• by Jon Last , Columnist, 3 hours ago

I’m not Chicken Little. The sky is far from falling on sports event marketing.  In fact, there is plenty of financial evidence to suggest the opposite.  I marvel at the growth in viewership and overall interest in sports. 

A multidecade effort to create accessible entry points for the masses to embrace sports as a cultural imperative has borne fruit in heightened interest and a proliferation of coverage by citizen journalists and social media influencers. 

In a time-shifted world, live sports may be the sole remaining example of appointment viewing, even with a younger generation that increasingly prefers-bite sized highlights over watching full competitions.

However, it can also be argued that with the massification of sporting events, we may be sacrificing the essence of the competition itself, once more than enough for everyday fans before games super-sized adjacent fan fests, concerts and influencers quaffing wine and taking selfies in luxury boxes.  Again, I’m all for attracting a wider audience, but when do the ancillary activities significantly dilute the main event? 

There are chips in the armor.  In our most recent tracking data, 35% of sports fans indicate that they are very likely to attend a live sporting event within the next two months.  That’s down 12 points from a year ago.  The same research shows 75% agreeing that the average fan has been priced out of attending sporting events, up +4 points from last June.

Only 40% of fans want to see more teams added to the NCAA Basketball tournament. And 71% of fans believe that they have to make more difficult decisions about discretionary purchases than they did five years ago, the highest we’ve seen in a year.  Less than half now feel that they are better off now than they were four years ago, the lowest we’ve seen since February of 2025.

I’ve written often about our K-shaped economy.  Sports has positioned itself firmly towards the upper arm of the K. 

The industry has successfully cultivated what we defined as “event enthusiasts,” those less enamored with the games themselves but more about being where the action is.  What happens if that segment grows bored, is priced out, or moves on to the next shiny new object?

Take Top Golf as a prime example.  The darling of the post-COVID golf industry, many heralded Top Golf as the impetus behind a boom in participation and interest in the sport, and the numbers bore it out in the immediate post COVID years.  Yet same venue sales have been down -5.5% and -4.5% over the past two years. 

Massification has attracted outside capital and grown revenue, but sometimes aspirational scarcity can be an even better long-term strategy. Ultimately, the sustainability of these super-sized events may matter less, as properties move to a world where the live venue becomes the studio, playing host to pay primarily per view digital consumption.  In the interim, it behooves properties to test price elasticities and demand -- while at the same time not avoiding the core product itself.