May 7, 2026

Turning Attention Into Lasting Fan Engagement

Athlete-Driven Storytelling Matters More Than Ever

Key takeaways:

Rights holders strive to connect platform-specific discovery strategies with deeper engagement experiences that convert casual viewers into loyal fans.

Athlete-driven storytelling is becoming one of the most effective ways to attract new audiences and strengthen long-term team and league affinity.

AI-powered content creation tech helps organizations scale personalized, multi-format storytelling that drives active engagement across owned platforms.

It’s hardly surprising that the global market for AI in sports has grown exponentially in recent years. Estimates of the market size vary depending on methodology, but most market research firms valued it at single-digit billions in 2025, and project a double-digit compound annual growth rate (CAGR) by the mid-2030s.

What’s surprising, however, is how much of the AI market is made up of fan engagement technologies. According to one analysis, fan engagement already has a whopping 22% market share, driven primarily by AI-powered platforms that optimize digital content delivery and support both brand building and revenue growth.

While sports organizations increasingly rely on AI-powered content platforms to boost fan experiences, such a high market share raises some questions. The answers may lie in research developed by Hyperset, which specializes in audience usage statistics. Their 2026 index provides an industry-wide benchmark for digital performance and details how fan engagement correlates with revenues.

The Engagement Spectrum

Using a methodology that combines third-party data platforms with proprietary tools, Hyperset’s index distinguishes between three types of engagement:

Active engagement: where fans actively seek information online, interact with owned platforms, or participate in peer-to-peer discussions on Reddit. These channels are particularly important because they consistently show the strongest relationship with revenues and digital value.

Semi-active engagement: subscribing to a YouTube channel, which reflects a conscious decision to receive ongoing content, but does not necessarily imply the same depth of commitment as search behaviour, website usage, or community participation.

Passive engagement: following a league, team, or player on Instagram. While passive engagement indicates awareness or affinity rather than sustained interaction, it remains an important channel for global reach and emotional storytelling.

Against this backdrop, the index compares the scale, structure, and trajectory of online fan demand across major American leagues and their international counterparts. Key findings include:

The biggest US leagues record similar shares of web searches and website traffic – between 51% and 56% – as a percentage of their total digital engagement

The NBA remains the world’s most-searched sports league, narrowly outperforming the Premier League in monthly searches.

The NFL is searched approximately 30 million times a month – the most of any league in the US.

The MLS and WNBA get more traffic on their official websites than people searching for the brand, a sign of a loyal fan base.

The Player Discovery Gap

One area where US leagues and teams struggle, however, is taking advantage of online interest in their own players. Hyperset’s index reveals that less than 1% of search demand for elite athletes ends up on a digital platform owned by their team or league, representing a missed opportunity to reach more fans with content that is particularly compelling for them.

To seize this opportunity, US leagues and teams would have to take a page from international properties, which are seeing success in North America with digital-first strategies that highlight personality-led content. The Fan Engagement Index analyzed the performance of multiple international organizations – including Formula 1, the Professional Darts Corporation (PDC), the Premier League, and LALIGA – in the US, and found that:

Peak searches for the PDC in the US have doubled every two years since 2022, making it one of the fastest-growing sports in the market.

The F1 website gets more traffic as a percentage of total searches for the brand in the US (57%) than in any other nation except the UK.

Around 7% of the average Premier League team’s digital engagement comes from the US, and based on five-year traffic trends, engagement is growing.

Digital interest in LALIGA has grown over the past five years, especially in Real Madrid and Barcelona, who get 10% of their search and website traffic from the US.

This success is indicative of a holistic approach to content – one that recognizes differences in discovery habits across markets and uses them to grow the brand.

“In the US, discovery is digital-first and player-driven,” explained Alfredo Bermejo Gutierrez, Director of Digital Strategy at LALIGA. “A clear example is Kylian Mbappé, whose personal brand and playing style drive huge engagement independently of Real Madrid. The same goes for Lamine Yamal. These player-led narratives resonate strongly. Our strategy is to amplify these moments while guiding new fans back into the broader ecosystem of the club and league.”

AI-Powered Fan Conversion

By strategically funneling new fans into owned platforms, rights holders can transform fleeting interest into deeper connections. This transition is essential for fostering active engagement, the type most closely linked to commercial outcomes such as merchandise sales, streaming subscriptions, and maximized customer lifetime value (CLV).

Executing this strategy at scale requires the right infrastructure. AI-powered content creation platforms enable rights holders to instantly generate and distribute a steady stream of multi-format, personality-led narratives that can be leveraged to direct fans into walled gardens, where the most lucrative interactions take place. Which helps explain why fan engagement technologies account for such a large share of the rapidly expanding AI in sports market.