HOW GEN Z IS CHANGING THE RULES OF SPORTS FANDOM FOR BRANDS

For generations, sports fandom was inherited rather than chosen. Team allegiances usually began at home, with a parent, grandparent or older sibling influencing what jersey you wore, what games were on TV and what rivalries mattered.

Geography reinforced those loyalties because the local teams were the ones you could reliably watch, and spending an afternoon at the ballpark or gathering around the television became part of the rhythm of family life.

Gen Z—which encompasses people born between 1997 and 2012—has inherited a very different sports landscape. Their attention is spread across hundreds of platforms, athletes have become media brands in their own right, and anyone with a phone can interpret, remix or add to what happens on the field. That has sometimes been mistaken for declining interest in sports, but I think we’re looking at it the wrong way.

In a recent study conducted by Acceleration Community of Companies and the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, we surveyed more than 2,100 Gen Z adults and found that only 26% identify as “die-hard” fans who regularly watch full games. Nearly half sit somewhere between casual and die-hard, engaging through athletes, highlights, social content and major cultural moments.

What we’re witnessing is fandom expanding beyond the broadcast, with a diverse spectrum of creators increasingly responsible for helping young people find their way into it.

Here are five shifts brands should understand.

1. Don’t bet on the game itself to get their attention

Nearly half of Gen Z sports fans have become interested in a new sport or athlete because of something outside the competition itself. Yet much of the sports business is still organized around getting people to watch the game.

The Netflix series “Drive to Survive” is perhaps the best-known example, because it encouraged audiences to care about Formula 1 drivers before they understood the intricacies of the sport.

But the same dynamic now plays out every day at a much smaller scale: a streamer can introduce someone to baseball because a Dodgers game happens to be playing in the background; a fan edit can make an athlete interesting to someone who has never watched them compete; fashion, relationships, music and memes can all become entry points.

For brands, this is increasingly where fandom starts.

2. Expand your definition of a ‘creator’

When marketers hear “creator,” they often think of someone with a large social following and a brand partnership rate card. Sports should force us to think much more broadly.

The creator ecosystem now includes athletes telling their own stories, fans making edits, commentators explaining the nuances of a sport, streamers bringing games into their communities and people whose primary subject might be fashion, entertainment or gaming suddenly introducing an audience to sports.

That’s important because creators shape how sports content gets understood, not just where it shows up. They provide context, personality and a point of view that can make an unfamiliar sport legible to someone encountering it for the first time.

3. Recognize that the athlete can be bigger than the team

One in four Gen Z adults say they would rather follow an athlete’s personal story than watch them compete, while 32% say they support individual athletes over specific teams.

That changes the architecture of fandom. Athletes like race car driver Lewis Hamilton, gymnast Simone Biles and rugby union player Ilona Maher aren’t interesting only when they’re competing—their fashion, advocacy, humor, relationships and lives outside sports give audiences multiple ways to form a connection with them.

Brands should resist treating those interests as ancillary to an athlete partnership. The instinct has traditionally been to connect an athlete back to their sporting credentials as quickly as possible. For a new generation of fans, the opposite path may be more powerful: the person gets them interested first, and the sport follows.

4. Give fans something to do, not just something to watch

Gen Z may be the least passive generation of sports fans we’ve ever seen. They’ve grown up with the ability to comment, remix, react, create and share, so it doesn’t make much sense to expect their relationship with sports to be defined solely by sitting through a broadcast.

The same instinct extends into the physical world. Seventy-eight percent of Gen Z sports viewers have attended or would attend a major sporting event primarily for the experiences surrounding it, including concerts, fan festivals, celebrity appearances and brand activations.

For brands, participation therefore needs to be baked into the experience. The best ideas hand audiences some authorship over what happens next.

5. Stop treating the ‘side door’ as secondary

Sports organizations have historically built around the assumption that the competition sits at the center and everything else radiates outward from it. Gen Z is showing us that relationship can work in reverse, too.

Someone who arrives through a creator, an athlete’s outfit or a documentary is no less valuable because they didn’t enter through the traditional front door. Today’s casual fan might follow highlights rather than full games, care about one athlete more than a franchise or initially show up for the atmosphere surrounding a major event. That first connection can still become something deeper.

This matters enormously as sports enter another cycle of global mega-events, with Super Bowl LXI and the 2028 Summer Olympics on the horizon. The opportunity for brands is to move beyond guarding the front door and toward building new ones, while trusting fans and creators to find their own way through them.

Source: adage.com