Since the late 1980s, the sports media business has been driven by insatiable demand for premium live rights. Initially the preserve of free-to-air and PayTV platforms, more recent intervention by telcos and streaming platforms has helped top franchises like the NFL, Olympic Games, the English Premier League, UEFA Champion’s League, IPL cricket and UFC achieve stratospheric financial valuations.
Until recently, this titanic battle for top tier live rights operated independently of the social video sector. But that hasn’t prevented the emergence of a thriving sports ecosystem on leading platforms.
In 2025, YouTube estimated that 35bn hours of sports content is consumed annually on the platform. TikTok, meanwhile, estimates that 57% of its users watch sports content on the platform every week. From a creator POV, it recently reported that there have been an incredible 67m creations under the #football hashtag alone.
Look behind those numbers and it becomes apparent that sport on social is a diverse, democratic and endlessly dynamic ecosystem, encompassing everything from elite soccer highlights and athlete channels to creator-inspired events and brand-funded series.
As a result, the sector has birthed an array of agile and entrepreneurial companies – each with their own playbook on marketing, monetisation and fandom.
Little Dot Studios, for example, has built a sports-based model analogous to the work it does for IP-owning clients in other genres. Robbie Spargo, co-managing director, agency, explains: “For the last seven or eight years, we’ve been working with sports rights holders, like the England & Wales Cricket Board, Lawn Tennis Association, Italian football league Serie A and the Women’s Super League.”
Utilising an impressive array of content assets, Spargo says: “Our role is to help rights holders develop a social media blueprint to achieve objectives like reach, monetisation and participation. So for the LTA, getting people to play tennis is a massive part of their strategy. We then implement right holder strategies, running social channels and creating everything from long form series on YouTube to TikTok shorts.”
Getting the best out of each platform requires a distinct approach, he adds: “In general TV-style content – highlights and live content – performs well on YouTube. Instagram is more mixed media, so there’s a lot of power in combining video with brilliant photos and graphics. TikTok, broadly speaking, is more stripped back, raw and authentic.”
A lot of LDS’s work involves leveraging the assets controlled by rights holders, but arguably the real revolution brought about by social has been the increased profile of talent, creators and fans.
US female rugby star Ilona Maher is one example of how athletes can bring a new narrative via social. Spargo says: “If you have somebody cutting through to fans in a different way that’s a phenomenal asset that should be embraced. With the Women’s Super League, players now have rights to show clips from their games via their own social handles and that is a great way to cut through.” Spargo makes a similar case for engaging with creators, though he advises that: “The crucial point about creators is that you have to do things the way they would. You need to approach it as a partnership where they have an authentic voice in conversations.”
Spargo says monetisation is of increasing importance to clients. “Today, it’s about finding the optimum use of content to maximise both reach and revenue. What makes sport especially interesting is that many rights holders have commercial partners who are also interested in accessing the social audience. So often you find that things like branded content are built into partnerships between rights holder and sponsors.”
Producer After Party Studios has been one of the big beneficiaries of the growing involvement of creators in sport, making series in partnership with Sky Sports and Sky Bet, as well as handling the production of The Sidemen’s annual charity match, which this year drew 90,000 to Wembley.
APS CEO Joshua Barnett says several powerful factors have come together to drive sports consumption on social media. “It all starts with the fact that fans want more around the action. We got into sport about five years ago because we saw an opportunity to focus on the characters within the sector – to show fans how being an elite athlete wasn’t all about some unattainable lifestyle.” Barnett says: “We realised we could tap into the online audience’s growing fascination with creators. Young sports stars had often grown up loving creators just like the rest of the social audience. That paved the way for us to bring the two worlds together – making shows where stars like Mason Mount and Jack Grealish interacted with creators like Harry Pinero.”
Intuitively, APS hit on one of the key drivers of sport on social – the pivotal role of creators as spirit guides for sports fans.
Earlier this year, YouTube VP ads marketing Anne Marie Nelson-Bogle alluded to this when she reported that social sports content “would be unimaginable without creators. 54% of people say they would rather watch a creator break down a major event than watch the event itself.”
The increasing influence of creators in the sports world has led to some intriguing recent developments.
For APS’s Barnett one of the most prominent has been interest from brands: “We started to get a lot of brands reaching out to us about getting involved with creator talent. One of our biggest successes has been a partnership with Sky Sports on a football entertainment format called Scenes.”
Scenes takes advantage of Sky Sports’ access to English Premier League content and talent, says Barnett. “In a sense, it is an elevated match day vlog, but our approach has been to bring YouTube talent together with legends of the game and where possible, players from each of the teams. The audiences love it. We did 30 million views across the first couple of series and are now into series three.”
Alongside its relationship with Sky Sports, APS is also working with Sky Bet, headline sponsor of the English Football League.
It produces a similar show to Scenes, called League of 72, and has just been handed the task of leading digital production on the gaming company’s digital-first Super 6 brand.
This will include formats like 6th Sense, which digs into the ridiculous ways fans predict fixture results, and Prove Me Wrong where fans debate football’s biggest talking points.
While rights holder assets, athlete images, brand financing and creator content are all engines of growth for sport on social, it has become increasingly clear in recent years that the one thing they are all seeking to ignite is fandom.
Content and audience may be the building blocks of monetisation, but there’s a growing realisation that super fandom is the key to unlocking multiple sustainable revenue streams.
COPA90 chief strategy officer Ross Whittow-Williams says his company came to this conclusion as it built its presence out across social platforms. “We realised that more and more places were opening up where you could reach and engage with fans in meaningful ways. So we consciously embraced the antithesis of a platform-based approach. Our model adapts and flexes and evolves with fan behaviours.”
This fan-centric model is crucial, he says, because: “Fans are retreating into harder to reach spaces that are protected by personalised algorithms – Whatsapp and so on. Nowadays, anyone can achieve reach but turning that into meaningful engagement and action is much harder, and that’s the focus of the COPA90 model.” COPA90’s mantra is that it is “about the world outside the 90 minutes, because that makes the 90 minutes matter more”.
Using this as its touchstone, the company sets out to understand where fans spend time (and why).
“Then we create strategies that reach and engage with them,” says Whittow-Williams.
This strategy is built around three pillars of content, he explains: “‘Feed’ content that meets fans in their personalised feeds and captures cultural conversations.‘Features’ content and activations that demonstrate unique access to – and knowledge of – the world outside the 90 minutes.‘Flagship’ content, which focuses on season defining moments that establish a culture defining position in global football.”
An example of feed content was a vertical series called The 92 Club Challenge. Here COPA90 sent a creator to every football league ground in England, where he scored and rated them.
“We talk about content within Feed, as needing to pass the WhatsApp test line. Would you share this with a mate?,” says Whittow-Williams.
At the Flagship end of the spectrum, he points to COPA90’s four-part series Once In A Lifetime: Argentina. “While all of the world’s media got on a plane to fly to the Qatar World Cup in 2022, we had production teams embedded in Argentina instead.”
For COPA90, the next step is geographic expansion, with the 2026 FIFA World Cup in the US, Canada and Mexico viewed as a pivotal opportunity.
This summer the company launched its Best Job In The World initiative to find six new faces for the brand in North America.
And as the World Cup approaches, “there will be a lot of programming about the growth of soccer over the last 30 years in North America”.
The core question is how does COPA90 make money.
The answer, says Whittow-Williams, is “not the content itself, but the insight, influence and position our content gives us. We’ve built a data-led understanding of fans that allows us to productise our knowledge as a service to rights holders and brands.”
Some brands, like Red Bull, have worked this out for themselves.
The brand’s long-standing association with adventure sports and athletes has powered a multiplatform social media strategy that encompasses live event coverage, branded content and always-on community engagement.
The fact that its unit sales have increased from 4 billion cans in 2011 to 12.7 billion cans in 2024 just goes to underline the power of sport + social.
This article was originally published in issue #1 of The Drop magazine.
