Now in its 36th edition, the annual Sportel conference in Monaco is one of the fixtures of the sports business calendar. It remains an incredibly important forum for media rights but is now a major event for sports technology, as well as a platform for new and existing properties to connect and share their latest updates.
At this year’s event, we heard LaLiga president Javier Tebas share his views on soccer governance and Manchester City, Mediapro explain their decision to rebrand, and The Overlap discuss their rise to become one of the most influential content platforms in soccer.
There were plenty of storylines and trends across the three days, with five that stood out in particular.
LaLiga president Javier Tebas was among the speakers at this year’s Sportel (Image credit: Getty Images)
Premium rights keep rising while the middle gets squeezed
The changing dynamics of the sports media market have been apparent for some time. Streaming has allowed broadcasters to become much more data oriented in terms of how they acquire rights, leading them to prioritise big ticket properties that drive customer acquisition and retention as well as benefit from huge live audiences that deliver advertising revenue.
This has benefited the likes of the National Football League (NFL), National Basketball Association (NBA) and the Premier League, who have secured significant increases in the value of their deals. However, as they take a greater proportion of broadcasters’ budgets for sports rights, others are scrambling for a smaller piece of the pie – leading to stagnant or even contracting media revenues.
At Sportel, multiple speakers said that although media rights would continue to provide income for properties who are capable of commanding such fees, they would need to find alternative sources of revenue moving forward.
“I think properties are seeing that you cannot depend entirely on your [media] deal to drive your property,” said Hillary Mandel, EVP and head of Americas, rights at IMG. “The dollars are incredibly important, but the ecosystem that sits around that… you’ve got to own it yourself.”
Jeff Roth, founding partner at Bruin Capital added: “I agree with the middle squeeze, and if you’re in that middle, it just becomes more important to focus on match day, sponsorship, streaming, kind of businesses that we invest in… it’s even more important for the folks that cannot rely on doubling your media rights every seven years when you go to market.”
“This is not the United we knew!” 😬 How far away are Manchester United from the standards Roy once knew? 🔴 https://t.co/ZmUi8ikJIv
— The Overlap (@WeAreTheOverlap) October 25, 2026
Creators are now partners, not a threat, as sport becomes more than the live event
YouTube had a significant presence in Monaco, sharing the stage with The Overlap, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and LiveMode across the two days. The consensus was that although live rights remained the lifeblood of sports media, content creators were helping to drive engagement and revenues across the industry.
“Live is the most important thing. Live drives everything,” explained Scott Melvin, The Overlap’s chief executive. “Rights, whilst they are king, are becoming prohibitively expensive… Very few creators, if any, will ever be able to afford Premier League rights. So, the opportunity is owning… If you can’t own the rights, own the conversation, and be 24/7.”
Pedro Pina, vice president, YouTube EMEA agreed, noting that 80 per cent of World Cup content viewership on YouTube took place in between matches.
“[Fans] love to know what happened in between matches, they want to comment, [and] they want to have a conversation by their own influencers and by their own creators,” he added, warning that rights holders and broadcasters that didn’t embrace this trend would face a potential value leak as younger viewers simply bypass official channels.
“It’s not about creators. It’s about viewers… it’s very, very difficult and very unsustainable to force viewers to have a behaviour that they don’t want to have… Water finds its way, and viewership is the same thing.
One way many rights holders are reacting to both the demand for such content and stagnating media rights values is through non-exclusive deals with creator-led channels that serve specific audiences.
The Overlap is one of several creators to be awarded Bundesliga soccer rights, while LiveMode is building on the success of sublicensing World Cup games from ESPN in Brazil by streaming selected Premier League and Champions League for free on its YouTube channel in Portugal.
“When [we] started in [Portugal], I think everyone in the industry was very concerned about our entry, with the mindset of a zero-sum game,” explained Thiago Tourinho, parter at LiveMode. “I think after the World Cup, everyone realised that it’s complementary, and we can add audiences… So after the World Cup, we did a deal with DAZN in which we have one match of the Uefa Champions League, one match of the [Premier League] every round. We are able to increase the revenue of DAZN and of [us] as well.”
“They have all the matches. They still have all the matches. Our match is not exclusive, so they also have it… So overall, we are increasing the revenue pool.”
Could AI be what immersive sport has been missing?
Five years ago, the metaverse was all the rage, fuelled by Facebook’s multi-billion-dollar rebrand as Meta and the enthusiasm of crypto advocates who believed we would all exist in a Web 3.0-enabled universe with transportable identities and digital items. Yet despite significant resources committed to creating a hardware ecosystem, building digital environments, and creating immersive applications, it’s fair to say that specific vision has not been fulfilled.
Yet proponents of immersive sporting experiences remain convinced there is a market for services that take fans closer to the action, encouraged by advances in local processing power, more desirable devices such as smart glasses, and increasing consumer appetite.
The XR Sports Alliance, an industry body of manufacturers, developers, broadcasters and rights holders, also believes artificial intelligence (AI) is the key to a new wave of applications that will actually appeal to consumers – whether it’s at home or in the stadium.
“For us, AI is really kind of one of the answers that we have for immersive technologies to succeed. It’s one of the reasons now,” explained Jose Somolinos, solutions strategist and XR lead at Accedo. “I’ve been 12 years working on these technologies, and every time I ask, ‘Would you like to have a headset?’ [The answer is] ‘No’.”
“The perfect user experience for that is going to be the new interface that we’re going to be using, because we are much more used to talk with [Large Language Models (LLMs)] with our natural voice, right? And the idea that when you will be able to wear these glasses, enter in an event, and have all the information about the map of all the different venues, and they guide you to go there… this is going to help you to enjoy the sport much better.”
“We see the trends for AI glasses taking off,” added Patrick Costello, senior director of business development at Qualcomm. “I think just in 2025 alone, Meta shipped over seven million devices …This is colliding now with the availability of [agentic AI].
“At some point – we may not realise it now – we’re all going to have AI agents, you know, working for us in the background and available as interfaces on these devices.”
Indeed, the one major constraint for truly immersive first-person experiences could be the cost of cameras – however, this is another challenge that could be solved by cheaper hardware and more AI in the future.
The value of tech in pioneering new formats
Athletics’ struggle to remain relevant in between major championships is well documented. A convoluted schedule and the difficulty in getting the sport’s biggest stars to compete regularly against one another have impacted visibility and meaningful competition.
Yet the success of the Paris 2024 Olympic Games, the emergence of a new wave of young, digitally-native athletes, and the evergreen appeal of witnessing superhuman feats of athleticism are huge votes of confidence for the sport.
World Athletics’ latest initiative to seize this opportunity is the Ultimate Championship, a season-ending invitational championship restricted to defending Olympic champions, world champions, Diamond League winners, and top-ranked athletes with a US$10 million prize fund. This guaranteed a high-quality field and gave the event meaning for viewers.
The priority for World Athletics was maximising the opportunity. It did this by deploying broadcast technology that would enhance the spectacle across multiple platforms and help viewers understand what they were seeing.
World Athletics captured new types of data for the first time, created a new app that provided a genuine second-screen experience, rather than simply mimic the official website, and tailored the on-screen graphics to offer something different from what had been offered before. These included new visualisations, live win predictions, and a clock located in the centre of the screen rather than in the corner
“The clock in the centre – that was designed to support vertical videos … [which] cut out the clock,” explained Cristiano Coraglia, senior product and project manager at World Athletics. “If there’s a world record, you will not see [the time]. Having the clock always at the centre allows you to help people understand the performance.”
Coraglia added that the format had been a success with sold out sessions, positive feedback from athletes, and early interest in broadcasting the next edition in two years’ time. By then, World Athletics hopes to be more capable of transforming raw data into new forms of insight – ones that can convert viewers who only tune in every few years into avid fans of the sport.
“[Viewers] don’t want to see simply a record, a number. They want to understand the story behind it. So our challenge is: how do we surface those stories?” he added. “The avid user will be happy no matter what. But if we keep presenting data like we did ten years ago then we will have the [core] fans, that [represent] 0.01 per cent [of the potential audience] and we will not engage with the [new fans].”
IMG’s Hilary Mandel spoke about the market for US media rights and investment (Image credit: Getty Images)
US money is driving growth
The rising valuation of sports franchises has been a common theme across many conferences this year and Sportel was no different. North American major league approval of minority investments from private equity firms, helping owners unlock equity, coupled with rising media rights values are having a major impact in the US.
However, US investors are also eyeing up European teams, especially soccer clubs, because the high cost of franchises on the other side of the Atlantic makes majority ownership all but impossible.
“The US [leagues] don’t allow private equity to own [a] majority… So it’s still very much a wealthy individual game in the US,” said Roth. “Because they can’t own [a] majority in the US, you also then see a lot of US investors, particularly [in] NFL and Major League Baseball (MLB) clubs, looking to own [soccer] teams on [a] majority basis… that trend, I think, will continue.”
“80 per cent of the investments we made on the Bruin side have been in businesses outside of the US, even though we’re all located in the US.”
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