We Keep Blaming Fans for Problems the Sports Industry Created
Apparently, sports fans have become the problem. Younger fans don't have the attention span to watch a full match. Fans aren't as loyal as they used to be. They don't want to pay for sport. They'd rather watch clips on social media than the real thing. They're distracted, difficult to reach and constantly looking for whatever comes next. I've heard versions of all of those arguments, usually followed by a conversation about how the industry needs to change fans' behavior.
I'm increasingly convinced we've got it backwards. Perhaps fans haven't become harder to serve. Perhaps we've made sport harder to follow.
Too Much Friction
Take younger audiences. I've been quite vocal about the lazy assumption that they somehow lack the attention span to watch live sport. I don't buy it. This is a generation perfectly capable of spending hours gaming, binge-watching a series, following creators or disappearing down a rabbit hole about something they're passionate about. They don't have an attention deficit. They have an incredibly effective filter for things they don't find relevant or engaging. That's a very different problem.
Yet when younger fans behave differently, our instinct is often to diagnose the audience rather than examine the experience we've created for them. We see younger fans consuming more highlights and following games through clips, updates and social media. The easy conclusion is that they no longer want long-form live sport. But look at the environment around that behavior. Fans can need several subscriptions to follow the teams they care about. Rights move between services. Matches can be difficult to find. Some games are available in one place, others somewhere completely different. Then we're surprised when a generation brought up expecting instant digital access finds another way to follow the action.
Maybe the clip isn't always replacing the match because the fan doesn't have the attention span for the match. Maybe sometimes the clip is simply easier to find. That's an uncomfortable distinction because one explanation puts the responsibility on the fan. The other puts some of it back on us.
And this isn't only about younger audiences. We've spent years adding friction to the sports experience while simultaneously talking about the importance of fan engagement. More subscriptions. More apps. More logins. More platforms. More places to search for the thing you already know you want to watch. Then we commission research to understand why fan behaviour is changing.
There is, of course, a commercial reality behind all of this. Sports rights are enormously valuable. Different markets require different distribution strategies, and nobody deliberately sets out to make life difficult for supporters. Individual decisions can make perfect commercial sense. The problem appears when you look at those decisions through the eyes of the fan rather than the organisation. The fan doesn't see a sophisticated rights strategy. They just want to know where the match is.
This is where I think we need to be careful about the language we use as an industry. Calling audiences "distracted," "disloyal," or "hard to reach" can become a convenient way of avoiding more difficult questions about the products and experiences we're giving them. Are they really difficult to reach, or are we expecting them to come to us? Are they less loyal, or are we making loyalty increasingly expensive and complicated? Do they really prefer highlights, or have highlights become the simplest way to remain connected? Do younger audiences really have shorter attention spans, or are they simply less tolerant of experiences that don't earn their attention? Those are very different questions.
None of this means sport should desperately chase every change in consumer behavior. Quite the opposite. The live event remains one of the most extraordinary things our industry has. Sport can create tension, emotion, and community in a way very few other forms of entertainment can replicate precisely because nobody knows what happens next. We shouldn't be trying to turn a 90-minute football match into 90 one-minute clips. But we should make that 90-minute match as easy as possible to discover, access, and enjoy.
Creating New Entry Points in the Fan Journey
And around it, we should give fans different ways to enter the story. Highlights, creators, social content, games, statistics, documentaries, and athlete-led media aren't necessarily competitors to the live event. For many people, they're the route into it. That's particularly important for the next generation of fans. Their journey into a sport may look completely different from ours. That's fine. The mistake is assuming that because the journey has changed, the destination has to change too.
A teenager discovering Formula One through a creator, football through EA Sports FC, or an athlete through TikTok isn't necessarily a lesser fan. They might simply be at the beginning of becoming one. Our job isn't to tell them they're consuming sport incorrectly. It's to make the next step irresistible.
Perhaps that's the bigger lesson. Before we blame changing audiences, we should look at the experience we've built around them. Fans haven't suddenly become the problem. They've just become much better at avoiding experiences that don't work for them.
Related Articles
The ability to stream alternative animated and video game versions of a live sports event have taken a step closer with tests involving EA Sports, broadcaster Sky, and German premier soccer league Bundesliga.
28 Aug 2026
The sports industry spends a lot of time discussing how to attract younger audiences. Every conference seems to feature a panel on Gen Z viewing habits. Every strategy document contains a section on fan acquisition. Every rights holder, broadcaster and streaming platform is searching for the next generation of supporters. Yet despite all this attention, I often feel we are asking the wrong question.
25 Aug 2026
Driving viewership and attention for new and niche sports streaming requires deploying alternative strategies for building buzz, visibility, and must-see excitement. Bulldog DM founder & CEO John Petrocelli explains how the recently launched Beach Football League achieved liftoff for the sport and its live-streamed experiences, leveraging social and celebrity involvement and choosing the right platforms for delivery and distribution, as he describes in conversation with Chris Pfaff of Chris Pfaff Tech Media in this clip from Streaming Media Connect 2026.
03 Jun 2026
With the highlights-first orientation of Gen Z sports fans, serving up a slate of live game broadcasts isn't enough for regional sports networks (RSNs) to reach younger cord-cutters and cord-nevers, sign them up, and keep them engaged. This means thinking outside the broadcast box and deploying alternate strategies via clips, social, and other types of programming, as Space City Home Network GM Jim Colasanto and NESN CMO and CDO Ahmed Darwish explain in this discussion with ViewLift VP Global GTM Strategy Chance Mason in this clip from Streaming Media 2026.
19 May 2026
As a new generation of highlights-first fans moves into the sports fandom mainstream, sports broadcasters need the agility and tech-savviness to produce and monetize personalized, short-form sports content at scale that meets the experiential demands of millennial and Gen Z fans. Fortunately Gen AI is a game-changer for sports highlights and personalization, as Play Anywhere's Pete Scott and Ring Digital's Brian Ring discuss in this clip from Streaming Media Connect 2025.
03 Mar 2025