If you're trying to understand where the next generation of sports fans are forming, and crucially how you’re going to monetise them, the answer is not sports subscription.
YouTube made more revenue in 2025 than Disney. Its viewers are younger, its creator ecosystem wider and its sports infrastructure growing.
So why do sports rights holders still treat YouTube as a background channel? You only need to look at the numbers to see how important it is. YouTube generated $62.3 billion in revenue in 2025 according to data released recently by MoffettNathanson. That puts it ahead of Disney, which posted $60.9 billion. YouTube is, by analyst consensus, the world’s largest media company.
And yet, when I read that Looper Insights surveyed sports industry executives about which ecosystem holds the greatest structural power in sports media, only 16.9% pointed to YouTube. Netflix and Amazon instead received the bulk of industry confidence. Trad broadcasters got 2.1%.
But for Gen Z and Alpha, YouTube is not just any old platform. It is their default. Gen Z is 39% more likely than Gen X to say that YouTube is their top viewing platform. Over 90% of Gen Z sports fans use social video to watch clips, highlights, interviews and live. It is where fandom lives.
On reading the Looper survey I can’t help but think that the sports media business is hiding its head in the sand.
The data tells us that YouTube is not just nipping at the heels of legacy TV. It has already replaced it for a significant share of viewers, and those viewers are expanding in terms of their age demo AND increasingly viewing YouTube on the TV set.
Look at this chart below from Evan Shapiro on UK YouTube viewing on TV, split into age bands. Increases across the board.
Feels like sports media execs should be taking this shift way more seriously.
For Gen Alpha the picture is even clearer. According to Precisify’s Kids US 2026 report, 75% of US children use YouTube, rising to 80% among 10 to 12 year olds. So if you are trying to understand where YOUR next generation of sports fans are forming their identities, and crucially how you’re going to monetise them the answer is not a Sky Sports or DAZN subscription.
Analyst Michael Nathanson: “YouTube’s global scale and innovative offerings create an uncommonly high moat.”
Most kids’ first media exposure to new fandoms happens via YouTube (according to SuperAwesome) but they are not merely casual viewers. Sports still treats kids and teens on YouTube as difficult to monetise, fickle and therefore not worthy of much, if any, investment in content or strategic thinking.
Yet they are future season ticket holders, future merchandise/shirt buyers, and future media purchasers and subscribers. The risk is, if rights holders continue to dismiss YouTube and instead focussing their efforts on streamers that still write cheques (for now), that by 2032 those 16 year olds on whom you’re soon going to be counting on may not be interested in your sport at all.
Understanding what YouTube really is
The executive assumption that YouTube is a clip repository, or unserious creator platform rather than sports infrastructure deserves a direct challenge.
YouTube TV, with its dedicated Sports bundle priced at $65 per month in the US, packages every major broadcast network alongside ESPN, FS1, NBC Sports, Golf Channel, NBA TV and more, with NFL Sunday Ticket available as an add-on. It is not a streaming app, it is a pay-TV operator but with an attached creator ecosystem that no legacy platform can replicate.
YouTube secured the NFL Sunday Ticket rights for approximately $2 billion per year in 2022. It has been active in bidding discussions for rights packages since. If it secures live game windows across the NFL, NBA and eventually even Premier League, it will become the most powerful sports destination in a single app, pulling leverage away from broadcast and pure sports streamers at the same time.
MoffattNathanson puts the standalone valuation of YouTube at $500 billion to $550 billion, or roughly 30% of Alphabet's current valuation. Paramount, one of the NFL's current broadcast partners, has a market cap of $8.24 billion. The maths on who is likely to need who more is looking pretty clear.
$62.3bn YouTube 2025 revenue (MoffettNathanson)
$8.24bn Paramount market cap, a current NFL broadcast partner
only 16.9% Share of sports industry execs citing YouTube as most structurally powerful by 2026 (Looper Insights)
YouTube’s creator ecosystem is now a distribution layer in its own right. Rights holders who limit their YouTube analysis to their own channel’s subscriber count are missing a more important shift: creator-led distribution is now a legitimate rights channel.
The Bundesliga partnered with YouTube channels in the UK, That’s Football (run by Mark Goldbridge) and The Overlap, for Friday night matches in the 2025-26 season. Goldbridge built a community of 13 to 24 year olds who were muting broadcast coverage to watch along with him anyway. The Bundesliga decided to make it official. LaLiga has done similar.
In France, streamer Zack Nani acquired Saudi Pro League and France Under-21 rights. In Brazil, CazéTV, which distributes via YouTube, invested $60 million in sports rights in 2025 alone. In 2026, CazéTV will also expand to Portugal launching a new channel on YouTube, broadcast 34 matches from the 2026 FIFA World Cup for free, including all of Portugal’s national team games.
As Jonny Keogh, YouTube’s Head of UK Sports, noted in a recent Sports Industry Group report: the creator-rights deal is no longer an experiment. It is a distribution infrastruture strategy.
So why does the sports industry keep looking away?
The Looper Insights survey found that 38.3% of executives believe YouTube will face resistance from rights holders and remain limited in live sports. That resistance exists, but it is worth calling out why.
Rights holders have spent decades building leverage through scarcity. Exclusive windows and minimum guarantees are the language of commercial strategy and have been for decades. YouTube does not speak that language, and its open, free, creator-led model doesn’t fit the prevailing ‘premium’ narrative that underpins most major rights negotiations.
There is also a less comfortable possibility. If YouTube becomes the dominant sports media platform for Gen Alpha, it means that the era of ever-growing broadcast rights fees has a ceiling. No rights holder wants say that part out loud in their forecasting. Hence it is much easier to focus on Netflix and Amazon.
But focussing on Netflix and Amazon while ignoring YouTube is an error. Netflix has 301 million subscribers and no free tier. YouTube has 2.7 billion monthly users and does not require a subscription. These are not the same type of platform, and they do not reach the same fans.
YouTube’s structural power in sports media is not a future risk, it is a present reality. I suggest that most rights strategies are underweighting it.
The 40.4% of executives in the Looper Insights survey who believe YouTube could evolve into a full operating system for sports media, covering discovery, creators and distribution in a single environment, are on the right track. But the tension is that rights holders can’t and won’t build their strategy around that reality now, they’d rather wait until the rights cycle forces them to.
In truth there is much more they could be doing now. Firstly, treating YouTube as a content and distribution partner, not a social media clip channel. Second, building a significant creator strategy that uses YouTube’s ecosystem to reach fans aged 13 to 24 is vital, because that is where fandom is being formed right now. Third, watch the NFL opt-out clauses. When they activate, YouTube’s financial position relative to legacy broadcast partners will make the platform’s ambitions very clear, very quickly. They’re ready to buy.
Gen Alpha don’t understand exclusive rights packages, they simply don’t get it and why should they when they’ve never known a time without easy access to billions of hours of content? What they DO understand is who shows them sport in a way that is cheap, accessible and curated in a way by people they trust. Right now, that answer is YouTube every time. The money will follow the audience. They always do.
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Very interesting.
Seems its kind of down to legacy, the feeling of lack of control and thinking the product loses its premium value by going to YouTube. And this is enough to keep legacy rights holders not to do it as they are incentivised and focused on short term-ism in order to hit targets and keep their jobs. Not for future value creation. That's how I see it.
YouTube is everywhere on my tv stack timeline. It can’t be ignored