The playing field for sports seems to be getting bigger by the minute.
NFL teams are going international, European soccer clubs are growing their footprints stateside, and US women’s leagues like the NWSL and WNBA are eager to add franchises as their fandoms expand. Less traditionally popular sports like Formula 1 and pickleball are gaining steam, too.
All the fan, brand, and investor interest has made for a “more professionalized” sports landscape and mounting competition for fan attention, Deloitte principals, directors, and leaders wrote in the consulting firm’s 2025 Global Sports Industry Outlook. Here are some takeaways for how sports organizations can approach a couple of major components of the industry, like streaming deals and data collection.
Stream on: Streaming live sports is the norm these days, with more SVOD providers than ever for fans, as well as leagues and teams, to choose from. As the Deloitte authors note, “fragmentation is a persistent concern,” but new content and services keep coming.
Sports broadcasters and streamers are increasingly adding shoulder programming like podcasts and documentaries to their coverage, and some fans are eating it up: 40% of Gen Zers and millennials said “they’d like more documentary-style content about sports and players in the offseason,” according to Deloitte Digital Media Trends data.
While there’s still a relative lack of shoulder programming related to women athletes, women’s sports content is growing through the introduction of new platforms like Whoopi Goldberg’s All Women’s Sports Network and iHeartMedia’s Women’s Sports Audio Network. There’s also social media content for streamers to contend with, considering more than 90% of Gen Zers and millennials consume sports content on social, according to Deloitte.
To keep up with fan habits, the report notes that leagues and teams should seek to strike a balance between “monetizing their business, maximizing sports rights payouts, and the best interests of the fans they serve,” while leaning on streaming and social content to create new fans..
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Data dump: Data collection and implementation, though not always top-of-mind in the sports industry in years past, has become a bigger priority, and as more sports orgs embrace the use of fan data for everything from improving venue experiences to securing new sponsorships, Deloitte expects “to see access to meaningful and actionable fan data become an important selling point in negotiating and structuring these partnerships.”
Clean rooms, which are already in use at some major broadcasters like Disney, may be particularly useful for sports organizations in their work with brands since they enable both parties to share and analyze anonymized data, according to Deloitte. Leagues like the NFL and teams like German soccer club FC Bayern Munich already have fan databases of their own.
While there are financial and tech challenges that come with incorporating more data into sports sponsorships, the report suggests that it will be “a major focus for sports organizations in the coming year.”
Bop to the top? With the growth of existing leagues around the world and the emergence of new ones, the report raises the question of “the upper limit of sports fans’ attention and spending.” Some newer leagues might find their audiences fading this year, the report’s authors wrote, but there are also still opportunities for innovative sports orgs to grow.
“Has society reached peak sports?” the report asks. Not if the sports marketers have their way.