🧠 Filling in the Gaps: Strategic Answers to Deloitte's 2025 Sports Industry Outlook Questions.

Welcome to the seventh edition of The Sports Stack. This week, we take a different approach. With the help of our first guest author, James Marshall, we take a deep dive (approx 10-12min read) into the 2025 Deloitte Global Sports Industry Outlook and answer the unanswered questions of the report. Grab a ☕️and enjoy.

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The full outlook can be found here.

We’ll cover the following topics. If you are reading online and you want to skip a topic, just click any of the anchor links below.

• What’s next for sports and streaming? 

• A more crowded playing field.

• Fan data drives monetisation for sports organisations.

• The evolution of immersive sports.

• Signposts for the future.

In each chapter, we’ll pull out the key stats Deloitte covered and then answer the strategic questions they posed.

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🎥 What’s next for sports and streaming?

Deloitte says:

• Immersive real-time integrations like in-gaming betting, seamless merchandising capabilities and social experience will continue to gain traction.

• 40% of Gen Zs and millennials (the new audience) say they’d like more documentary-style content about sports and players in the offseason. 

• [Watch out] The continued expansion of the sports streaming market will further fragment the landscape for fans. This could make discoverability difficult and increase fans’ costs. 35% of consumers say they need to subscribe to too many services to watch all the events they want to watch. 

Deloitte’s Strategic Questions to Answer:

Q. How can streaming video-on-demand providers use sports content strategically to help build loyalty and boost retention among their subscribers and keep them from churning?

SVOD providers like Apple, Amazon and Netflix can draw on their successes in other verticals to create compelling sports streaming experiences. 

Ecosystem integration - Apple’s seamless integration across its ecosystem (e.g., Apple TV+, iPhones, and Apple Music) encourages users to stay within its services. By integrating its sports offerings into Apple TV+ and providing adjacent sports content, in addition to its impressive existing non-sport content, Apple can build a compelling all-year-round package that guards against subscriber churn.

Customer-Centric Models - Amazon’s flexible subscription options and personalised offerings have helped them translate this into tailored sports packages, such as single-game pricing or ad-supported tiers. Last week, Amazon UK announced that they will start providing 3 pay-per-view games from France’s Ligue 1, which are available to purchase for £2.49. These games are available to everyone, even non-subscribers. While not a direct tactic to avoid subscriber churn, offering other top-tier rights in a pay-per-view model can enable SVOD providers to generate additional revenue throughout the year. 

Tailored Recommendations - SVODs like Amazon, Apple, and Netflix can leverage their AI expertise to build platforms that recommend relevant content, such as favourite teams or specific athletes, directly on the home screen. This level of personalisation, especially during the off-season, will help to drive watch time and mitigate against subscriber churn.

🤼 A more crowded playing field.

 Deloitte says:

• Sports are expanding globally, and traditional leagues (NFL, MLB, MLS, FIFA, NBA, etc.) are extending their reach internationally.

• Women’s sports are booming. The WNBA plans to add three new teams by 2026 and have sixteen teams by 2028.

• Leagues are innovating, with new tournaments being introduced to established leagues such as the NBA and the NCAA, which is expanding its college football playoffs to 12 teams.

• Cross-sport influence: innovations from newer leagues are reshaping established leagues’ approaches to gameplay, athlete treatment, media and fan experiences.

• [Watch out] There are concerns about market saturation, and questions are emerging about fans’ ‘carrying capacity’ for attention and spending. Have we reached peak sports viewing?

Deloitte’s Strategic Questions to Answer:

Q. How can leagues and their media partners best address the potential audience fragmentation that all these new options could cause?

Mix up content strategies and create cross-over events - Leagues and media partners can work to create more cross-over events with their top stars competing against each other. They should ensure that their content strategies for these events and their traditional events include a mix of live broadcasts, highlights, and other non-live content. As we discussed previously, younger fans are watching fewer live events, and producing non-live content enables fans to catch up when it is convenient for them and still builds fandom and engagement.

Avoid conflicting schedules and create scarcity - Sports should collaborate where appropriate to ensure their schedules do not clash with other premier sporting events. The PGA Tour recognised this, moving some of their event schedules to Wed-Sat to avoid Sunday playoff NFL games. The Tour Championship was also moved to August to conclude before the NFL regular season begins, resulting in a significant increase in viewership and showing the positive impact these delicate changes can have.

Ultimately, there will be losers. Attention is finite, and you are no longer competing solely with sports. You are now competing against films, entertainment programmes, live podcasts, and active participation in sports, for instance, fans opting to play a sport rather than watch it live.

Q. How can established leagues develop a robust scouting function to learn from and incorporate innovations from newer and smaller leagues around the world?

Setting up innovation labs and incubators - These innovation labs and incubators are vital to enable the next growth of technology and sports disruptors. The NBA’s launchpad accepts global applications on themes like ‘Future of Officiating’, ‘Future of Media’, and ‘Future of Fan Connection’. Comcast’s SportsTech, supported by the PGA Tour, SkySports, and the Premier League, seeks innovative sports technology businesses to shape the future of sports. 

Talent - Sometimes,’ if you can’t beat 'em, buy 'em’ can be the right option. Traditional leagues should target top talent in challenger sports with the aim of hiring them into their businesses. Bringing fresh ideas and the people who have helped launch these innovative initiatives into your own traditional sports organisations will help challenge the status quo. 

Test and learn, and most importantly, be open-minded - Don’t assume you know everything; 58% of traditional league execs dismiss challenger sports and formats as ‘gimmicks’ - this is a dangerous mindset and one that will not create longevity. Challenger leagues excel at testing high-risk ideas in niche markets. Traditional sports should be looking to do the same.

📲 Fan data drives monetisation for sports organisations.

Deloitte says:

• Well-maintained fan databases are valuable for sports organisations in securing and enhancing partnerships. Access to detailed fan insights—like demographics and purchasing behaviours—enables them to provide specific information to their partners.

• Additionally, fan data can be pivotal in securing media rights. Networks and streaming platforms value understanding audience preferences and engagement levels, which detailed fan insights can provide.

Deloitte’s Strategic Questions to Answer:

Q. How can sports organisations get creative with data-driven, or data-first, partnerships to create new revenue streams and draw in high-visibility brands and brands that share their values? 

Thanks to James Marshall for the following contribution.

Two years ago, I had a conversation with a client at Arsenal that really stuck with me. They summed up the scale of the club perfectly:

“At any given moment, we’re a digital creative agency, an on-the-ground activation business, a talent agency, a merchandise distributor, a global ticketing operation and a commercial sales team. Oh, and we also play 50 games a year throughout Europe and another 4 or 5 in the US, all whilst scouting roughly 200 players who aren’t even on our books yet.”

This shows the vast scale at which modern clubs operate. However, a challenge I hear a lot about through our work at Gemba is how to bring all this data together and, more importantly, why it matters. “Data is the new oil,” and all that. So, why is this important?

There are two reasons:

First, Claire Kelly, one of my colleagues, is always pushing our sports clients to think more like retail brands such as Tesco, looking at their fans as customers. Tesco doesn’t just know basic info like age or gender; they understand consumer habits. They know how often I walk into a store, what my guilty pleasure is on a Friday night, and what I’m likely to pick up at lunchtime versus in the morning. Clubs and leagues can do the same thing. By creating a single, cohesive view of their fans, they can start targeting fans with offers that feel more relevant – whether that’s tickets, merchandise or website visits – and turn those fans into more loyal customers.

Second, clean rooms, as the report highlights. By anonymising first-party fan data and matching it with brand data, Rights Holders have a big opportunity to monetise their fanbase in completely new ways. This will be a win for C-suite executives and commercial teams as it opens up partnerships with non-endemic, premium categories like tech and retail, who have vast amounts of data and are looking to leverage it in new, creative ways. Not only does this create new partnership possibilities, but it also frees up high-visibility inventory to sell, as these partnerships are often more about in-house data and less about traditional exposure. It’s a commercial win-win.

👓 The evolution of immersive sports.

Deloitte says:

• Attendance at live sports events is rising, but the increase in ticket prices presents a unique opportunity for immersive sports, reducing entry costs for consumers and addressing the gap.

• Advancements in display technology, renewed investment, and new partnerships are bringing innovative concepts to life. Providers are seeking to engage sports fans in novel ways and broaden the concept of sports as entertainment.

Deloitte’s Strategic Questions to Answer:

Q. How will these technologies and experiences influence stadiums and other venue construction? Will fans’ expectations increase? 

There are a couple of important points to consider regarding this trend. The first is that sports as entertainment is growing, and fans are expecting more than just live sports action when they attend an event. For this reason, sports stadiums are influencing the future, with examples like Spurs Stadium in London, which encourages fans to stay after the final whistle and socialise in Europe’s longest bar. 

Secondly, and perhaps most importantly, advancements in technology are catering to the majority of sports fans who are unable to attend events due to living in a different country, rising ticket prices, or other limitations. New technology provides these fans with the chance to feel part of the action from a distance, through out-of-home experiences like COSM. For a fraction of the price, fans can engage with the action and enjoy the game from every angle - in fact, you could argue that they have the best seat in the house. 

The influence that these technologies and experiences will have on stadiums and venues is important to consider. We will continue to see innovative and remarkable venues, such as Spurs and the soon-to-be-completed Buffalo Bills stadium, being built. However, we’ll also witness the impact of these out-of-home immersive experiences and VR/AR, which may raise fans' expectations and potentially affect attendance. In the early days of the NFL and other sports in America, as broadcast technologies advanced, team owners opposed broadcasting matches due to concerns over their potential impact on stadium attendance. This even resulted in certain rules being established; for instance, a home game could not be televised in the team’s local market unless a specific percentage of tickets were sold at least 72 hours before the game. Will we see the same pressures in this new era?

🔮 Deloitte’s Signposts for the Future.

1. New sports media rights deals are exclusively allocated to an SVOD (Streaming Video On Demand) service.

2. In-game betting capabilities becoming fully integrated into SVOD broadcasts, such as the ESPN BET feed on PGA Tour Live.

3. Brands will begin collaborating with sports organisations primarily to gain access to their proprietary fan data.

4. Further experiments with innovative out-of-venue experiences showcasing premiere sporting events will take place, such as COSM expanding globally. 

5. Attendance, ratings, and overall interest in immersive sports experiences will keep growing.

Thanks for reading!