Broadcast rights to the next World Baseball Classic (WBC) national teams competition will be negotiated alongside the broader Major League Baseball (MLB) rights packages in the US in 2028, it has been reported.
WBC rights have historically been sold separately, but MLB will have the opportunity to add the WBC to conversations that are already expected to include its full suite of local, national, and global rights, according to Sports Media Watch.
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This comes after the tournament drew huge viewership figures for the recent 2026 edition.
Notably, Venezuela's victory over Team USA in the final attracted over 10 million viewers on Fox's main free-to-air channel and its Spanish-language linear offering, Fox Deportes.
That game, which peaked at 5.64 million, was the most-watched WBC broadcast in the US of all time.
Rights to this year’s WBC were acquired just months before the tournament, with national network Fox Sports agreeing a US rights deal last October.
MLB commissioner Rob Manfred recently hinted that WBC rights will be bundled with the league’s when negotiations take place with the broadcasters in the next cycle.
Speaking on ‘The Dan Patrick Show’ earlier this month, he said: “Our broadcast partners were out in force at the WBC finals and I think this is going to be a piece of our national broadcasting agreements.”
However, Manfred issued a caveat for the event shifting to a regular rotation, adding: “Obviously, to do that it has to be on a regular schedule.”
The WBC has taken place every three or four years since its inception in 2006, and it has not yet been determined if the next edition will be in 2029 or 2030.
Major streaming service Netflix, which has stepped up its live sports offering in recent years, added baseball to its mix by securing WBC rights in Japan, one of the biggest markets for the sport outside the US.
Both Fox and Netflix are incumbent MLB rights partners and will likely be among the suitors in 2028.
In total, MLB has six broadcast partners in the US, with NBCUniversal, TNT Sports, Apple, and ESPN also holding rights. Notably, ESPN was the initial English-language broadcast partner for the WBC in 2006 and 2009.
MLB also has a partnership with Mexican broadcast heavyweight TelevisaUnivision, which shared WBC rights in Mexico with media giant Disney.
Meanwhile, MLB is the latest US sports league to come under federal scrutiny for the distribution of streaming rights to its games, as US regulators investigate whether fans are being asked to pay exorbitant sums in subscription fees.
The MLB probe is part of a broader federal inquiry about how professional sports leagues provide their games to online platforms.
This comes after the US government’s Department of Justice (DOJ) opened an investigation into whether the NFL’s domestic broadcast distribution model is forcing American football fans to pay too much in subscription fees.
The DOJ is also planning to examine the streaming rights of the other leagues covered under the Sports Broadcasting Act, including MLB, according to Bloomberg.
Federal Communications Commission chairman Brendan Carr told Bloomberg that he has so far mostly spoken about issues with broadcasts of the NFL but is looking into complaints from baseball fans that MLB is too difficult to watch on TV.
The NFL, MLB, NBA, and NHL currently have an antitrust exemption under the Sport Broadcast Act of 1996 for negotiating their broadcast rights contracts, but it doesn’t cover cable, satellite, or streaming, with the latter option fast becoming the go-to provider of live sports in the US.
Carr said: “You could make the argument that there are other sports leagues out there that are potentially pushing the limits of the Sports Broadcasting Act even further than what the NFL has.
“The NFL is something that everyone is aware of and focuses on. And so I speak of it just as a shorthand, but we are focused more broadly on other leagues as well.”
