WGN Sports

 ( Sports Divisions Of Tv Channels ) 

WGN-TV carried select regular season NFL games involving the Chicago Bears and the now-defunct Chicago Cardinals via DuMont during the 1951 NFL season; following that, the Bears and Cardinals moved their telecasts to ABC – and by association, ABC O&O WBKB-TV (now WLS-TV) – under a limited contract that lasted until CBS gained primary rights to both teams as part of a league-wide television package in 1956. In November 2010, WGN-TV became the home for preseason and regular season games involving the Bears – the latter originally consisting of NFL Network Thursday Night Football simulcasts – that are not carried by a broadcast network. (Under NFL broadcasting rules, games that are televised on the league's national cable partners are required to be simulcast over a local broadcast station in the home markets of the participating teams.) This marked the first time that Channel 9 had broadcast games from all five of Chicago's legacy professional sports teams during the course of a single season; the Bears simulcasts were not carried on WGN America due to conflicts that would be incurred with the NFL Network telecasts. Among the Bears games shown on the station were simulcasts of ESPN-televised Monday Night Football broadcasts (including match-ups against Dallas Cowboys on October 1, 2012, and Washington on September 23, 2019). In those cases, although ABC-owned WLS-TV has right of first refusal to MNF simulcasts as its corporate parent, The Walt Disney Company, holds majority ownership of ESPN, WLS management elected to exercise the station's right of first refusal over the game telecasts to avoid preempting ABC's live Monday night broadcast of Dancing with the Stars.

The station's coverage of Little League Baseball games during the late 1940s, 1950s and 1960s was noted for the innovation of the center field camera angle now commonplace in baseball coverage. First utilized by the station in 1951, during Little League games held at Thillens Stadium, the angle – which allowed for clear views of pitch movement, action between the pitcher and the batter, and more effective close-ups than were capable with the then-standard overhead shot from behind-the-plate at upper deck – was used for those telecasts due to the smaller size of the stadium and the lack of a suitable place to place a camera behind the plate. The angles were later used for Cubs game coverage and was quickly adopted for local and national baseball telecasts by other professional and collegiate broadcasters.

Restrictions similar to those that affected WGN America—as well as the absence of contractual streaming rights—also prevent WGN-TV from running sports highlights during live streams of the station's newscasts on the WGNTV.com website (unusual since some stations, including a few of WGN-TV/WGN America's Tribune-owned sister stations, have had permission to run sports highlights during live streams of local newscasts on their websites and ), which are substituted with a disclaimer screen denoting the restrictions that runs in place of the sports segment's video feed and accompanied by the audio portion of the segment.

Additional games would be transferred to CLTV beginning with the 1998 season, in order to comply with contractual limits imposed by The WB (which began offering its programming over WGN upon the network's January 11, 1995 launch) on the number of network program preemptions, other than those caused by long-form breaking news coverage, that could occur on an annual basis. The move substantially reduced the number of games shown on WGN-TV from 144 games in 1997 to 92 games in 1998, with 62 additional WGN-contracted games being placed on CLTV and a select number of additional games originally set to air on CLTV also being shifted to WGN. As a result, although it continued to air some weekday games during network prime time hours periodically, Channel 9 shifted to showing the majority of scheduled sports broadcasts on weekday and weekend afternoons, weekday late evenings (in the case of games held in the West Coast after network programming ended locally) and weekend evenings. (During situations when WGN was scheduled to air sports broadcasts in place of network programs from The WB and, from 2006 to 2016, The CW, WGN-TV rebroadcast the sports-displaced network shows on a Broadcast delay later in the week, usually in a weekend evening timeslot not occupied by a scheduled game telecast, as neither The WB nor The CW has ever aired prime time programs on Saturdays and as The CW had embargoed providing programs on Sundays from September 2009 until October 2018). Beginning in 1999, CLTV also added a slate of overflow games produced for Fox Sports Net Chicago, which would also offer the games over proprietary overflow channel Fox Sports Net Chicago Plus (which aired the games in place of CLTV in area suburbs served by a cable provider that did not offer the news channel on their lineup).Confirmed by WGN-TV Chicago Professional Sports L.P. & WGN Continental Broadcasting Co. vs. National Basketball Association. 961 Fed. 2d 667 (7th Cir. 1992)

On July 8, 1999, Tribune Broadcasting entered into a leasing arrangement with Weigel Broadcasting, under which the latter's flagship independent station, WCIU-TV (channel 26, now a The CW affiliate), would carry a select number of Cubs, White Sox and Bulls games—a cumulative average of 40 telecasts each year involving the three teams—that would be produced by WGN Sports for exclusive broadcast within the Chicago market, starting with the 1999–2000 Bulls season. (The WCIU telecasts were branded under the "CubsNet," "SoxNet" and "BullsNet" umbrellas until 2004, when WGN began marketing the telecasts under the brand "WGN Sports on The U". CLTV would continue to air select games not covered by the WCIU agreement until 2002.) On February 19, 2015, Weigel terminated its agreement with Tribune to carry WGN-produced Cubs and White Sox telecasts, in an effort to limit scheduling conflicts with WCIU's then-recently launched early-prime time newscast (produced through a news share agreement with WLS-TV); the WGN-leased overflow broadcasts were moved to WPWR-TV – airing under the brand "WGN Sports on My50" – beginning with the 2015 Cubs and White Sox seasons. The sub-licensing agreements as well as the splintering of the team's telecast rights with regional cable sports networks – Fox Sports Net Chicago (later FSN Chicago) from 1999 until 2003 and then Comcast SportsNet Chicago/NBC Sports Chicago beginning in 2004 – resulted in the number of Cubs games produced by WGN-TV gradually decreasing in recent years (down to 70 per season by 2008). (Until the Fox Sports Chicago deal, the Cubs were the last Major League Baseball franchise that did not have local broadcast contracts with both cable and broadcast television outlets.)

As a result of its decision to exempt the station from a renewed affiliation agreement involving the group's 12 other CW-affiliated stations dating to the network's 2006 founding with CW managing partner CBS Corporation, on May 23, 2016, Tribune announced that WGN-TV would convert into an independent station effective September 1. This would allow WGN-TV to increase the amount of sports programming that it could air during the calendar year (albeit, with far fewer televised games for each of the contracted teams than it had previously been able to air during its first tenure as an independent between 1956 and 1995) and give it full over-the-air exclusivity over Cubs, White Sox, Bulls and Blackhawks telecasts, resulting in the termination of its outsourcing agreement with WPWR (which would concurrently become a primary CW affiliate through an agreement with parent company Fox Television Stations).

In April 1990, NBA Commissioner David Stern lowered the number of superstation-licensed telecasts to an annual limit of 20 games, a move it claimed would limit negative impacts on game viewership on the league's national television partners (at the time, TNT and NBC) as a result of concurring deals involving WGN and the Bulls and TBS and the Atlanta Hawks (the latter of which was part of an overall deal with Turner Sports that granted TNT national telecast rights to games from other NBA teams). The new restriction spurred a conspiracy and antitrust lawsuit that was filed by the Bulls (one of two NBA teams that voted against the proposal, along with the Brooklyn Nets, then broadcasting over Secaucus, New Jersey–based superstation WWOR-TV) and Tribune Broadcasting with the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois on October 16, 1990, alleging that the league rules would harm the Bulls, their fans and WGN and that Stern's proposal was aimed at "phasing out such superstations telecasts entirely in increments of five games each year over the next five years." (The NBA contended the restriction was exempt from antitrust law under a provision of the Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961, which was deemed in later rulings to only be applicable to the sale or transfer a national game package to a television network and not those involving individual teams.)

On January 26, 1991, Senior U.S. District Judge Hubert L. Will granted a permanent injunction in favor of the Bulls and WGN, prohibiting the league from instituting the policy on the determination that the NBA's superstation licensing restrictions were "a significant restraint of trade" in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act. On February 20, 1992, attorneys with the NBA, WGN-TV and the Bulls reached an agreement to let WGN broadcast 30 Bulls games for the 1992–93 season, per the NBA's allotment that teams could license superstations to carry 30 games in a given season (up from both the limits mandated by the injunction and the proposed limit that resulted in the suit), a rule that would remain in place through the 1993–94 season before reverting to the originally proposed 25-game limit. Subsequently, on April 14 of that year, a three-judge panel of the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals with the Northern District Court that overheard an appeal of Will's decision held that the superstation limit was an illegal restraint of trade. On November 5, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the appellate court decision.

When the case was remanded back to Judge Will in October 1993, it was now based on new contractual terms in the league's deal with NBC that awarded it cable rights to games not covered by a national cable agreement, despite the network having yet to own general entertainment or sports-based cable outlets, as well as plans to implement a licensing fee (reportedly $250,000 per game) to teams that telecast over superstations. Bulls owner Jerry Reinsdorf (using the sustained fanbase of the Cubs through the WGN telecasts, even at times when the team's performance was mediocre to poor, as an example) and attorney Joel Chefitz both argued that the team's national availability through WGN was vital to maintaining the team's fanbase and to its financial success following Michael Jordan's sudden retirement from basketball and move to baseball. On January 6, 1995, Judge Will affirmed that the NBA's efforts to restrict carriage of the Bulls on WGN-TV was a "naked restraint" of competition in violation of antitrust laws, rejecting arguments by NBA representatives that broad television coverage through superstations hurt revenues for national, regional and local telecasts paid to the league and individual teams and noted that evidence "revealed that superstation coverage of the Bulls and Hawks may actually have helped to promote greater public interest in NBA basketball." The ruling permitted the station to televise at least 30 games (eleven fewer than the 41 annual games that the Bulls and WGN requested) over the Chicago signal and superstation feed, while allowing the NBA to impose a reasonable rights fee (around $40,000, rather than the $100,000 licensing fee sought by the NBA) for broadcasts of each game, based on the consideration that the league received more than $2 million in annual copyright payments from WGN's Bulls broadcasts.

On September 10, 1996, a three-judge Seventh Circuit panel overturned the 1992 decision and remanded the case to be re-heard by a federal judge. Although the Bulls initially maintained that WGN would still be able to nationally televise Bulls games, in October 1996, WGN-TV announced plans to restrict distribution of the 35 Bulls games it was scheduled to air during the 1996–97 season (a five-game increase over the 1995–96 season) exclusively to the Chicago area signal. (The WGN superstation would carry movies in place of the embargoed Bulls telecasts; the 9:00 p.m. newscast was also preempted nationally as a result of the restrictions due to their being subject to delay on the Chicago signal due to game overruns.) Despite the feed's continued carriage of Cubs and White Sox games and its purposing as the national feed of The WB for markets without a local affiliate, cable provider Tele-Communications, Inc. (TCI) – which provided service to portions of the immediate Chicago area through its Chicago Cable TV arm – cited the national restrictions on the Bulls as well as its own decision to make room for additional cable channels for its subsequent decision to remove the national WGN channel from its systems. However, criticism of the move from some subscribers led TCI to reverse course and retain the WGN superstation feed from affected systems in Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Wisconsin and Michigan. (Some TCI systems elsewhere would not reinstate WGN until as late as 1998, through an effort by Tribune and the superstation feed's uplink carrier, United Video Satellite Group, to take advantage of TBS's conversion into a hybrid basic cable network.)

On December 12, 1996, the Bulls and WGN reached a settlement to the six-year-long lawsuit, which allowed WGN to air an extended schedule of 41 games – the maximum allowed under the NBA's local television policies – during the 1996–97 season (35 that would air only on the Chicago signal and twelve that would be shown on both the local and superstation feeds). From the 1997–98 season thereafter, the number of games permitted to air on the superstation feed increased to 15 per year. The parties also agreed to replace the NBA's superstation tax with a revenue sharing model, under which the NBA would collect 50% of all advertising revenue accrued from the national WGN telecasts. The restrictions, however, resulted in some Bulls away games televised by the WGN national feed being unavailable to television providers within the opposing team's designated market if the game was not carried by a national network, a local television station or a regional sports network.

In August 1990, the MLB filed a petition to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to propose allowing local television stations to force cable systems to blackout superstation-licensed games involving local franchises within the team's home market through a change in how network program non-duplication rules define a "network program" to include live sports broadcasts shown simultaneously on local and out-of-market stations available via cable. United Video – which, in addition to WGN, also distributed sister stations WPIX in New York City (which carried games from the New York Yankees), KTLA in Los Angeles (which aired Los Angeles Dodgers games) and KWGN-TV in Denver (which aired Colorado Rockies games) – filed an opposition to the move, citing that the proposal would result in the superstation signals being "chopped up even more and made even more difficult for cable systems to receive." Tribune Broadcasting contended that the petition was "protectionist," noting the lack of evidence that "viewers' current ability to choose between a local broadcast and a different version of the same game is harmful to either sports or the public interest." Tribune Broadcasting, TBS parent Turner Broadcasting System and the National Cable Television Association (NCTA) also filed petitions opposing the MLB request.

In April 1992, Vincent lobbied Congress to repeal the compulsory license that allowed cable systems to carry superstation signals. In July 1992, Vincent ordered the relocation of the Cubs, the Atlanta Braves and two other National League Eastern Division teams that did not regularly broadcast their games on superstations (the Cincinnati Reds and the St. Louis Cardinals) to different divisions starting with the 1993 season, with the Cubs and the Cardinals being reassigned the NL Western Division and the Braves and the Reds being moved to the Eastern Division. Tribune responded to the move with a breach of contract lawsuit, alleging that the action overstepped the bounds of Vincent's authority. The move sparked concerns that WGN-TV's revenues from the Cubs telecasts would be impacted if the Cubs were forced to play a larger number of games against other Western Division teams based in the Pacific Time Zone, resulting in an increased number of games being shown in the late evening locally and potentially impact advertising revenue from the 9:00 p.m. newscast if it had to delay it after prime time more frequently because of the late baseball starts. Tribune representatives accused Vincent using the issue as part of his and some team owners animosity toward superstations to deflect from management or performance-related problems within their baseball clubs, though the Cubs denied Vincent's claim that its opposition to the move had mainly to do with the "scheduling difficulties that will be experienced by ... WGN-TV." U.S. District Judge Suzanne B. Conlon ruled in favor of Tribune and the Cubs in a preliminary ruling on July 23, 1992. A majority of MLB team owners passed a motion of no confidence against Vincent as MLB Commissioner in an 18-9-1 vote on September 4, 1992; he subsequently resigned on September 6.

As such, beginning with the April 1 game between the Blackhawks and the Winnipeg Jets, WGN wound down its local sports coverage throughout the spring and summer of 2019 as the station's contracts with all four teams expired. The station's final Bulls game aired on April 9, 2019, against the New York Knicks at Madison Square Garden. WGN-TV's final Cubs game broadcast aired on September 27, 2019, against the rival St. Louis Cardinals at Busch Stadium. WGN-TV's final sports telecast involving one of the four legacy professional sports franchises that the station has been involved with during its history was the second game of a White Sox–Detroit Tigers doubleheader at Guaranteed Rate Field on September 28, 2019. Ancillary sporting events (such as the Arlington Million horse race) may continue to be shown on WGN following the removal of its professional sports telecasts.

WGN-TV's contract with the Fire ended at the conclusion of the 2022 season as a result of Apple TV gaining exclusive worldwide rights to all MLS matchups for 10 years, beginning in 2023. The deal left WGN-TV without sports programming for the first time in the station's 74-year history; however, WGN-TV plans to carry events from LIV Golf starting on February 25, 2023 as part of a time-brokerage deal with Nexstar; although the deal was signed with the CW, WCIU agreed to cede rights to the Chicago market due to cross-ownership.