On Place de la Concorde in Paris this summer, the battle for Olympic gold will be fought by athletes who go by the names of Phil Wizard, Shigekix and 671.
The trio are among the top-ranked B-boys and B-girls in the world of competitive breaking — the official term for what many know as breakdancing — which will make its debut at the games in the French capital. It will join other recent Olympic additions surfing, skateboarding and sport climbing.
Organisers hope that such events will appeal to a demographic that research suggests is losing interest not just in the Olympics but in live sport more generally: young people.
Evidence of a drop-off in youth engagement with live sport is ample and growing. A YouGov report last year found that just 31 per cent of global sports fans aged 18-24 watched live matches, compared with 75 per cent for those 55 and over. Instead, younger viewers were more likely to watch highlights clips or interact with star athletes via social media, while a large portion engage with their preferred sports through video games.
A separate survey from Morning Consult in the US showed that almost half of Gen Z — defined as those born between 1997 and 2012 — had never attended a live professional sporting event, while only 53 per cent counted themselves as sports fans, compared with 69 per cent of millennials. “Gen Z’s overall interest in sports remains significantly below that of older generations,” Morning Consult said in the accompanying report.
Explanations for these changing habits vary, from rising ticket and TV subscription costs which have priced younger people out, to a preference for short-form content, or a simple overload of other forms of entertainment that did not exist when older fans got their first taste of live sport.
Whatever the cause, such trends threaten the long-term viability of a business model built on multibillion-dollar live broadcasting deals and have set off alarm bells across the industry.
Investors and executives running clubs and competitions are responding with a range of new ideas, including changes to how live sport is delivered, how it is packaged and even how the sport itself is played. Optimists believe that shifting tastes could even present an opportunity for sport to move beyond its traditional bases of hardcore followers and tap into millions of new fans.
The rapid growth of women’s sport, for example, is creating new fans. In the US, the popularity of female basketball player Caitlin Clark helped the University of Iowa women’s basketball team smash TV ratings records all season. The collegiate national championship game drew nearly 19mn viewers, the most-watched US sports programme outside gridiron football in at least five years. Deloitte expects women’s professional sport to generate revenue of $1.3bn this year, up from $981mn in 2023.
“Everyone is worried about the future of the industry right now. It’s much more of a bear market than a bull market,” says Gareth Balch, co-founder of consultancy Two Circles, which advises a long list of top sports businesses, including the National Football League, the English Premier League and the Wimbledon tennis championships. “But there is hope.”
For many sports looking to engage a new, younger audience, the first port of call is documentary filmmakers.
The huge success of Netflix’s Drive to Survive, a behind-the-scenes look at the personalities in motor racing series Formula One, has spawned similar shows on rugby, golf and cycling. YouGov research showed that 20 per cent of British sports fans aged 18 to 29 counted themselves as “avid” F1 fans, but 31 per cent identified as dedicated Drive to Survive viewers. Meanwhile F1’s female fan base has risen from 10 per cent of the total before the show launched to 27 per cent in 2022.
Executives across the sector believe that introducing their sport to a wider range of people is an important step to boost interest in star players and top teams on social media, which should then feed through to live competition viewership.
Another strategy is to find alternative delivery channels for the games themselves. During the Qatar World Cup in 2022, tournament organiser Fifa allowed Brazilian fans to watch their national team’s games for free on Twitch, the video game streaming site, after partnering with the influencer Casimiro. Millions of people tuned in.
Some of this alternative programming is targeting even younger fans. In the US, the NFL aired the most recent Super Bowl live on Nickelodeon, a children’s cable network, and deployed cartoon characters SpongeBob SquarePants and Patrick Starfish as commentators. Using augmented reality, viewers on the channel were able to watch virtual green slime sprayed over the end zone after a touchdown and a giant robotic Plankton — the villain of the children’s TV show — flying over the stadium dropping buckets of cartoon chum on the crowd.
Barney Francis, who runs global production for sports marketing agency IMG, says that the industry would continue to innovate with alternative programming “to suit different ages and tastes”. “Technology is allowing producers to become more creative in how they address live sport to create new viewer experiences that transcend sport and become cultural moments,” he says.
Beyond increasing their presence on social channels such as TikTok and Snapchat to reach young adults, many competition organisers are embracing online gaming to help connect with teenagers and children, teach them about their sport and ultimately convert them into life-long fans.
EA Sports claims that playing EA Sports FC, the most popular video game franchise in history, increases the likelihood of a young person buying football match tickets by 18 per cent and paying for a TV subscription by 21 per cent.
The Wimbledon tennis championships have been among the pioneers, building immersive experiences on Roblox, a gaming platform popular with school-age children. In WimbleWorld, users can play tennis-themed mini-games, and interact with a virtual Andy Murray. For older gamers, the tournament organisers last year created Race to Wimbledon on Fortnite, a gaming platform with a big teenage userbase. Much of this is driven by research showing that interest in sport is typically forged by the age of 14.
“You’ve got to fish where the fishes are,” says Usama Al-Qassab, marketing and commercial director at the All England Club, which runs the championships. “If the first thing they’re switching on is their PlayStation, or they’re looking at their mobile phone, you’ve got to be able to interact with that [technology] first and foremost and use that as an on-ramp.”
Other sport franchises/competitions are following suit. In March, the English Premier League took a minority stake in Rezzil, a virtual reality software developer, and signed a four-year deal to build a game that would “place users on the pitch and in the boots of their favourite Premier League players”. The league has also been working with Sky Sports and IMG to trial a new “Game Mode” for live broadcasts, where TV viewers can switch to a camera angle that mimics the look of EA Sports FC.
Some investors and executives imagine a future where new technology turns live sport into a more immersive experience. Ian Charles, co-founder of sport-focused investment firm Arctos, mapped out one scenario where walking through the turnstiles at a live game could open up a range of online benefits through your phone. A fan might get the chance to map their child’s face on to a star player when watching a live game back home on the sofa.
“On your TV, your son is playing right alongside LeBron James because he’s been grafted on to [teammate] Antonio Davis. Your son is dunking and blocking and celebrating,” says Charles. “That’s an incredible way to pull fandom into the game.”
Many sports have been tinkering with their existing formats with small rule changes designed to speed up play to maximise the action.
Major League Baseball (MLB), for example, introduced a time limit last year to force pitchers to start throwing the ball quicker, while stoppage time at the end of football matches increased during the 2022 World Cup in order to dissuade teams from time-wasting. F1 has added new sprint races, which last around half an hour rather than 90-minute plus Grand Prix, as a way to offer more bite-sized events.
But some sports are going much further, exploring alternative formats as a way to draw in younger viewers, inspired partly by the huge success of the Twenty20 format in cricket, in which matches last a few hours rather than four or five days. The Indian Premier League Twenty20 tournament has become one of the most valuable sports businesses in the world, with combined TV and streaming rights generating $6.2bn when they were auctioned off in 2022.
Some in the sports industry have advocated shorter versions of tennis, basketball and rugby, while Michael Johnson, the former US Olympic gold medallist runner, has recently secured investor backing for a new “fan-focused” athletics league.
Greg Maffei, the chief executive of Liberty Media, which owns F1 and recently paid €4.2bn for motorbike racing series MotoGP, says that decision makers across the world of sport are looking at ways to tighten rules to speed up play and make the viewing experience “more compelling”.
“We can argue whether it’s the shortened attention spans of a younger audience, but the reality is their viewing patterns are different and their interest level and what they’re interested in is different. You have to find them where they are in a way to meet their needs.”
Among the most drastic experiments being pursued is TGL, a two-hour golf tournament backed by Tiger Woods and Rory McIlroy that will be played between three-player teams of top stars in an arena. Much of the action takes place on a simulator, with players eventually moving to a real-life putting green. The idea is to create a more digestible version of golf compared with the sprawling, days-long contests the game is known for.
TGL’s teams have attracted a long list of big name backers, including Boston Red Sox and Liverpool FC owner Fenway Sports Group, billionaire hedge fund manager Steve Cohen and basketball star Stephen Curry. The new league, which will air on ESPN on Monday nights, plans to launch next January after hurricane damage to its Florida venue forced a year-long delay.
“We believe that it’s a product golf fans will like,” says Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, who co-owns one of the TGL teams with his tennis star wife Serena Williams and her sister Venus. “But when I wake up every morning and talk to our team president, our default mindset is how do we get that next generation of golfer?”
Not all sports are worried about shrinking youth viewership. One area that appears to be thriving with younger audiences is combat sport, such as mixed martial arts (MMA) and boxing.
Executives in this corner of the industry suggest it has attributes that make it particularly in tune with young fans. For one, the violent knockouts, which land in an instant, create visceral moments that lend themselves to social media.
The unpredictability of each bout also requires constant attention, unlike a 90-minute football match or a 52-lap F1 race. A boxing fight might last a full 12 rounds, or could be over in 30 seconds — something that can be detrimental for traditional broadcasters who have to fill time around pre-sold advertising, but is less of a problem in the age of streaming.
“When you see a knockout, it’s delightful. It gets the endorphins going,” says Todd DuBoef, president of US-based boxing promoter Top Rank. “You’re there and you have no idea when it’s going to end. And that plays on you constantly, because that punch could be the last punch. You’re not going to get popcorn and beer.”
Strong appetite among younger viewers helps explain why entertainment conglomerate Endeavor sealed a deal late last year to merge the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) with WWE, which produces scripted wrestling. The merger valued the combined entity, now listed on the New York Stock Exchange, at more than $20bn. WWE has more than 100mn subscribers to its YouTube channel, compared with 6.7mn for the Premier League and 12.8mn for the NFL.
Since then, streaming site Netflix has agreed to pay $5bn to carry Raw, WWE’s Monday night live event, for the next 10 years. It is also set to air live boxing for the first time in July, starting with a bout between 57-year-old retired champion Mike Tyson and YouTuber-turned-boxer Jake Paul, 30 years his junior. Although boxing experts consider it little more than a stunt, analysts expect it to be the most watched fight in history.
Some in the industry believe that fears around young people’s appetite for sport are overdone, and that much of the gloomy data wrongly conflates changing habits with waning interest.
Instead, they argue, what rights holders are experiencing is the shift to a future where the fan base is less white, less male and younger than it has been in the past, and so it interacts in different ways.
New classes of fans are willing to pay for in-person events. Attendance at the Women’s Super League and the Women’s Championships, the top two tiers of professional football in England, have surpassed 1mn this season, breaking the previous record set a year earlier of 689,000.
“We’re not trying to take market share from men’s football. We believe this is a different audience,” says Nikki Doucet, the chief executive of the recently established NewCo, which runs women’s professional football in England.
Elsewhere in Europe, a report from PwC conducted for La Liga, Spain’s football league, showed that while Spanish fans under the age of 24 were less inclined to watch live TV, they were more interested in sport generally and more willing to pay for it than older cohorts.
Balch, the sports consultant, says his top advice for clients is to switch focus away from what he calls the “supply side” — the players, the teams, the fixtures, the stadiums — and to dedicate more energy to tapping into the vast pool of people around the world who have not previously engaged with sport.
“Anyone who sits here and says ‘I know what the impact is going to be of the YouTube generation coming through and how they are going to want to consume live long-form sport and whether they want to pay for it’ is lying,” says Balch. “Market forces will drive where it is going.”
