By Lee Radbourne, founder and CEO, Streaming Consultancy & co-founder, Summitly.

In 2025, sport’s comfortable assumptions around rights, production and audiences were shattered. AI hype, platform plays and league-owned services exposed a new reality: attention is no longer enough. As 2026 approaches, the real battle will be for identity, belonging and real-time connection.

The sports broadcasting industry has long taken comfort in predictability. Rights cycles rolled over, production workflows evolved at a measured pace, and the phrase ‘we have always done it this way’ acted as a safety blanket for an ecosystem built on routine. In 2025, that sense of order was tested harder than at any point in recent memory. The year tore through long-held assumptions and forced the industry to confront a difficult truth: stability is often an illusion.

AI did not gently disrupt sport. It tore up old thinking. Creators did not stay at the edges; they became primetime. YouTube did not grow steadily; it quietly became the largest sports broadcaster on the planet. Leagues stopped behaving like traditional rights sellers and began operating more like technology companies. And fan identity – real, verified and owned – became the only currency that truly matters.

2025 was not a year of marginal gains. It was a hard reset. And 2026 is when the map starts to be redrawn.

2025: A year of delicious, necessary chaos

The AI bubble everyone pretends is not a bubble

It is clear we are in an AI bubble. It is large, noisy and all-consuming. Valuations passed the trillion-dollar mark; companies invested in one another at unsustainable multiples; and growth was fuelled by losses. The environment looked remarkably similar to the dotcom bubble. Even Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, said at DevDay 2025: “There are many parts of AI that are kind of bubbly right now.”

Nearly every vendor claimed to be AI powered. As I shared during my FutureSPORT session, this is not necessarily a negative. Bubbles do not destroy industries; they reveal who is building something real.

That divide became clear in 2025. Some organisations used AI intelligently to automate workflows, accelerate clipping, personalise streams and enhance production. Others simply added AI to pitch decks and hoped no one looked too closely.

AI is real. The economics are not. And the truth is that AI is not the story, it is the accelerant. The real story and the value driver of the next decade is fan identity and hyper-personalisation.

Barcelona and Spotify: The plot twist of the year

Barcelona insisted they had a billion fans. Spotify asked for proof. What they received was a CRM with around 300,000 identifiable humans. The ‘billion fan’ mega deal became a $307 million agreement.

Yet in 2025, Spotify renewed at €460 million over 12 years. The ~64% uplift was not driven by reach, it was driven by cultural resonance, meaningful activations and identity-based engagement. Spotify delivered music drops, merchandise moments and emotional proximity that connected directly with fans.

The lesson was clear: followers do not equal value. Identity does. It marked the first strong signal that 2025 would not reward scale alone, but the ability to prove who your audience is.

Apple and Formula 1: When tech stopped pretending

Apple’s move for Formula 1 was one of the standout moments of the year. The company committed $150 million per year for five years, nearly double ESPN, in a rights market where many prices are flattening or declining.

Apple was not buying a broadcast. It was buying fan behaviour at global scale. Sport is not just content; it is an onboarding funnel into an ecosystem. F1 brings youth, reach and cultural heat, while Apple brings a complete product universe.

This is not simply watching a race. It becomes part of every Apple device and service. Ultimately, it is lifetime user acquisition. Apple is not buying sport; it is buying fan identity and real-time engagement signals and turning emotion into product.

Ligue 1+: The plot twist no one predicted

When DAZN publicly and dramatically withdrew from the French rights, many assumed Ligue 1 was heading for collapse. Clubs were told to forecast zero media revenue. Instead, the league launched Ligue 1+, a league owned and controlled platform with long-term ambition.

Its first year delivered €158 million in revenue, more than 1 million subscribers and €142 million redistributed to clubs. This was not a temporary fix. It was a statement of sovereignty and proof that leagues can control distribution, data and destiny — at least for superfans.

The challenge now is whether Ligue 1+ can scale without losing the ambition that defined its launch, and whether it can grow audience resonance beyond superfans.

The year YouTube became the world’s stadium

YouTube’s role as sport’s global gateway became undeniable in 2025. It accounted for 12.6% of all US television viewing in September, surpassing Netflix and Prime Video combined. In Brazil, CazéTV secured the entire 2026 FIFA World Cup and consistently delivered audiences that rival national broadcasters. Meanwhile, creators such as Mark Goldbridge and The Overlap outperformed mid-tier channels with live Bundesliga watchalongs in the UK.

Fans turned YouTube into the stadium long before the industry acknowledged it. 2025 simply made that reality impossible to ignore.

2026: The year broadcast finally evolves

If 2025 exposed the cracks, 2026 is the year broadcasters and rights holders begin building on the new foundation. These shifts are no longer theoretical; they are already visible in early deployments across the industry.

Personalised broadcast becomes product

The one-feed model has reached its limit. Fans no longer accept a single, static version of an event when the technology exists to offer more and when competing platforms already do. In 2026, personalisation becomes a commercial product rather than a concept.

Rights holders will deliver sub 2 second latency for meaningful real time moments, personalised camera angles, contextual overlays and dynamic highlights shaped by fan behaviour. Most importantly, personalisation will link directly to watch time, conversions, merchandise triggers and retention. It will no longer be the broadcast. It will be your broadcast.

Broadcast turns into a data engine

In 2026, one question becomes existential: how effectively can you convert emotion into identity?

Broadcasters will expand their use of interactive layers, identity capture prompts, CRM linked personalisation and real-time segmentation. The broadcast becomes the moment where fan signals are collected and fed into marketing, product development and monetisation.

The fastest-growing organisations in 2025 were not producing the most content. They were capturing the most fan signals per second.

Attention is linear. Identity is exponential. This is the equation the industry has been missing.

Fan-powered storytelling goes mainstream

Fan-driven storytelling will mature in 2026. Real-time fan clip ingestion will become standard; creators will integrate directly into live broadcasts, expanding the growing ecosystem of altcasts; and revenue sharing around highlight moments will shift from experimental to operational.

In turn, fans will move from the edges of the experience to its centre and the line between audience and contributor will continue to blur.

YouTube becomes a mandatory rights layer

In 2026, more rights packages will position YouTube as a primary distribution layer. The Bundesliga’s UK strategy is an early sign of this structural change, and with CazéTV proving the model at scale, YouTube is no longer a secondary outlet — it is the primary gateway to fandom.

Creators drive reach and revive the vast volume of content that never gets seen. Membership models convert superfans. Together, they create a funnel that traditional broadcasters cannot match alone. Broadcasters and rights holders who treat YouTube as a companion ecosystem will thrive. Those who treat it as secondary will fall behind.

The rights market splits cleanly in two

The divide that surfaced in 2025 becomes structural in 2026. Global IP properties such as the Premier League, Formula 1, the NFL and the NBA will continue to grow because identity and emotion scale at the top end even as fan fatigue becomes more visible.

Everyone else will rely more heavily on YouTube for discovery and on membership-driven platforms for superfans.

Ligue 1+ will become the industry’s test case for whether sovereignty can scale. If it succeeds, others will follow. If it falters, dependency models will tighten again.

The final message heading into 2026

AI will not decide who wins the next era of sport. Tech stacks will not. Rights fees will not.
Fans will. Identity will. Belonging will. Real-time connection will.

When the AI bubble finally bursts, value will not flow to the loudest broadcaster or the most complex workflow. It will flow to those building relationships at the speed of live emotion.

Stop building for attention, start building for belonging, because the next decade will not be won by who broadcasts the game. It will be won by who broadcasts belonging.