If sport were a city, it would be New York… one that never sleeps. Well, also most never at least. To the naked eye, the sporting calendar spanning the world’s biggest domestic leagues and competitions appears relentless – constantly dovetailing and overlapping to ensure a near 365 blitz on our senses. A quick AI check backed this up, informing me that across the whole of 2026 there will only be 20-40 days without some form of elite sport to watch. That means that for fans of sport in the broader sense – ones who are equally happy following football as they are basketball or cricket – there is essentially no real let up in the sporting calendar.
Sport is always-on, but individual sports do have off-seasons. They need breaks for athletes, coaches, administrators and even fans to recharge their batteries / passion (absence makes the heart grow fonder and all that) but they have a commercial incentive to keep connected to their fanbases and not disappear into the background. With this in mind, how do individual sports plug the gap in the calendars? When there is so much competition for attention, how do they keep engaging their fans, keep giving them their sporting hit and how does technology help them do it?
The answer lies beyond the pitch in the ancillary aspects of sport that have gained elevated status in our consciousness by a mix of coverage, commercial incentives and cultural significance. I’m talking about the bits of sports that don’t involve kicking a ball but equally part of the narrative and part of how we satiate our love of the game.
The first example of this is kit launches. These have evolved basic pre-season photo shoots to feed website e-commerce and email comms to highly produced, narrative driven digital campaigns with video and social first content to the fore – as I type, the social feeds of football fans around the world will be littered with launch videos of their favourite teams new first, second and even third kit ranges.
