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Sport is the new battleground in the streaming wars. But it’s not action on the field they’re tempting us with.
Disney+ has signed a deal with Gary Neville’s football media brand The Overlap. It’ll host his Stick to Football talk show and a new Manchester United-focused programme co-hosted by Wayne Rooney and YouTuber Mark Goldbridge.
This follows the arrival on Netflix of Gary Lineker’s The Rest is Football podcast, which digested World Cup action daily and will return twice a week during the season.
But anyone watching these shows won’t see a single Premier League goal.
The domestic rights to broadcast live matches and highlights remain with Sky, TNT and the BBC, who pay a combined £1.67 billion per year.
Netflix and Disney+ are courting sports fans with pundits, podcasts and documentaries — without paying for the live action
UK broadcasters now stump up double that across all sports, with the genre making up 70 percent of all television spending. Once Sky’s big money deals in cricket and Formula 1 are added to its football outlay, it has by far the biggest bill.
Yet, even our free-to-air channels — BBC, ITV, Channel 4 and Channel 5 — now splash more on sport than any other genre of new, original programming, £700 million between them. Sport’s liveness means it is the last major form of communal viewing in our fragmented media world, and ever more important as the years go by.
So, why would streamers pay for sports programmes with no actual sport in them?
A NEW WAY TO ENGAGE WITH SPORT MEDIA
Sports events have gradually switched from being exclusive to TV to part of a landscape in which television co-exists with digital platforms. So, streamers have been incorporating more sport into their programming strategies.
Competition for our eyeballs is intense. In the UK last year, the average person spent four-and-a-half hours a day watching video at home. Most of it was on the box: 84 percent of in-home viewing was through the television set, whetherst content increasingly resembles conventional TV
Disney has long owned American sports media giant ESPN. But in the UK its streaming appeal has been based largely on access to content old and new from familiar global franchises such as Marvel, Pixar and Star Wars.
It does already show the women’s Champions League, while Netflix claimed a record 108 million viewers for the rather grim spectacle of influencer Jake Paul defeating 58-year-old former world heavyweight champion Mike Tyson in 2024.
Yet, in the era of scheduling our own viewing, we’re not really in the habit of turning to streamers for live, appointment-to-view television. Instead, they have experienced more consistent success in programming best described as “sports adjacent.” Sports-themed documentaries have become a far cheaper way to attract and keep subscribers.
The triumph of the Formula 1: Drive to Survive docuseries, for example, has powered F1 back up the sporting grid. Its compelling behind-the-scenes storytelling, familiar from other Netflix shows, brought new fans closer to the action. The lower-speed thrills of the Netflix golf series Full Swing suggested not all sports are, however, ready for their streaming close-up.
With these prestige documentaries usually allowing sports and clubs to present a positive portrayal of what they’re doing, the traditional role of sports reporters as the main narrators of sport has been eroded.
Instead, pundits such as Neville and fan creators, including Goldbridge, have the profile and style to keep viewers entertained — even if they are less likely than traditional media to offer the journalistic scrutiny that sporting institutions such as Fifa need.
Working with these personalities is the natural next frontier for streamers. The “always on” nature of regular podcasts helps create viewing routines, so customers have something new to watch whenever they go to the landing page.
The streaming market has hit a saturation point from existing customers. More than two-thirds of UK households subscribed to at least one service last year, yet the figure of 68 percent was roughly as it was in 2021. Winning over sports fans who baulk at Sky’s prices offers the potential for further growth.
As in any sporting event, there are winners and losers. Premier League football is one of only a handful of competitions with the global appeal to be worth the streamers’ time and money. Other sports that were once staples of British screens, from county cricket to swimming, have been pushed to the margins, struggling for attention in a sports media dominated by a smaller number of key events.
The growing profile of women’s sport hasn’t helped. As I argue in my forthcoming book, Sports Journalism in the UK, media attention has been concentrated on women’s football, cricket, rugby union and tennis. Neville is not going to announce The Rest is Hockey.
Sports have long faced the dilemma of choosing between the better exposure of free-to-air with the greater rights fees on offer from a pay broadcaster. Largely hidden on TNT, this summer’s Commonwealth Games in Glasgow struggled to achieve the broader impact of previous editions.
Despite the almost limitless space available on streaming platforms, they are likely to maintain a focus on established attractions. There will be no return to the sort of diverse agenda that older viewers will recall from programmes, including BBC Grandstand.
The future of sports broadcasting is therefore bigger. There will be more content, and especially more football, as streamers join others in giving viewers what they’re prepared to pay for. But it won’t necessarily be better.
If we want to read critical journalism about sport and watch coverage of a variety of events, we’ll have to work harder to seek these out for ourselves.
The writer is Director of Media, Film, Journalism, Politics and History at the University of Salford in the UK
Republished from The Conversation
Published in Dawn, ICON, September 13th, 2026
