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ESPN charged cable distributors a per-customer fee, which was then passed on to households. They contacted the cable companies and asked, if ESPN were to hold NFL rights, would they agree to a 20 per cent increase in that fee? The answer was an across-the-board yes. No cable company wanted to tell its customers that it had dropped the channel carrying a weekly prime-time NFL game.

ESPN had one more trick: the 20 per cent increase would go up every year.

“Do the math,” one former executive recounts in Those Guys Have All the Fun, an oral history of ESPN by the authors James Andrew Miller and Tom Shales.

Thanks to the wonders of compound interest, a 40-cent carriage fee would quadruple over six years. Michael Eisner, the former Disney chief executive, was so excited that when the NFL deal was announced, he didn’t mention the 20 per cent increases because he didn’t want the cable companies to realize that to which they had agreed.

“Michael Eisner knew that the NFL was unlike any other programming, and he used it to impose the most dramatic rate increases ever on cable customers,” an executive with cable giant Comcast says in the same book. “The NFL deal really made ESPN,” says another.

But the thing that made ESPN could yet be its undoing.

ESPN has lost more than one million cable subscribers in just the past two months. Although it still has a massive customer base of more than 88 million subscriptions, a sustained rate of decline like anything it has seen in recent weeks would cause major problems in short order.