Social media has changed the way we enjoy professional sports

According to McKinsey research, 20% of Gen Z sports fans don’t tune in to watch sports live. But there’s a misconception that Gen Z (those born between 1997 and 2012) are not interested in watching sports altogether. In reality, Gen Z loves following sports just as much as earlier generations, they just tend to consume it very differently. According to Ben Vonwiller, McKinsey’s Co-Head Global Sports & Gaming, young people have a different attitude towards sports. They want to see their identity represented in a diverse set of athletes. Instead of following teams, like older generations, they prefer to follow individual athletes.

In the past decade (the formative years of Gen Z), we’ve seen the social media boom and the maturation of the creator economy. Through the democratization of media production and publishing, the creation and consumption of content has become easily accessible to all with a smartphone. The sports industry has also entered this new era of influence. Early millennials and prior generations grew up rooting for their favorite teams through their television sets, but athletes are now connecting directly to younger fans through their personal social media profiles. When you consider that most athletes at the upcoming 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris are now tech-savvy Gen Z themselves, it makes perfect sense that the way they connect to their peers through social media is second nature.

Whereas sports teams used to be the only ones with powerful global brands, social media has fundamentally changed fan engagement, with individual athletes now controlling their own branding in a way that frequently overshadows that of their teams’. This is perfectly highlighted by the fact that many sports stars now have more followers than the teams they represent. Take Lewis Hamilton with his 37.4 million followers on Instagram, almost triple that of Mercedes F1’s (13.4 million) or Simone Biles with her 7.4 million followers, over 7 times that of Team USA Gymnastics (1 million).

Then there are the superfans, personalities that are so fanatical about viewing, analyzing, and commenting on their favorite sport through their own content, that they amass millions of followers who want to see their take or reaction. These sports influencers are often a bridge between athletes, teams, and fans. If you search for 2024 UEFA European Football Championship reactions on YouTube for instance, chances are high you’ll find several videos with hundreds of thousands of views each.

Athletes no longer just play sports and superfans no longer passively consume, they are now content creators with reaches larger than those of most sports teams. To create engaging content and stay up to date with the latest trends, these content creators often have sophisticated creative teams and social media managers that work to populate their social media channels. After all, athletes have to focus on training if they want to win gold!

With sports stars traveling around the world to participate in events like world championships or the Olympic Games throughout the year, they are not in the same place as their content teams most of the time. It’s not uncommon for their teams to be scattered around the globe to begin with, employing talented video editors from different countries to work on making slick TikTok videos. Our browser based editor elevate.io has made the distance between athletes and their social media teams irrelevant, allowing global teams to co-create social content in the cloud in real-time without the need to render, download, or install anything. Athletes at the Summer Games in Paris can upload their videos and pictures to their elevate.io workspace in the cloud and editors halfway around the world will be able to get editing instantly. Once the edit is done, the social media manager can jump into the same workspace to grab the final product and publish the new post to the feed.

elevate.io

Are you an international team producing video content? Try elevate.io for free today.