Not all sports tournaments (and their fans) are created equal…

With the Paris Olympics into its second week, we’re halfway through the final lap of this summer’s sporting marathon (with a special mention to the wonderful victory lap the Paralympics will provide as we head into September).?

Over the summer months, sports fans have been treated to a smorgasbord of elite competition featuring the usual mix of annual Majors and Grand Prix, peppered with the T20 cricket World Cup, football’s continental championships in Europe and South America and, of course, The Olympic games.??

Millions of people will have travelled from near and far to experience these sporting events in the flesh but, by the end of the summer, many millions more will have tuned in or logged on to follow the action on TV or through digital media – either live on demand or increasingly in bite-sized, snackable chunks. They will have chosen to engage with tournaments either through legacy media channels, official rights holder platforms or through social media – or, most likely, through a combination of all three.?

To give you an idea of scale, the 2020 editions of the Euros and the Olympics (which both took place in 2021 for obvious reasons) drew unique global TV audiences of 1.9bn and 3.05bn respectively and this year’s editions are expected to at least match these levels. Digitally, the official UEFA Euros social channels cumulatively racked up over 300m engagements and almost 3bn video views. If you add to that 100s of millions more engagements and video views from events such as The Open Championship, Wimbledon and the six Formula 1 Grand Prix that have been staged since the start of June and we can see that this summer has been a veritable gold mine of digital reach for rights holders, media and sponsors to tap into.?

Sporting fandom around these major events is a peculiar thing (and not just in the crazy costumed sense). Its nature is peculiar to the nature of the sports involved, the types of participants and frequency of exposure to them.??

The majors in golf and tennis are annual fixtures that provide seasoned fans with full days of action, ranging between four days and two weeks depending on whether they prefer to swing a club or racket. They feature individual athletes, representing themselves rather than a team or nation, that fans can follow the narratives of, across a nine month long global calendar of events. They are sports that can be broken down into 1000s of individual scoring shots and therefore require sophisticated scoring engines for fans to follow the action.?

In comparison, the Euros is a quadrennial event, featuring national teams in the world’s most popular sport. Over the course of a month, they provide fans ranging from casual to full-time with 90-120min shots of high intensity, relatively low scoring action spread across one month with participation – and therefore – following becoming more focused as the tournament reaches its denouement.???

With the characteristics of these sports, their fans and the experience in following them differing so markedly, rights holders and broadcasters need to adapt their digital and technical strategies accordingly. They must ensure they are delivering the types of scoring and match information that fans want to see, adapting to rights restrictions to ensure they deliver other means of engagement when video is not an option.?

They need to ensure they are providing the stories around the athletes and their teams that keep fans engaged outside of the competition and they need to ensure they provide content that is both authentic and catered to the different types of fan-following. For example, team guides in football that provide the casual follower with context or detailed player records and course information for the avid golf fan.?

However, the sporting event that provides the most unique challenge for the media and rights holders involved is undoubtedly the Olympics. This historic competition draws a vast audience – second only in sporting terms to the FIFA World Cup – but is a very different beast to its football counterparts. It is a truly global spectacle with over 200 nations represented, across 32 sports and a total of 329 events. This means there are more events and more reasons for fans to engage than any other major sporting event.??

However, at the same time, the breadth of events and the relatively unknown nature of both the athletes - and in some cases the sport they are competing in – means that the essence of Olympic fandom is that bit different and needs to be understood when providing digital experiences for it. For example, Romanian football fans who celebrated their team’s qualification from the group stage will have been well versed in both the sport and the skills of their players, having followed their exploits for their domestic teams in Romania and across Europe. Many of those same fans will have been passionately cheering on David Popovici as he won the men’s 200m freestyle to secure Romania’s first gold of the Paris Olympics, unaware of his exploits prior to the race or indeed any of the nuances of elite swimming.?His success drew coverage from every national media channel and newfound support from brands to celebrities and social media influencers.?

The Olympics showcases the very best of competition. The dedication and commitment of Olympic athletes who train and push themselves to the limits to achieve their goals, without the commercial backing or opportunity that other sports provide (disregarding of course professional beasts like tennis and basketball who manage to embrace the Olympic spirit) inspires us all. It temporarily turns us into fans of everything from archery to shot put and more. It is this temporary fandom, driven by positive nationalistic fervour, that needs to be appreciated. Rights holders and media providers need to ensure they can engage with these new fans, keeping them updated across the different events and informing so that their passion is supported with context. They need to educate fans on the different events but also ensure they tell the stories of the amazing athletes who have sacrificed so much to be able to compete.?

The Olympics have done this well offering a range of content types across the different official channels available to them – from scheduling and medal tables via the app to behind the screens content via WhatsApp to providing highlights, via rights owners, and athlete-led content via TikTok.???

In the hyper-commercialized world of elite modern sport - one that can leave some fans with a bitter taste in their mouths -?the Olympics provides us with a welcome palate cleanser. For the broadcasters delivering content across 160 countries, the multitude of online sports platforms and of course the social media accounts of Olympics and competing federations, the responsibility is not just to cover the action but to ensure they deliver the content in the form fans want, via the channels they want, that tell the full story of the Olympics, the athletes and the unique spirit they create.???

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