It’s not just about TV ratings or social-media likes any more.
The real battleground is share of attention – the finite, fiercely contested resources of audience time, interest and emotional investment. It’s the invisible economy every brand, platform and property trades in. As regards sport, we need to be honest: we often turn up late to the party.
Competition in entertainment is fierce
The average person now spends 2 hours 23 minutes every day on social media alone – that’s 143 minutes of potential influence, persuasion and consumption. But sport isn’t the only contender in town.
Globally, 2.89b people engage with various forms of entertainment content (e.g. music, gaming, streaming, memes, creators, live events) on social platforms. Sport captures 1.45b of them, roughly half the overall entertainment audience. Make no mistake, everything is considered entertainment now.
Sport’s slice of the action: 18 minutes a day
Let’s get realistic. Data shows that a minimum of 55–65 % of a user’s daily social media time is spent on entertainment. If sport accounts for about a quarter of that time, users allocate 14–22 minutes a day to it. Let’s average it out at 18 minutes.
Now, remember that noise: there are over 750,000 sport-related accounts (e.g. federations, clubs, leagues, athletes, media outlets, influencers, fan pages) all vying for those same 18 minutes. Quick maths: 0.08 seconds of potential attention per account, per user, per day.
No wonder it feels hard to cut through the clutter. We’re not merely competing with rival teams or leagues; we’re competing with MrBeast, Messi and Megan Thee Stallion – often in the same feed.
The uncomfortable truth: sport is under-delivering
Channelling my inner Mark Ritson, much of the industry operates with a false sense of security. We assume passion equals attention. We think that because people care about sport, they’re watching it. Wrong on both counts.
Passion doesn’t guarantee consumption. Presence doesn’t guarantee relevance. We might love our content output, but that doesn’t mean anyone is engaging with it. Worse still, we rarely understand whether they are or not as conversations about the role of sport in entertainment are full of gut feelings.
So, where’s the benchmarking? How many minutes does your content actually command? How do we trend against music, gaming or film?
Attention is finite. When quantified, we realise that winning it drives sponsorship value, audience growth, participation and long-term fan engagement. Losing attention leads to irrelevance.
Therefore, understanding how to win and retain attention is vital. It extends beyond random metrics and can have a significant impact on our success in the industry.
What you can do
- Benchmark outside sport: judge your marketing against the best in film, gaming, music and creators, not just other teams.
- Build for attention: craft strategies that win seconds rather than merely filling a marketing plan.
- Convert to memory: strike a balance between reach (to capture those seconds) and creating mental cues that embed the sport in the minds of fans.
- Measure what sticks: monitor minutes watched, scroll-stops, asset recall and entry moments, then optimise content based on results.
- Act like an entertainment brand: value every second. If sport is only getting 18 minutes a day, each second is a potential seed for mental availability.
Closing thought
Sport holds emotional power and delivers stories that matter. Yet in today’s attention economy, these stories must work harder to be seen. If we want to grow, we can’t keep playing the same game – we must compete as part of the entertainment sector, because we are.
