With this week’s announcement that Victory+ will be the broadcast home of Texas Rangers baseball in 2025, local sports obsessives now know where they can catch the games from all five major local franchises. (And, yes, we absolutely consider Major League Soccer’s FC Dallas squad to be a major team.)
How We Got Here
For the uninitiated, the local televised sports landscape has been in flux over the past year or so as the Rangers, the Dallas Mavericks and the Dallas Stars all got out of their deals with Bally’s Sports Southwest. Diamond Sports Group, which owns the regional networks that have hosted the Rangers, Mavericks and Stars games for decades, declared bankruptcy in March 2023, more or less signaling to the many pro franchises across the country that it was time to find a new local broadcast arrangement. First, it was the Stars who announced their locally available, or non-national broadcasts, would come direct-to-fan via the Victory+ app. Not only would no cable subscription be required to access the games, which would’ve been noteworthy enough on its own, but the games were made available for free.
Soon after that refreshingly affordable and straight-forward announcement, the Mavericks introduced a multi-layered set of broadcast options. Local broadcast for the 2024–25 season would be available on over the air TV on KFAA channel 29, which isn't available on many multi-channel streaming or cable providers, but readily available with an HD antenna. Also, for anyone not in the mood to mess with an antenna or try to switch TV services for the right package, the Mavs TV service would carry all the local games, but not for free.
Fans who want to catch all the Stars and/or Mavs games must also have access to national channels such as ESPN, TNT, NBA Network and NHL Network. The NFL and the MLB also have a number of exclusive deals for which fans now need more than one app or service.
And that brings us to the latest local club offering fans a new way to watch its games. On Wednesday, the Rangers announced that they, too, would broadcast their local games on the Victory+ app, as the Stars do. But unlike the Stars, fans will have to pay for the privilege. On the bright side, many Rangers fans have had to either change their TV provider to find a package that included Bally’s Sports or opt to watch only the scant few nationally televised Rangers games. Not anymore.
But the flipside of that is, well, you gotta pay more.
Let’s break it down a little more specifically and see just how much you can expect to spend per year to watch every game from all of the pro Dallas teams moving forward in this costly new frontier. For this exercise, we’ll count YouTube TV as the stand-in for standard TV/cable/streaming service for basic networks such as ABC, NBC, CBS, FOX, TNT, TBS and ESPN. Many of the most popular packages from YouTube, Hulu, DirecTV and more also offer NFL Network, MLB Network, NBA Network and NHL Network either in their basic offerings or for an additional, nominal monthly fee.
Dallas Cowboys
YouTube TV - $497.94 ($82.99 x six months).Amazon Prime - $14.99 per month (The Cowboys will likely be on only one Thursday Prime broadcast.)
Netflix - $15.49 per month (Don’t be surprised if the Cowboys play on the exclusive Netflix Christmas in 2025.)
Peacock - $7.99 per month (Peacock has hosted exclusive broadcasts in two consecutive seasons.)
NFL+ - $14.99 per month (if your basic cable or streaming package does not have the NFL Network, which has exclusive broadcasts during the season.)
Dallas Mavericks
Mavs TV - $125 per season.YouTube TV - $331.96 ($82.99 x 4 non-NFL months).
Amazon Prime - $89.94 ($14.99 per month x 6 regular season months beginning next season).
Dallas Stars
Victory+ - Free.YouTube TV - No additional cost since the NHL season and NBA season run concurrently.
Texas Rangers
Victory+ - $100 per season.YouTube TV - No additional cost since MLB season runs during the end of NBA season and through the first few months of the NFL season.
AppleTV+ - $9.99 per month (The Rangers played in three exclusive Apple games in 2024. These games are not included with Apple's MLS Season Pass.)
Roku Channel - Free on supported devices.
FC Dallas
MLS Season Pass on AppleTV+ - $99 per season.YouTube TV - No additional cost as MLS season runs during the end of NBA season, the middle of the MLB season and into the NFL season. (FC Dallas could play in a Fox Sports game of the week broadcast, but most likely it won't be more than once or twice.)
Estimated Cost of Watching Every Game Played by All Five Major Dallas Teams:
$1,307.29*Pretty depressing, right?
That’s a high cost, and we haven’t even gotten into college football, college basketball, pro golf, pro tennis, F1 racing and European soccer.
At least the silver lining there is that if you have a few of the aforementioned services and apps for the local pro sports, you’ll usually be in luck for the other leagues mentioned here, except for the soccer part. Paramount+, an app we haven’t noted yet here is $7.99 per month. It's home to the UEFA Champions League, Serie A from Italy and the English Football League, which for now at least is home to everyone’s favorite underdog Welsh club, Wrexham AFC.
And hey, you might already keep a subscription to YouTube TV, Amazon Prime, Apple TV+, Netflix or Peacock for other shows, regardless of which sports you follow. If you do, that’ll certainly help the sticker shock associated with watching sports in the post-cable reality we live in.
*Remember, we did say "estimated." Schedules and prices for plans and services tend to vary and change, you know.
