Most sports organisations stopped evolving their fan revenue models ten years ago.
They nailed the Gate Economy with tickets. Mastered the Broadcast Boom with rights deals. Built the Database with CRM systems. But then things seem to have stalled.
Meanwhile, the audience moved on. And the bill just arrived.
The four phases of sports fan revenue
The evolution looked something like this:
Phase 1: The Gate Economy – Revenue capped by stadium capacity. You monetised who showed up.
Phase 2: The Broadcast Boom – Selling exposure to millions. But you had no idea who was watching.
Phase 3: The Database Era – Capturing emails and purchase history through friction. Forms. Sign-ups. Gated content. Building CRM lists. Sending nurture emails. Waiting for fans to raise their hand.
Most organisations are still here. Stuck in Phase 3.But your audience is already living in Phase 4: The Engagement Era.
Phase 4: Real-time fan engagement and creator partnerships
They’re on second screens during your matches. Participating in live polls. Predicting outcomes. Playing trivia. Creating content.
They’re also creating mini-communities in Discord servers. Gravitating towards like-minded fans in WhatsApp groups. Building their own sporting worlds in Roblox. Driving their own narratives through YouTube creators, using live chat as a means to have one-to-many conversations that shape the content they feel like they’re co-creating. Building inside jokes and rituals you’re not part of.
And 75% of them? Completely anonymous to you.
You can’t monetise fans you don’t know
While you were building databases, creators built infrastructure. Rick Shiels and friends just launched the Creator Golf Club, converting millions of anonymous YouTube subscribers into registered tournament participants who pay to play against him. Digital to physical. Platform traffic to owned communities.
That’s Phase 4.
The fans making content during your matches? They’re not just your audience. They’re your distribution network. The question is whether you’re enabling them or competing with them.
How fan revenue shifted from impressions to participation
Phase 3 taught you to sell impressions to sponsors. Show them your reach. Your social following. Your broadcast numbers. Phase 4 is different.
Phase 4 revenue comes from three places:
1. Creator integrations during live moments
Brands aren’t paying for impressions anymore. They’re paying for participation. When your creator network activates during a match, sponsors aren’t buying eyeballs, they’re buying engagement infrastructure. They’re buying credibility and authenticity.
2. Fan transactions within the experience
Predictions. Opinions. Merch drops. Betting integrations. Every interaction is a conversion opportunity. The revenue isn’t in the impression. It’s in the action.
3. Behavioural data fans willingly share
Not through forms, through participation. Zero-party data at scale because fans are choosing to engage, rather than being asked to fill in a CRM field.
The RSN collapse: When broadcast revenue models fail
13 NBA teams missed their January broadcast rights fee payments. Main Street Sports Group couldn’t make the cheques clear. The Heat, Cavaliers, Thunder, all staring at a $180M shortfall this season. The RSN model isn’t dying. It’s already dead.
This is what happens when you build your entire revenue model on broadcast deals that assume attention stays where it was. It won’t.
Why sports organisations are missing $1M in fan revenue
The organisations I’ve been watching are the ones building direct fan relationships and data infrastructure. They aren’t panicking about RSN collapses. They saw this coming.
Meanwhile, teams still relying on fragmented broadcast cheques are learning an expensive lesson mid-season: the gap between attention and conversion shows up on balance sheets.
If you don’t have digital inventory to sell sponsors polls, overlays, gamification, creator activations, you’re showing them empty shelves.
1 in 3 organisations believe they’re missing out on at least $1 million per year because of it.
But here’s what most won’t admit: that 75% anonymous audience? They’re not dark to everyone. They’re visible to the creators they follow.
Phase 4 is deciding whether you partner with those creators or compete with them.
Owned vs rented: Direct fan relationships or broadcast dependency?
This is the fundamental choice now.
Do you own your fan relationships, or are you renting them from broadcast partners and platform algorithms?
The WNBA can’t close a collective bargaining agreement. Meanwhile, Unrivaled Basketball just locked in 75% of its players through 2028 by offering equity. Players aren’t employees, they’re owners.
When given the choice between renting their attention to legacy systems or owning a piece of what they’re building, talent will always choose ownership.
Your fans are making the same choice.
They can consume your content passively through broadcast partners, or they can participate actively in experiences they help create. The ones choosing participation are your Phase 4 customers.
Building fan revenue infrastructure that converts in real-time
Phase 3 organisations built CRM lists and hoped for conversions.
Phase 4 organisations build infrastructure that converts attention in real-time.
It’s not about collecting data anymore. It’s about monetising interaction as it happens. Selling the engagement, not just the impression.
The NBA is already planning a national streaming RSN for 2027-28. But that’s 18 months away. What happens in between will separate the organisations that own their fan relationships from the ones that rented them.
The question isn’t whether Phase 4 is coming. It’s whether you’re building infrastructure that converts attention, or waiting for the next broadcast deal to save you.
We’ve built the Fan Revenue Calculator to quantify exactly what Phase 4 is worth for your organisation. Try it now
