Saturday afternoon. A football match starts, but half of the people watching are not really watching it. Their eyes move to the screen, but their thumbs are on a group chat, a stat overlay, a bet slip that refreshes every couple of seconds. The striker is about to take a free kick, and even before the ball is kicked, the odds on the second screen have already changed. The two-second delay between the sound of the crowd and the sound on your phone is where a lot of the money in sports now comes from.
Here is the number that stopped us. PwC found that only 19% of younger fans watch a full game start to finish at home, and about 1% do nothing but watch. Everyone else is doing three things at once. Kevin Westcott, Vice Chair at Deloitte Global Telecommunications, explained that the winners will “blur the lines between viewing and interactive experiences.” You don’t have to use the couch now. The most important thing is the interaction.
In short, fans stopped just watching and started taking part. They want information as soon as it happens, money that moves as fast as the game, an app that already knows them, and a way to talk back. If you give them all four, you will be much better.
Real-Time Data Is the New Baseline
In the past, people used to brag about how fast their phones were. Now it is the floor. According to Zappi’s early-2026 numbers, around 83% of Gen Z fans use a second device while they watch. You will see 93% thrown around in decks, but we couldn’t find that one, so take it with a pinch of salt. Ricardo Perez-Selsky, Senior Director of Digital Production at Fox Sports, described streaming raw in-car cameras in late 2025, just the driver talking to the pit. Fans in the chat room started explaining the race to each other. He called it “a real community builder.” Give people the raw feed and a place to react, and they’ll make the show themselves.
The Death of the Single Screen
The fixed-angle broadcast is becoming less popular. Instead, there are different angles to watch, a chat window on the side and a poll to decide who gets to score next. Around 87% of fans aged 18 to 29 use sports apps, and FIFA logged over a million downloads during the Club World Cup.
The money case is about the San Francisco 49ers. They hired PwC to improve their digital setup. The aim was to reach fans 365 days a year, not just on game days. The most important thing is the relationship itself, not the broadcast. Adobe did some calculations and found that companies that focus on the customer experience make about 1.7 times more money than other companies and get 2.3 times more value from each customer over time. A team that only plays on Sundays is not as good as a team that plays more often.
Hyper-Personalization and AI Agents
The generic feed is becoming less popular. Instead, it will be replaced by: AI that tracks your fantasy team, finds a ticket deal near you, and puts together a video of only the players you follow. Jordy Leiser, the CEO of Jump, said that soon a team would use AI to set thousands of different prices for seats that are not being sold inside a single game. In just one match, there were thousands of them. On paper, that seems like a smart price. The person sitting next to you might have paid half as much as you did. Most sportsbooks now say that a personalised experience is the most important factor in keeping customers, but we’re not sure about this. It seems like the companies that sell personalisation tools are trying to make us believe this.
Money Moves as Fast as the Game
This has changed the most, and platforms talk about it the least honestly. Mordor Intelligence says that more people are betting on live games than on pre-game games. In 2025, between 53% and 62% of all betting was on live games. The important figure is that people who bet live spent about 87% more per month than those who didn’t. Micro-betting lets you bet on the next point or corner. You are always making decisions, and there will always be more to come. One of the oldest tricks is to make your brain want to close something up. These interfaces are based on this idea.
This makes us think about a word that is used too much in the industry: instant. Usually, this means that your brain is processing the information straight away, not that you get money in your wallet. In early 2026, a test found the best crypto books to be able to clear a withdrawal in under an hour, while the worst took three full business days to process a Bitcoin payout after it was reviewed manually. The same word can mean very different things.
Some platforms remove the human entirely. On a non-custodial book the payout comes straight from a smart contract the moment the match settles, and the Dexsport login is just connecting a wallet like MetaMask, no email, no ID upload. Dexsport has been running this way since 2022, it has an Anjouan licence, and it has had its contracts checked by CertiK and Pessimistic. But we wouldn’t oversell it. The word ‘instant’ still means immediate, but only after approval. This can be delayed if the risk checks take time. It is not yet clear if it will be successful when used by the big, centralised books. This is because the US GENIUS Act and Europe’s DAC8 rules are making it more and more difficult every three months.
Athletes Became the Platform
Deloitte found that around a third of Gen Z don’t pay for a streaming service to watch sport. They watch videos on social media instead. So, loyalty moved from leagues to individual athletes and creators. These people want “real content” over a polished appearance, and now run their own channels. One detail, since everyone thinks fewer people are watching sport: the WNBA had an average of 1.3 million viewers per game in 2025, which is a 6% increase, and signed an eleven-year, $2.2 billion media deal that will start in 2026. The audience is not disappearing. It won’t stay still.
