For more than three decades, Sportel Monaco has been where the sports media business goes to do deals. Rights holders, broadcasters, streamers and the technology firms that sit between them descend on the Grimaldi Forum each October to buy, sell and size each other up.
That part isn’t changing. With the exhibition floor already 80 per cent sold out and more than 80 exhibitors expected, the 2026 edition is shaping up to be as busy as ever. Industry heavyweights including Relevent, Two Circles, Infront, LaLiga, the National Football League (NFL), Fifa, ESPN, Sportradar and Deltatre are among those already confirmed to attend, while the usual suspects like YouTube, JioStar, Warner Bros Discovery, AWS and IMG are also set to be part of the mix.
What is changing, however, is who else is in the room, and what they want to talk about.
Enter the CMOs
The biggest structural addition this year is the CMO Brand Programme, a full day of closed-door panels and curated networking taking place on Monday 19th October and run in collaboration with Qualcomm, the programme’s main sponsor.
The idea is simple, if overdue. Sportel has always been a media rights and distribution event. Brands have tended to arrive late to the party, once a rights deal is done and it’s time to buy inventory or sign a sponsorship.
This year, however, organisers want to bring them in much earlier – into conversations about content, audiences, data, and how a sports property’s value is built in the first place.
The timing is deliberate. With the traditional rights model under pressure in parts of the market, sponsorship and brand partnerships are carrying more of the commercial load. Sportel’s pitch is that those revenue lines should be developed together rather than in separate rooms.
The line-up gives the concept real weight. Ashish Babu, chief marketing officer at Tata Consultancy Services, whose sports portfolio runs from major marathons to Jaguar TCS Racing in Formula E, is joined by Revolut’s Rory Miller Cheevers, Diageo’s Paddy Carberry, who heads up sport for Guinness and its Premier League and Six Nations partnerships, and Qualcomm’s Garret Ponder, who leads brand partnerships for a Snapdragon portfolio that includes Manchester United.
Fintech, IT services, drinks and chips: four very different categories, all betting heavily on sport. Elsewhere another session will discuss sport and brands as a two-way growth engine, while RTL AdAlliance chief executive Stéphane Corbule leads a discussion on rethinking sponsorship for an age shaped by media, technology and content.
The organisers are candid that this first edition of the CMO Brand Programme is a starting point rather than a finished product. But if it works, it could reshape what Sportel is for.
Tebas takes the stage
On the main Speakers Stage, the headline act is LaLiga president Javier Tebas, who will sit down for a keynote interview on the league’s next moves in broadcasting.
Expect talk of new distribution models, partnerships and format innovation, as well as piracy and audience fragmentation – two subjects Tebas has never been shy about.
Few executives in European soccer generate as many headlines, and fewer still are as willing to say what they think in public.
Four masterclasses, four big questions
The conference is anchored by four masterclasses, each tackling a pressure point for the industry.
The first, on the new global sports ecosystem, looks at how consumption is going global, how businesses are moving from direct-to-consumer models towards more interconnected B2B2C setups, and how investors judge opportunities across the value chain. Deltatre chief revenue officer Peter Bellamy, IMG’s Hillary Mandel and Bruin Capital founding partner Jeff Roth will share their perspectives in what promises to be a useful discussion on the convergence of technology, rights and capital.
Meanwhile artificial intelligence (AI) gets its own session, of course, with the emphasis firmly on moving from experiments to full-scale use.
SVG’s Ken Kerschbaumer leads a panel featuring JioStar’s Prashant Khanna, BuzzMyVideos chief executive Paola Marinone, Ekstraklasa’s Marcin Serafin and SURJ Sports Investment chief executive Danny Townsend. Governance, IP, rights and trust are all on the table.
Production is next. After an Olympic Games and a Fifa World Cup that showed top-tier coverage no longer needs hundreds of staff on site, SVG Europe’s Will Strauss asks what comes next. On that, Bundesliga Media’s Dominik Scholler, TNA Wrestling president Carlos Silva, LiveU’s Sarah Jakob and Protocol Sports Marketing’s Lowell Conn all weigh in.
Finally, live betting. Bolt6 chief executive Steve Carter, AWS’s Paul Devlin and Sportradar’s Patrick Mostboeck will dig into the technology behind in-play wagering, and the thorny issues of latency, integrity and regulation that come with it.
More than 80 exhibitors and hundreds of delegates are expected to attend this year’s event (Image credit: Getty Images)
YouTube’s big push
If one company is making a statement in Monaco this year, it’s YouTube.
The platform has three dedicated sessions. Jonny Keogh, head of UK sports, will make the case for putting YouTube at the centre of rights holders’ distribution strategies. Pedro Pina, YouTube’s vice president for EMEA, joins LiveMode partner Thiago Tourinho and media analyst Evan Shapiro to unpack how LiveMode broke World Cup broadcast records, and what creator communities and brand partnerships mean for live sport. A third session with sports executive Jason Wachs is still to be detailed.
For an industry still working out how far to lean into free, creator-led platforms, those sessions could be among the most useful of the week.
Elsewhere, case studies from Deltatre (World Athletics), Pixotope (BBC Sport), ViewLift (Fisu) and the Esports Foundation (Warner Bros Discovery) sit alongside sessions featuring Mediapro, Dolby OptiView, Wurl, Epic Clips, Grey Matter Entertainment and the XR Sports Alliance, plus the Pitch Perfect Innovation Contest.
Why it matters
Strip away the panels and the view of the harbour, and Sportel’s 2026 programme reads like a map of where sports media revenue is under strain and where the next growth might come from: brands getting involved earlier, capital looking for entry points, AI and remote production cutting costs, betting deepening engagement, and platforms like YouTube reshaping reach.
“What makes Sportel Monaco unique is its ability to bring the right people together, at the right time, in the right place,” says Marine Picoulet, Sportel Monaco’s executive director.
The organisers are also thinking beyond the Riviera. Sportel Canada debuts in Toronto on 23rd and 24th March 2027, part of a wider push into North America. But for three days this October, Monaco is where the conversation about the future of sports media will be happening, and this year, the brands will be in the room too.
Combining richer content, in-depth data and exclusive community benefits, SportsPro+ is your VIP pass into the global sports industry. Discover more here.