By any measure, sports are more popular than ever.
Networks and streaming services are paying increasing fees for access to the world’s best events, evidenced by recent bumper deals for the US Open and NBA, plus Netflix’s plays for the NFL and WWE. The 2024 Super Bowl was the most-watched TV broadcast in the US since the moon landings. Nearly 24 million people in the UK watched England’s Euro 2024 final defeat. The Olympic Games continued to inspire and demand attention. There is increasing demand for women’s sports. Fans are also paying more every year to attend matches in person.
Yet, how often does the live game – either on the biggest screen in the room, or even for those inside the stadium – truly have our undivided attention? Two things can be true at the same time – nothing is more sought after by broadcasters than sports rights, but televisions are no longer anyone’s primary viewing platform. Smartphones have that crown. Which one is the ‘second screen’ now?
Sports dominate the big screen, but our phones dominate our attention. The trend we will see in 2025 is for sports to abandon the notion of ‘first screen’ and ‘second screen’ and put more emphasis into winning the battle for both screens – at the same time.
In the embryonic days of social media, we used to refer to Twitter as sports’ second screen.
It was a simpler time. Fans reached for their smartphones to react in the moment with a spontaneous text-based thought.
“WOW! Lebron!” Send Tweet!
Now, our devices are never out of reach, whatever the situation.
Picture yourself at home, watching sports. How often is your full attention on the action itself, and how long does this last?
Look around the room at your partner, children, or friends. How many are solely focusing on one activity? Many reading this will be visualizing similar scenes of divided consciousness.
Anecdotally, we know this to be true, and the data backs it up. There are nearly seven billion mobile network contracts worldwide.
Users pick up their phone nearly 60 times every day and spend approximately four hours online each day.
There is an increasing desire to feel connected at all times. Message, notification, reply, reaction.
WhatsApp has more than two billion global users. iMessage, WeChat, Messenger, Telegram and Snapchat have or are approaching one billion users each.
If we’re not messaging, then we’re likely watching a video of some kind.
A reported 93% of US teenagers use YouTube regularly. The four most used apps among that demographic are all video-focused.
Nearly everyone owns a smartphone, but the youngest in society feel the most dependent on them. There is no sign of that trend reversing.
Meanwhile, the biggest arenas in the biggest sports have increased connectivity to the point where many fans are distracted by their phones even when they’ve paid a lot of money to be there in person. And even in the stadia where connectivity is still jammed on matchdays, you’ll find fans using their phones to create and capture content.
So, whether a viewer is in attendance or watching remotely, the challenge becomes how do you facilitate fan engagement on multiple fronts concurrently? How do you create interactive experiences around what is taking place in front them and on the device they look to at least five times, on average, over a two-hour window?
The sports industry knows it cannot fight against this audience trend. So in 2025 it will start to adapt to it – or it will lose ground to other forms of entertainment which do.
The primary job remains to make viewers aware of the live product and compel them to tune in.
An equally important task is convincing viewers to interact with or around the live event as it is happening on their primary device.
Your athletes are playing more than one game at a time
Sports publishers regularly turn to their athletes’ owned channels to help reach fans directly. That is not possible when they are active, which is also the window of peak opportunity.
This is part of the reason for the increasing gamification of the live moment. Fantasy sports and other real-time contests, such as prediction challenges, have grown in popularity and volume. More commercially, the gambling industry is ever more intertwined with the sports industry for similar reasons. Betting messaging is everywhere across sports sponsorships to live broadcasts to in-game advertising and shoulder programming, while the NBA even built live odds into its streaming platform this year.
All of these devices are designed to hook the viewer in the moment and provide them with extra incentive to keep watching and remain invested in the action. Creating multiple touchpoints to engage live viewers, relevant to various age and fandom demographics, is now non-negotiable.
Add fuel to the group chat fire
The mobile world is dominated by messaging, be that a 1:1 exchange, sprawling group chats, or engagement on specific interest-based communities such as those housed on Reddit and Discord.
Eye-catching or viral moments will always spark conversation. Sports cannot manufacture global talking points on-demand but must be more proactive than ever in pushing these moments to existing and desired audiences organically and via paid advertising as soon as they happen. Publishers must aspire to there being as small a gap as possible between the live moment and its community being proactively equipped with assets to share and celebrate it in a legally compliant manner.
The advance of generative AI as a content creation aid will reduce the time required to create and localize, but there must also be an understanding and collaboration between the rights holder and its broadcast partners to achieve a mutually-beneficial outcome.
One hundred voices are better than one
An effective method to measure the health of a sports league or team’s digital popularity is to count the number of independent voices proactively and voluntarily producing
content about it.
A survey from YouTube found that 65% of Gen Z now identify themselves as video content creators, and we are moving beyond the era where most of your audience is happy to be a passive observer. This creates a huge opportunity for all forms of entertainment willing to lean into the audience’s desire to create. Globally influential figures can have a transformative effect on the popularity of a team or event.
The NFL’s Kansas City Chiefs felt this impact when Taylor Swift became an enthusiastic attendee, but figures with this level of allure are few and far between. In a content discovery space dictated by algorithm, sports properties would achieve greater impact by harnessing a digital ecosystem which nurtures 50 engaged creators with 10,000 followers apiece, or 500 with 1,000, rather than aspire to court one ‘influencer’ with 500,000 or more.
