Sports organisations are now media powerhouses in their own right

Sports teams have the one thing traditional publishers cannot match: loyalty that doesn't churn. First Team's Mark Gilbert, moderator of the Glide Live: London sports panel, shares the themes that emerged when content leaders from The FA, Sportsbeat, and Watford FC debated what that means in practice.

Published: 12:45, 08 July 2026

Leading sports teams and organisations have the one thing traditional publishers cannot match - loyalty that doesn’t churn. 

No football fan has ever stopped following their club because their rival’s content suddenly got better. 

Elite teams and federations have behaved like newsrooms for years, and the gap between how they deliver content compared with traditional media outlets has never been closer.

Sports organisations have recruited executives from media organisations since the turn of the century - and I was one of the first to switch from poacher to gamekeeper.

The Football Association hired me from The Sun sports desk in 2012 to be their first Head of Digital Communications. That move was unusual at the time, but it looks unremarkable now. 

And the role sports organisations are now playing in delivering premium content to their audiences - and replacing much of the role traditional media used to play - formed the basis of a panel I chaired at the inaugural Glide Live event held in Westminster in June. 

The harder question, and the one that took up most of the session, is what kind of publishers sports organisations are becoming. 

The panel I hosted spent 35 minutes debating what high audience retention means in practice, and how sports teams and federations continue to unpick how best to capitalise on it.

At The UnHerd Club, a 60-strong audience of publishing and sport leaders heard from three senior voices, each with a different vantage point.

Nick Veevers, Content Manager at The Football Association, joined us hours before his evening shift covering England's first World Cup match against Croatia. Georgie Heath, Creative Director at Sportsbeat, brought the agency view from across multiple sports and major events including last year's record-breaking Women's Rugby World Cup. And James Montague, now Head of Content at Watford after senior social roles at UEFA, Juventus and Tottenham Hotspur, gave the perspective of someone who has worked at every scale football operates at.

The session was packed full of insights and anecdotes, and a few threads from the conversation are shared below to give you a snapshot of some of the themes we discussed.

The slow opening up of behind-the-scenes access

Anyone watching content from England’s World Cup campaign might assume openness was always the default - but it wasn't. The shift from a closed, formal, press-conference-led approach to something far more textured, where players are filmed in training, relaxing in their downtime, with cameras capturing genuine moments that reveal their personalities, was hard-won over more than a decade. 

Different England managers brought very different attitudes to The FA’s in-house content team, as well as varying appetites for how much they were prepared to reveal from inside a camp. 

The current model, where innovative behind-the-scenes content complements traditional press conferences, took years of trust-building between content teams, communications teams, technical staff and the players themselves. 

In turn, that content is picked up and reported on by traditional media - amplifying the reach of The FA’s content beyond its owned and operated channels. 

And the same is happening in different areas across the sport. Agencies working with smaller federations are negotiating access for content creators who travel with teams for weeks at a time. Clubs are building co-creation models with their own players, so the player's channel and the club's channel reinforce each other rather than compete.

Players are considered publishers in their own right

Younger fans increasingly follow individual players over the teams they play for. Prior to Cristiano Ronaldo joining Al-Nassr and Lionel Messi signing for Inter Miami, replica shirts from those teams were never seen on the streets of England. 

And while some clubs have been concerned with the influence and reach of star players’ channels, modern-thinking organisations have embraced it as a new way to reach new audiences. The smartest content operations are working with players' own channels rather than against them, producing content packages designed to be repurposed, and treating player reach as a multiplier rather than a competitor.

The commercial implications of this are enormous. One panellist described doubling overseas streaming revenue by producing tailored content for players whose home markets sit outside the UK. Another talked about how a social post with a million views used to be the exception but is now a regular occurrence, and it is almost entirely driven by content built around individual players rather than the institution itself.

With sports clients we work with at Glide, we see the opportunities teams can create by using players as advocates and brand ambassadors, instead of regarding them as members of staff, which was how many organisations viewed them in the past.

The lesson sport keeps proving, and the one publishers in attendance at Glide Live kept noting, is that personality is a faster route to growth than brand. Even at the institutional level, fans want to know the people, not the badge.

Owned channels, and the return to first-party data

Earlier sessions at Glide Live covered the renewed focus on owned audiences across publishing. Mail Editions, The Times, and The Spectator made the case for apps, registration, subscription, and first-party data as key assets to build around. My panel made the same case from the sport angle, but with a different starting position.

The difference when working for a sports organisation is that your audience comes to you as fans rather than readers, so registration matters less than the emotional contract that’s already in place. 

In sport, the task is increasingly to convert fan loyalty into channels you control rather than platforms you rent. For years, sports teams and federations built huge audiences on social media platforms, often neglecting their own website and app. But that is now changing, and changing fast. The FA launched a new app in advance of the World Cup, with documentary content and tournament video debuting there first before being shared with audiences on other channels. 

And one of our panellists revealed how a single email campaign at one sports organisation generated a seven-figure line of revenue in a season. 

The lesson here is that owned channels are having a huge renaissance. Social channels remain an essential platform to scale audiences, but owned channels offer first-party data and can assist organisations in retaining greater control of narratives when LLMs cite trusted sources in AI search.  

The data point nobody wants to name

A recurring theme emerged from several answers - specifically that the data you can trust is the data you actually own. 

First-party data from registered users tells you who someone is and what they care about. Social data tells you they exist. The gap between the two is the difference between a relationship and a metric.

That's an old observation in publishing but it's still a fairly new one in sport. The clubs and federations who are good at this are now treating their first-party data with the same care publishers have been forced to for years. 

For publishers, the question this panel raised is uncomfortable. Sport is catching up to publishing on data discipline, while bringing an audience asset that publishing can't replicate. 

The ones who aren't there yet will get there eventually, but the time it takes those late arrivals to catch up will be significant.

AI in practice, and the limits our panellists keep finding

The impact of AI was a thread throughout Glide Live, and my panel returned to it near the close of the sports session. 

The most revealing insight was that the use cases genuinely changing how content teams work are unglamorous. Automated video tools that mine archives for specific historical moments. Asset platforms that surface player photos by name. Workflow tools that cut an hour of editing time into ten minutes.

And according to our panel, the places AI keeps falling short are consistent. Anything requiring cultural nuance, political sensitivity, or the kind of judgment a long-serving editor makes by instinct cannot currently be done accurately by AI. 

Audiences are increasingly able to spot AI-generated content, and the panel was sceptical that the trust contract between a club and its fans survives if the content stops being recognisably human. The takeaway from the panel is that AI is certainly now a part of workflows, but leading organisations are ensuring it is not yet infiltrating the ‘voice’ of their content.  

Why you should attend the next Glide Live

The inaugural Glide Live brought together senior decision-makers from across publishing and sport. Voices from the Daily Mail, The Spectator, CNN, Mail Editions, The Times, Poker.org, Hello!, the BMJ and Which? sat alongside sport-side representation from Arsenal, LIV Golf, Formula 1, IMG and the DP World Tour.

Eight concise sessions in an intimate setting under Chatham House meant there was enough time for networking and debate in side rooms, and the absence of slide-decks meant sessions were interactive and full of audience questions.

For more from Glide Live: London 2026, start with the conference recap - Glide Live: London 2026 - What the media industry's leaders are doing about AI, search, and revenue. 

Mark Gilbert has worked with some of sport’s biggest organisations. He was The FA's first Head of Digital Communications, shaped FIFA's content strategy ahead of Qatar 2022, and led digital work for AS Roma, Arsenal and the Saudi Arabia Football Federation. He advises federations and rights holders on digital and content strategy, with other clients including the IOC, The National Lottery, The R&A and LIV Golf.