FASTER, PLEASE: The Sports Bubble Is About to Pop:

“We are very bullish about our cable business, and we are very bullish about ESPN,” said Robert Iger, CEO of Disney, ESPN’s parent company. “The bundle is not going away. Not only is it not going away, it is going to continue to grow.”

Except that it isn’t. No amount of wishing upon a star at the Disney offices in Burbank or the ESPN offices in Bristol, Connecticut, can hold back the forces of consumer choice that the Internet has unleashed. As a cable industry executive put it to Sports Business Daily recently, “The cost of goods is going up and sales are going down…that’s not a good trend.”

Every participant in the sports economy—franchise owners, athletes, programming networks, cable companies, and even the fans themselves—have benefitted from this broadband version of the hide-the-ball trick. That big fat $100 average household cable bill that everyone pays has served as a siphoning conduit of cash forcibly flowing from fan and uninterested non-fan alike.

The brazen economics of modern sports are being revealed and dismantled by the Internet, and the coming fumble-pile of desperate industry participants should make for some great viewing. That’ll be bad news for $30 million-a-year over-the-hill third basemen, the greater fools who pay them, and the unknowingly subsidized superfans who love them.

The rest of us will live in a world with a few more bucks in our pockets—and a few less braying Chris Berman-wannabes clogging up our iPad screens.

Read the whole thing. As with the news and record industries before them, if only pro sports leagues, sponsors, and their network enablers had been less contemptuous of their core customers during their zenith, we might be a bit more sympathetic during their decline.

Related: TV Advertising Falls Globally; Digital Poised to Overtake by End of 2017.