A couple of posts ago I introduced the fandom chasm, four things that have to work together to close the gap between how fans behave now and how sport is built to reach them. Last time was brand salience. This time: consumption, how fans actually watch, discover and follow now, measured against how most organisations still assume they do.
The instinct when attention fragments is to chase it everywhere: more platforms, more formats, more partners carrying your content. That instinct is understandable, and it’s the wrong fix.
The fragmentation is real, and it’s accelerating. Sports content across the top streaming platforms grew 52% year on year in the first quarter of 2026 alone, split across five platforms with no single one holding a majority share: Amazon at roughly 38.5%, Netflix at 25.9%, Disney+ at 23.7%, Paramount+ at 10.3% (up 219% on the back of its UFC deal alone), and Apple TV taking a slice too. Free ad-supported sports content grew a further 30% on top of that. There’s no longer a single place “where sport lives” for a rights holder to defend. Rights are splintering faster than any single organisation can consolidate a fanbase around one channel, and it’s fuelling real fatigue: US broadcasters are pushing the FCC on “viewing fragmentation” as a regulatory issue in its own right, and piracy is rising in direct response to how hard it’s become to simply find the game.
Discovery has changed as much as distribution. 62% of fans now say they discovered a new team, player or league through short-form video, not a broadcast or a fixture list. Gen Z follows athletes and personalities rather than teams or institutions, and their attention is earned in seconds by an algorithm, not held by loyalty to a badge or a season ticket. That’s not a taste difference to wait out. It’s a completely different discovery mechanism, and most rights holders are still building content and distribution plans around the old one.
Millennials complicate the story, they don’t contradict it. They remain the highest-value fans in sport: nearly half watch daily, and 85% call themselves die-hard or regular. But they’re also the fastest segment to leave when content stops feeling personal to them specifically. Being the highest-value audience and being the most demanding audience turn out to be the same thing. Loyalty doesn’t buy patience with generic content any more, if anything it raises the bar.
So the answer isn’t “be on more platforms.” It’s tempting to read all this as a distribution problem, chase the fragmentation by signing up for every platform and format going. That’s expensive, thin, and it treats the symptom. The organisations actually closing this gap are the ones treating discovery as something to design for on purpose: building content for the grammar of where attention already is, short-form, creator-led, algorithmic, rather than cutting broadcast content down and hoping it travels. A three-minute highlights package edited for a ninety-second feed isn’t short-form content. It’s long-form content with the ending cut off, and audiences can tell the difference immediately.
I’ve built for this from both sides. Supertri’s athlete-led storytelling and in-house docuseries were built for how fans actually discover multisport content now, not repackaged from broadcast, and it doubled content consumption and got picked up by global broadcasters off the back of it, the reverse of the usual flow. On the platform side, growing NFL Game Pass subscribers 18% while cutting media spend by a quarter at DAZN came from the same instinct: meeting people with the right content in the place they already were, rather than trying to pull them somewhere else first.
Reacting to a consumption shift a year after it happens is functionally the same as not reacting at all. Fragmentation isn’t going to consolidate back down to a smaller number of channels. The organisations that treat this as a permanent condition to design around, rather than a phase to wait out, are the ones building an actual advantage out of it while everyone else keeps commissioning content for an audience that’s already moved on.
