content you can handle, plus a few others.
Don’t forget about documentaries
A great sports documentary is a wonderful thing, and now we’re really spoiled for choice. ESPN + subscribers can watch all 30 of 30 episodes , including OJ: Made in America , a strong contender for the best documentary of all time, which can be worth a $ 5 monthly fee alone. Amazon Prime offers a surprising amount of sports programming , including original TV shows like All or Nothing and This is Football . HBO Go reigns supreme, offering a huge selection of excellent original documentaries: Women of Troy, about women’s basketball at the University of Southern California in the 1980s; Fists of Freedom: A Story of the Summer Games in ’68; Be Serena; Andre the Giant; Diego Maradona; I mean, the list goes on and on.
Of course, there are also completely free options. In particular, the legendary ” Baseball” by Ken Burns will be broadcast on PBS for the foreseeable future – at the request of the director himself . Personally, I’m a big fan of Derby Days with the Copa90 on YouTube, which explores the iconic competition in world football;The utterly insane Portsmouth / Southampton episode is a great place to start.
We may not know for sure when the sport will return, but until then, at least we have replays – and each other. If watching sports is an important part of your social life, get your friends (online, of course!) And choose something to watch during your regular gaming hours. It may not be exactly the same, but now it’s better to go outside.