Glide Live: London 2026 - Sports clubs are publishers now

£1.4m from email marketing alone, 29 videos over 1M views, 58% of under-35s follow sport through clips not matches. How sports organisations built content operations that publishers can learn from.

by Rich Fairbairn

Published:

Sport has the one thing every publisher is desperate for: loyalty that doesn't churn. Nobody walks away from their club or a sport they love because a rival's content got better.

This panel brought together a national football association, a club running content in-house on a limited budget, and a sports content agency with content creators embedded at a wide range of national bodies and rights holders. 

It was moderated by Mark Gilbert, one of the UK's leading sports marketing and content experts.

Content team growth (national football association): 3 (2007) → ~15 (2020) → 25 (2026). COVID was the inflection point that highlighted and proved the value of content.

Owned channel revenue (football club): £1.4m from email marketing alone this season. 2x streaming revenue after targeting international fanbases.

Player audiences are the growth lever

Individual player edits for social media drove results: 29 videos exceeded 1M views this season - 21 featured just two players. Co-creation with players (mutual edits, Instagram collaborations) leverages their audiences in ways club channels alone can't match. 

Research published the week of the event found 58% of under-35s now follow sport through clips and social media rather than full matches. Source: Bango, June 2026

Building star power grows the sport. A strategy deliberately built around elevating individual personalities drives broader interest. One standout player's personal encouragement of teammates to build their own social profiles created a compound effect across the entire squad.

Embedded creators: 800 applicants, 10 selected, living with the squad

A content creator programme embedded 10 creators within teams for an entire tournament (selected from 800 applicants across 32 countries). They lived with squads - same hotels, training, meals. 18 months of buy-in work with coaches was required. The resulting content served tournament, team, and player channels simultaneously.

Pitch-side content and access challenge

Pitch-side content is the single biggest differentiator. The data is unambiguous - getting cameras as close to the action as possible, and getting content out fast, outperforms everything else by a significant margin.

Access remains the key challenge. Years of relationship-building with coaches and players is required. Senior staff buy-in unlocked behind-the-scenes formats that became the biggest audience drivers. Exclusive documentary content (app-first for 12 hours before YouTube) drives downloads.

Owned channels generate the biggest revenues

Owned channels generate the biggest revenues for clubs - and provide a safe space for official communications in what can be a hostile environment (frequent manager changes, fan backlash about ownership). A 600,000-person database with 100,000 marketing opt-ins provides clean first-party data.

AI in sport is early-stage

Automated highlight tools help clubs with limited resources create player edits. But for written content, the human angle and context remain essential - one attempt to use AI for a time-sensitive piece required so much fact-checking it would have been faster to write from scratch.

Quotes from the room

"COVID was a very informative lesson in a content sense. All eyes moved online when there were no televised games. That's when the organisation saw how content can have increased impact."

"We did an email campaign this season and made 1.4 million. Which is no mean feat for a club the size of ours."

"Youngsters are more likely to follow athletes as opposed to teams. It's quite a transient environment. So we produce individual player edits and leverage their audiences."

"We had 800 people from 32 countries apply to be our 10 content creators. They went in and literally lived with the team throughout the tournament."

"I threw [some ideas for content] into ChatGPT and in the end I might as well have just written it myself. Once I cross-referenced the facts, it just wasn't accurate."

"It's almost like a content studio within the organisation now. Owned channels, social team, creative team, video, and operations."

A fuller version of this session will be available soon.

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