Analysis: As sports media values trend negative, scarcity and quality are king By Callum McCarthy, Editor-at-Large Monday, December 22, 2025 - 14:08
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There is a fundamental and growing disconnect between the desires of the sports industry and the behaviour of the sports fan.
The industry thinks in terms of calendars and schedules. Sports fans think about sport in terms of seasons: regular seasons, pre-seasons, post-seasons and, perhaps most annoyingly for the industry, off-seasons.
The sports industry has been working hard to move sport away from its natural ebbs, troughs and breaks - none of which seem to make much money. Sports that span 24 hours a day, 365 days a year are now the norm, ensuring a never-ending onslaught of content as leagues, cups, tournaments, competitions and series that are either expanding or created out of thin air to fill the last available nooks and crannies.
The endlessly increasing supply of sport over the past few decades is partly responsible for making it a near-trillion dollar endeavour. But if slowing media rights values are anything to go by, the returns from this constantly growing behemoth are diminishing to the point of negative yield.
The International Cricket Council's decision to ensure major tournaments take place every year - guaranteeing annual India v Pakistan fixtures for broadcasters - has made the ICC more money in the short term but weakened the pulling power of its men's World Cups, which now take place in three years out of every four. Broadcast and sponsor money grew significantly thanks to that decision, but as its broadcaster JioStar starts to doubt whether it gets a return on its investment, the only direction from here seems to be down.
The Premier League found out that increasing the number of matches it makes available to UK broadcasters could only help to preserve its value rather than grow it. The next time the league comes to market, it knows that quantity can't be the answer to growth.
Our lives are now so cluttered with sport that the appointment-to-view' experience is being reserved for the sport that matters most to us - the teams and countries we support, playing fixtures that carry meaning. Outside of this, fans are increasingly turning to on-demand, catch-up and short-form content which is far more complex for rights-holders to monetise.
A big part of what makes sports events feel special are their absence. The Olympics, the FIFA World Cup, the Ryder Cup and the Ashes have been iconic events for a century and more because they happen so rarely. Seasonal football. Absence makes our hearts grow fonder and, in the case of The Ashes, that absence allows English hopes the necessary time to recover.
Scarcity is a dying art in sport and entertainment more broadly, but what better reminder of its efficacy than the Winter Olympics. Curling, bobsleigh, luge, skeleton and speed skating mean very little to most people, but for two weeks out of every 208, the magic touch of the Olympic brand thrusts them all into mainstream culture.
Curling, in particular, blossoms on the Olympic stage. In Canada, Vancouver 2010 produced a men's curling gold-medal audience of 6.9 million for Kevin Martin's win. In the UK, Sochi 2014 turned a men's curling final into a mainstream moment on BBC Two, with 2.6 million viewers watching during a daytime slot before working from home was normalised.
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In the US, PyeongChang 2018 still drew 1.6 million viewers for men's curling on NBCSN at 1:30am Eastern, a time that should be a graveyard for almost any live sport. Beijing 2022 had almost 700,000 people in the UK watching Eve Muirhead's team win gold in the early hours.
Likewise, the Winter Olympics as a whole reaches mass audiences its constituent sports could never dream of. Beijing 2022 reached 2.01 billion unique viewers across linear and digital platforms, with 713 billion minutes watched via media rights partners. In Canada, CBC said 26.5 million Canadians watched at least some coverage, while digital viewing hit record levels.
The 2026 edition of the Winter Games in Milan-Cortina will land in a much more comfortable time zone for western audiences and numbers from PyeongChang and Beijing are sure to be eclipsed. But for winter sports administrators looking to capitalise on quadrennial success, expanding their calendars and lengthening world championships won't do the trick.
All of these sports already have annual world championships that barely move the needle. A biennial peak that they can own - like a Ryder Cup or an Ashes - might be a much better place to start for building their sports outside the Olympic cycle while still retaining the scarcity that brings audiences back.
Sport has become excellent at pushing cumulative engagement numbers that justify its oversaturation, but the industry rarely enquires as to whether fans are actually enjoying or connecting with all of this additional content
It's a model that has been working well for women's football, which soars on the biennial peaks of the World Cup and European Championships, all while trickling converts into participation, attendance and viewership of the season-long club game.
That trickle - rather than a flood - is seen in some quarters as a failure. If thought about in a more sober fashion, women's club football is doing well to find audiences when competing directly against a men's game that already dominates most fans' weekends. If it can keep riding those peaks, there's no need to worry or rush.
The sports industry's obsession with scaling sport outwards - more games, more competitions, more timeslots - tends to produce a glut of forgettable content that fans are happy to miss. No matter what anyone at FIFA or DAZN might say,
