How and Why the Diamond League Is Heading to FloTrack in 2025
The Diamond League will be on FloTrack in 2025 and fans and athletes are not happy
By LetsRun.comOn Wednesday, FloTrack announced that it has acquired US broadcast rights for the Diamond League starting in 2025. That means that 2024 Diamond League season, which begins on April 20 in Xiamen, China, will be the final year on NBC/Peacock, which has broadcast the series since 2017. While NBC will retain rights to the Prefontaine Classic, every other Diamond League meet, including the final, will be shown on FloTrack next year.
The move to FloTrack was nearly universally panned on social media by US track fans and a number of American track stars. The reaction was so negative that FloTrack turned off comments on its own social media posts announcing the move.
Olympic gold medalist Morolake Akinosun summed up the sentiment well.
As a track and field community, we *rarely* ever all agree on anything. But our common dislike of Flotrack having the Diamond League next year has unified us 😭
— Morolake Akinosun™ (@MsFastTwitch) April 11, 2024
Olympic silver medallist Kenny Bednarek tweeted “Track world fuming” on X.
World champion and two-time Olympic medallist Gabby Thomas posted on her Instagram story, “This might be the worst news I’ve heard from the diamond league since… ever.”
Citius Mag’s post about the news contained the following comments:
“Worst move ever” — 2021 Olympian Heather MacLean
“Flotrack = death of the sport” — two-time outdoor Worlds team member Isaiah Harris
“Bad for the sport uhggg” — 2015 Worlds bronze medalist Emily Infeld
It is not hard to understand why they are upset. There are two main reasons:
1) US fans will pay significantly more to watch the Diamond League
A FloTrack subscription costs $29.99/month or $149.99/year. A Peacock subscription costs $5.99/month or $59.99/year. No one is happy about paying way more for the same product.
2) Moving to FloTrack significantly limits the reach of professional track & field in the United States
In order to grow in the United States, track & field needs to be in front of as many eyeballs as possible. The move to FloTrack will limit that. It means casual fans will not be exposed to the sport.
Meets like Herculis in Monaco will only be available on FloTrack starting next year (Kevin Morris photo)
Peacock had 31 million subscribers at the end of 2023. And while NBC could have done a better job promoting its track & field offerings to the masses, with Peacock there was at least the hope track would be exposed to the casual fan.
FloSports, FloTrack’s parent company, does not disclose subscriber totals, but the number is way less than 31 million. According to its 2022 media kit, FloSports averaged 6 million monthly visitors across all of its sites, which includes at least 20 different sports. Their subscriber count is a fraction of that number.
For reference, Similarweb.com, a tool to estimate web traffic, estimated FloTrack had 243,400 visitors in March 2024. It said LetsRun.com had 4.4 million.
The other issue is that FloTrack is exclusively a streaming service. NBC only aired three of the 14 Diamond Leagues live on television in 2023 (two on CNBC, plus the final on CNBC and NBC), though it did show a number of others on tape delay. But NBC at least had the option to show the meets on NBC, USA, or CNBC or to promote the events across their networks. FloTrack has no such option. You will never stumble across a Diamond League meet on TV next year. You will have to seek it out.
In FloTrack’s announcement about the news, Diamond League CEO Petr Stastny tried to spin the development as a good thing.
“This partnership represents our shared commitment to elevating the profile of track and field, providing fans with unparalleled access to our premier series of events,” Stastny said.
Sorry, but that’s a load of crap. (Neither Stastny nor FloTrack general manager of track and field Ryan Fenton responded when asked for comment for this story).
FloTrack’s model is not about expanding the reach of the sports it covers to generate more revenue, but rather extracting as much revenue as possible from existing fans of the sports it covers.
Take FloSports’ deal to stream DC United’s soccer games in 2019. The deal was announced to great fanfare as it was FloSports’ first attempt to stream one of the “major” professional leagues in the US. Less than a year later, the deal was cancelled with Washington Post reporter Steven Goff writing, “The move to an exclusive streaming service damaged United’s momentum in the local marketplace. One season after rejuvenating its brand and popularity with Wayne Rooney’s arrival and Audi Field’s opening, United was largely out of sight and out of mind.”
The move of the Diamond League to FloTrack lowers the profile of the Diamond League in the US. It ensures the sport will be even more “out of sight and out of mind” in the US.
But it’s easy to criticize, and we understand the sport needs to generate revenue. The bigger questions: how and why did this happen? Here’s how.
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It all comes down to the $$$$ and contract structures
A few important things to know before we begin this discussion. First: while it has a voice in DL affairs, World Athletics does not control the Diamond League. The Diamond League is actually a Swiss company called Diamond League AG, in which World Athletics is a shareholder along with the 15 DL meets.
The 2023 Diamond League champions (Kevin Morris photo)
The second important thing to know is that a company called Infront Sports & Media acquired the rights to source international broadcasters for the Diamond League starting in 2025. What that means: Infront paid the Diamond League a bunch of money for the broadcast rights for the Diamond League, with the aim of turning around and selling those rights to companies like NBC in the US or the BBC in the UK.
So the Diamond League gets financial security (a large lump sum from Infront) and avoids the hassle of negotiating dozens of contracts with individual companies. Infront, meanwhile, is betting that it can turn a profit by selling the rights on for more than it paid to acquire them. Which means that Infront is interested in which company can offer the most money, rather than the company that can offer the most exposure for the Diamond League.
Infront, by the way, is owned by Wanda Group — the title sponsors of the Diamond League.
NBC is owned by Comcast, which brought in $121 billion in revenue in 2023. It is orders of magnitude larger than FloSports. Which means NBC could easily afford to outbid FloSports for the Diamond League rights — if NBC thought it was worth it. The fact that NBC has chosen to spend its money elsewhere says a lot about the popularity and profitability of the Diamond League in the United States.
NBC has a vested interest in promoting Olympic sports in general (since it holds Olympic rights through 2032, including the 2028 edition in Los Angeles) as well as track & field specifically (since it holds rights to World Athletics Series events such as the World Championships, World Indoors, World Road Running Championships through 2029). When NBC gained the Diamond League rights, it could have just taken the world feed and rebroadcast it, which would have been the cheapest option. Instead, NBC brought in its own announcers to record a separate broadcast using the world feed pictures (the world feed audio was shown on the Peacock broadcast while NBC used its own announcers when it aired meets on TV, either live or taped). NBC wanted this to work.
FloTrack wants it to work, too. And while it’s easy to blame them for taking the Diamond League rights and putting it behind a $30/month paywall, it’s a reflection of where the Diamond League sits in America’s sports consciousness. FloTrack saw an opportunity when the rights became available and took its shot. Perhaps it is worth asking why those rights were available to them in the first place.
