To say that the model of sports consumption has changed is a truism in 2026. But it does bear examining what exactly we mean when we say that the way we consume sports today is different from the past.
Where attention once peaked on matchdays and faded on days off, today it is always on: following a sport is a 24/7 pursuit. Where fans once followed teams closely, their transfers, rivalries and results, many now follow storylines just as keenly: the pre-match fit, the post-match memes, the long-form documentary narrative arc. The score still matters enormously, but it increasingly feels like the start of the story rather than the whole of it.
One result is that participation in fandom has fragmented. The shared experience, crowded around a TV screen or in the ground together, is still there; alongside it, though, a parallel kind of participation has grown, lived out in clips, highlights, reactions and memes shared online by fans all over the world.
This does not look like a behaviour constrained to Gen Z, either: according to Bango research, 59 per cent of 25 to 34-year-olds say they often follow games through clips, updates or social media instead of watching the full match.
Social media has of course played a part in this. The recent shift from social graph-based distribution to interest graph-based distribution has altered what sports fans see in their feeds.
Reach is not so tightly correlated to audience size – which explains why a Reel from a more niche sports property like SailGP can top 100 million views, or why Alexandra Burghardt, a German Olympian with 100,000 followers, can publish one of 2024’s most-viewed sports Reels globally (it now sits at 243 million views and counting!). Personality, taste and creativity count for more than scale alone.
Athletes are well placed to win in this new mode of fandom. There are roughly 1.5 million athletes with accounts on Instagram, and one in three users follows an athlete. At a global tentpole like the Olympic Games, countless entities, teams, federations, broadcasters, publishers and fans are all posting about the same event.
What athletes tend to bring to that shared moment is a particular combination: a recognisable face, a clear point of view and built-in behind-the-scenes access. In a feed that rewards the most distinctive take on a story everyone is following, that combination seems to travel well.
Erling Haaland’s historic run both on and off the field at this summer’s World Cup is a case in point. Haaland acquired more than 36 million Instagram followers in the space of eight weeks. What was striking was that his personal, non-matchday posts (training, travel, humour) averaged three times as many ‘likes’ as his on-pitch content.
He reached millions of new households because he was beamed into their living rooms playing football; he captured people’s affections through the proximity and personality evidenced in his self-authored social content. None of this diminishes the live broadcast – leagues and broadcasters continue to create the moments that matter most. What is interesting is how far athletes can now help carry those moments online.
There is a calendar point here, too. Most major professional sports leagues involve around 50 matchdays and 300-plus days when nobody is playing. Athletes naturally fill those 300 days with life beyond the pitch: training, travel, family, fashion, gaming. For anyone thinking about keeping fans close year round, that feels like a resource worth paying attention to.
Some of the most interesting experiments we are seeing are where media organisations, leagues and teams bring athletes closer to their production and content plans.
Ferrari letting Charles Leclerc and Lewis Hamilton take over its channels for a day gave @scuderiaferrari its most successful day in 2026. The Bundesliga asking Jamie Vardy to host Friday night watchalongs puts a familiar player voice around its live product. And what stood out about Fox’s excellent World Cup coverage was the freedom given to on-air talent like Zlatan Ibrahimovic and Thierry Henry to be themselves on their own channels, pairing broadcast production values with voices that travelled well beyond the live show.
It’s remarkable that athletes have built their audiences largely without premium match IP. In most sports, rights agreements mean athletes cannot share their own best on-field moments. Imagine what Haaland’s summer might have looked like had he had the ability to supplement personality-driven posts with clips of his goals!
To this point, one approach we’re watching with interest is the Women’s Super League (WSL), whose most recent rights deal grants players permission to use match clips on their own social channels after each game.
When an athlete can pair their own voice with footage of their own moment, the combination of distribution plus rights could mean a step change in engagement for both player and league. In this model, the broadcaster brings credibility, production and live rights, while the athlete brings trust, tone and distribution.
For leagues, teams and broadcasters thinking about the season ahead, the open question is how to treat talent less as an IP risk to be managed and more as a distribution partner to build with.