After years at the margins, Netflix is making its big push into live sport.
A long run of experiments has borne a growing portfolio of major events. The global streaming giant now shows five National Football League (NFL) games a season, up from two last year. In December it will carry the most-hyped heavyweight boxing contest in a generation, as British former champions Tyson Fury and Anthony Joshua finally collide at Cardiff’s Principality Stadium.
It confirms a directional shift for a platform that was long ambivalent about the value of expensive sports rights. More lies ahead, as Netflix moves from set-pieces to longer, more complex broadcast projects.
This week it announced a comprehensive, landmark deal for the rights to the 2030 Fifa World Cup in Spain – a co-host of soccer’s signature men’s tournament in four years’ time.
Before then, Netflix will embark upon its most ambitious broadcast to date – as the home of Fifa Women’s World Cup coverage in the US and Canada for 2027 and 2031. It is a brief with considerable regional relevance: the first tournament is being held in Brazil; the second across the US, Mexico, Costa Rica and Jamaica.
IMG was named this month as Netflix’s production partner for both editions. Speaking at sports industry conference Leaders Week London at Stamford Bridge in the wake of that announcement, IMG president Adam Kelly and Brandon Riegg, vice president of nonfiction series and sport at Netflix, discussed the scope of that project and its implications for live sport in the next phase of the streaming era.
“This is our first foray, obviously, into football, and it’s a massive crown jewel event,” said Riegg. “And I think first and foremost, we want to execute in a way that pleases the fans who show up to watch.”
Streaming the Women’s World Cup
Encouraging early performance of live sport on Netflix coupled with an existing documentary relationship with Fifa meant that when the live rights to the tournament went to market in 2024 “there wasn’t much of a debate” as to whether a streamer moving into the “event business” would bid.
“Really, the Olympics and the World Cup, I would argue, are the two biggest global events,” he said. “And so we threw our hat in the ring.”
Riegg acknowledged the added appeal of back-to-back competitions in the Americas, with viewing times that are “a little bit more accessible for the for the US”.
“But you know,” he added, “I think the thing with sport is you don’t know when the next opportunity will come up, so you sort of have to be open-minded and opportunistic.”
Netflix then needed a vision for content production that could “satisfy fans” and “invigorate our partners”.
“It’s not a very long list of people that can do that,” Riegg suggested. “And so really, IMG was at the top of the list, and we spoke to them pretty early on.”
This assignment has arrived in a transitional period for IMG. Kelly said has been “desperate to talk about” the new partnership “for over a year”.
The company is now part of TKO Holdings, owner of the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) and WWE, whose Monday Night Raw series also appears on Netflix around the world.
The Premier League’s decision to take production in-house was a blow to IMG, but it has continued to be heavily involved with soccer, working with the likes of Major League Soccer (MLS), the National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL) and the Women’s Super League (WSL).
Kelly expects Netflix to be “incredibly strong for women’s sport and women’s football”.
“We talk often about trust,” he said. “And one of the huge strengths that Netflix has is the trust of 320-plus million globally, who naturally, when they switch on the device – they hear the ‘tud-um!’l – they feel the trust that there is going to be great content for them to watch. And [Netflix has] earned the right through that trust to push content towards them that they might otherwise not have seen.
“I think the Women’s World Cup, as a result, is going to drive incredible audiences, really great growth, and that’s going to benefit the whole football ecosystem and sport more broadly.”
Netflix and IMG have already collaborated on live sport. Together, they brought “new technology” to the Six Kings Slam men’s tennis tournament in Saudi Arabia, with a “new look and feel to get people closer to the action”.
Innovation for its own sake, however, is not on the agenda. Kelly is wary of “trying to overengineer” the on-screen product, putting an emphasis on “trying to find a way to communicate the narrative, the storytelling, the passion, but also the action in a way that just improves the experience for the fan.”
A broader offer
Live sport is emerging as a key differentiator for the major digital players – much as it has been for conventional broadcasters in the past.
“Between the various streaming services, the linear channels, social media and what not, the competition for people’s time and attention has never been greater,” Riegg said. “Sports, I think, is proving that it’s one of the few categories of programming that can still aggregate a meaningful audience.”
There is a commercial imperative. Even market-leading Netflix has had to battle for growth since subscription streaming’s early 2020s peak – days after Riegg’s Leaders appearance it announced 1,000 redundancies, its steepest workforce cut since 2022.
But “eventised” live events also complement other Netflix programming, both creatively and strategically. The platform built a sports presence through documentaries like Covid-era basketball smash The Last Dance and streamed the pioneering Formula 1 docuseries Drive to Survive.
During the men’s Fifa World Cup this year it grabbed a share of the soccer conversation through a deal with UK-based podcast studio Goalhanger, distributing the Gary Lineker-fronted show The Rest is Football. That partnership has continued into the Premier League season.
By surrounding live events with documentaries, films and podcasts, Riegg said, Netflix makes it “very easy” for casual and diehard fans “to navigate the entire universe of a given subject – in this case, sport”.
That density of programming on Netflix creates another dynamic. A personalised user experience has long been the company’s competitive advantage, and Riegg believes this can have a powerful effect on discovery.
“Your Netflix is different than my Netflix,” he said, “but I think when I worked in linear networks previously, a lot of the decisions we made would be based on gut or past performance.”
The Netflix library of data, he added, throws up some counterintuitive insights. For example, “a huge number of people that watch Bridgerton also watch Drive to Survive”, while UK audiences who “may have come for Peaky Blinders” might move next to high-concept Korean drama Squid Game.
When it comes to live events, the algorithmic recommendation engine is increasingly supplemented by “a lot of early promotion and marketing” – something Riegg insists Netflix has “gotten better at over time”.
Streaming and sport’s multiplatform future
For Kelly, the streaming sector’s pivot towards live rights is a restatement of sport’s viability in a very different setting.
“The power of sport, the superpower of sport, is that live engagement – the scarcity factor and this demand to make and schedule time,” he said. “I think that puts a super-premium on people’s commitment to engage with sport, and that commitment is highly valuable, particularly in today’s world.”
The “authenticity” and “honesty” of sport, he argued, are even more compelling when set against AI-generated “infinite content”. At the same time, rights holders must appreciate the “always-on factor”.
“The surrounding content is increasingly important,” he added. “As well as creating that funnel, it’s creating the opportunity for non-core fans that have been ready and willing to make that commitment to get access and to be intrigued and to choose to sample and engage with sport in another way.”
IMG “has heavily invested”, Kelly said, in proving “that the connectivity between audience and engagement on TV and digital platforms drives better outcomes for brands”.
This also delivers strong results for media partners, he added, encouraging them to spend more on content creation to support better audience engagement and analysis on digital platforms.
“And that,” he continued, “is a positive feedback loop.”
Kelly expects the content distribution contest to intensify – and “wouldn’t be surprised” to see AI companies or Starlink enter the space. All of this, however, demands a different strategic frame for rights holders, he argued.
Instead of the “walled garden” of exclusivity that defined the traditional broadcast era, he suggests a multi-touchpoint approach to growing and monetising a fanbase – using athletes and fan channels as well as linear and digital platforms.
Netflix, for its part, is now finding a place in that wider sports ecosystem.
“We’re a general entertainment platform,” Riegg said. “If you’re looking to serve your existing fanbase, there are a lot of great options to do that. If you’re looking to reach people that are either lapsed or never-fans or casual fans, we certainly believe that we’re in a great position to help provide that growth, and that comes a few ways.”
With the infrastructure to deliver it established, Riegg expects live sport – and its capacity to meet “an inherent human desire” for unpredictability and clear stakes – to become a bigger part of the Netflix programming mix.
“Sport transcends language and geography and culture,” he added, “and I think storytelling is the same. And so, really, it’s just saying, ‘Who are the best storytellers for us to work with?’ And then going out and saying, ‘These are the stories that we think are the most interesting ones to tell.’
“It is literally as simple as that.”
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