Sports Leagues and Broadcasters Must Tailor Engagement Strategies for Gen Z
Free Live Sports president Cathy Rasenberger argues that sports leagues and broadcasters need to adapt to the ways Gen Z viewers consume content—short-form, social, athlete-centric storylines—if they want to engage and retain younger audiences in this discussion with MTech Sport, Media & Entertainment consultant Matt Stagg, Play Anywhere CSO Pete Scott, and Hub Entertainment Research principal Jon Giegengack from Streaming Media Connect 2025.
Going Where the Viewers Already Are
Stagg asserts that broadcasters are waiting for people to watch sports like they used to, which is a lazy strategy because viewing habits have changed. He wonders how they should be planning engagement strategies.
Rasenberger notes, “From my point of view, I think it’s got to be ubiquitous. You have to go where your viewers are, and Gen Z viewers are not watching SVOD or traditional linear cable or broadcast. They are watching short form, they’re watching clips, they’re watching highlights, and it’s on social media and it’s on FAST and it’s on YouTube.” The professional leagues understand this—if they don’t have a strategy that reaches all of the different demographic groups, they won’t reach them at all.
Rasenberger’s FAST platform is “layering on top an SDK that uses short-form video to engage younger fans. It’s called Glued In. And it enables community interaction, gamification, rewards, betting data, and moderated UGC, and it’s vertical. So you can share it onto social media.” This aids in content discovery: “[If y]ou want to bring young people in, do it in the language they speak, which is short-form video, and then sell them up on the longer-form content.”
Scott builds on this point by providing the example of ESPN’s app. “There’s a section called Verts. So it’s Home, Scores, Verts. And Verts is literally vertical video. A lot of that’s being powered by WSC Sports to basically understand that the audience is looking at vertical content.”
He agrees with Rasenberger that you need to go where the audiences are. It’s also important to be “respectful of how they consume their content, and then roll it up as much as you can into the live experience.” Scott discusses the failure of the World Cup’s recent draw to make a big splash. “That was just the cards that were dealt,” he concedes. “But think about the storylines, think about the players. It’s almost like a movie business now. If you start six months out before the release, and if you’re not dropping a little tease about the actor or the storyline or behind-the-scenes video, people just won’t be interested in it.”
Community-Building as a Boon for Engagement
Scott believes that upcoming events will provide opportunities for better engagement: the Super Bowl, the Olympics, etc. “You’ll start to see, I hope, broadcasters engaging audiences in multiple places where they know they can get audiences to respond,” he says. In addition, making money from these efforts is an important aspect: “How do we placate a large sponsor like a Coca-Cola or [a] FIFA?” He believes AI will play a role. “AI is going to basically start to match the content with the person and the particular personalized ad. And I think you’re going to see a lot of interest around that.” Scott foresees a marriage between personalization and monetization on multiple platforms.
Rasenberger concurs. “Yeah, I think you hit the nail on the head. I think that now younger audiences follow the athlete. They don’t necessarily follow the team as much. So they want to know[, for example,] what does that athlete eat during the day? What do his bio rhythms look like?” She says they follow these details like they would follow any social media influencer’s output.
Giegengack adds, “It’s kind of a shift from serving an audience to serving a community, and people that are fans of football, or better yet, people that are fans of a specific team, they want to know everything that’s going on.” He cites the NFL draft as something that’s become a massive event, along with the NFL Combine. “When it began, they just put [the Combine] on TV just because, but without realizing that people, especially in the off-season, will eat this stuff up. And I think that the range of things that fans will watch to feel part of that community is huge. And it’s a really, really good sign even for the big sports because now you have stuff that will keep these people engaged and maybe even become more engaged in the off-seasons while there’s no games to watch. And that used to be a struggle when all you had to work with was linear TV, but now there’s no shortage at all of ways to keep people engaged while it’s in the off-season.”
Join us February 24–26, 2026 for more thought leadership, actionable insights, and lively debate at Streaming Media Connect 2026! Registration is open!
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