Falling in love has no rhyme or reason – it’s a deeply irrational, sometimes shocking feeling. At least that’s what it feels like to fall in love with a sports team.
Sometimes, children are born wearing kits of the teams their parents support – in Bologna, quite literally. Other times, those on the rebellious side choose to support their family’s rival club.
Occasionally, a nation is drawn to a team whose star hails from its shores, or fans become fixated on a generational talent like Lionel Messi or Cristiano Ronaldo.
2020 research into US-based fandom of Premier League clubs showed that attachment to a fan community – and venue – play a big role in identifying with an overseas team. But what happens when there are no such ties? How do viewers in Japan find and support a team in the NFL? How does Manchester United amass 300,000 official club members across 167 countries, with 275 official supporters’ clubs?
Opportunity comes knocking
While top-tier leagues are reaching all-time highs in domestic media rights fees – such as the NBA’s $6.9bn-per-year agreements with Amazon, Disney and NBC – the broad feeling is that domestic markets are reaching saturation. There are, though markets with growth potential abroad, offering vital revenue for rights-holders seeking to reach increasingly borderless, digitally native sports fans.
The NFL generates over $12.5bn per year in media rights revenue, yet only one per cent of that total comes from its international deals. Compare that with the Premier League, where its international media rights have now surpassed its domestic income.
So what exactly can a league do? Though falling in love is irrational, the strategy from the rights-holder side must be calculated, methodical and meticulously planned.
“Falling in love with a team, a sport, or a player is like a chemical reaction. And chemical reactions don’t always happen. There might be a probability behind it, but you need to put the conditions in place and then wait for that lightning to strike,” says Keegan Pierce, LaLiga’s director of international relations. “The way to do that is being agnostic in your promotional strategy.”
Win the heart first, then the head
In some markets, leagues might be competing with a similar product. But what happens when a league has to start from scratch?
Viewers learning how a sport works during live broadcasts is crucial – but rules are not necessarily front-of-mind when introducing a sport to a new market.
“From an education standpoint, partly it’s the rules but, honestly, it’s more ‘why should I care about this team or this game?’ You have to help people understand rivalries, jeopardy in games, who the star players are. That builds interest,” says Henry Hodgson, general manager for NFL UK.
“How defences work and those kinds of things come a little further down the road. When people switch on a sport they want to understand what’s at stake. The education is certainly, ‘how do you get a first down?’ But also ‘why should I care about this game?’”
And not all markets are created equal. “There are countries where clubs have players who are household names, and that goes well beyond the Spanish-speaking world,” LaLiga’s Pierce adds. “Then there are some places where, at the same time that you’re teaching people about LaLiga, you’re also teaching them about Spain, you’re also teaching about the sport of football.”
Make yourself available
For leagues, media rights naturally serve as the vessel for exposure in international markets. Maintaining a balance between monetising pay-TV rights while maintaining as much exposure as possible is obviously key.
The Premier League has found its home with NBC, which has held rights for over a decade, now paying $450m per season. Though behind a paywall, over 30 per cent of the US population classifies themselves as football fans, with 39 million people claiming to be Premier League fans.
SportBusiness understands that 34 per cent of Premier League followers globally have become interested in the past four years – driven by activations, media rights deals and exposure in new markets.
In the UK, the NFL has just renewed its pay-TV rights with Sky but has also opted for a larger free-to-air package with Channel 5, renamed 5, to introduce more people to the sport via a gameshow format.
While there is no blueprint, each territory must be assessed, market by market. Leagues have to adapt to new modes of viewing and interacting with sport – be that social media highlights, TikTok content or YouTubers streaming games.
Ahead of the 2025 season, the German Bundesliga announced a multi-platform broadcast approach in the UK and Ireland, with YouTube channels complementing coverage on Sky and the BBC alongside pay-per-view matches on Amazon’s Prime Video. At a crucial juncture in the media landscape, leagues must stay ahead of the curve to ensure they get as many eyeballs as possible on their content. Whether that’s for a love-at-first-sight moment, or a slow-burn romance.
“You can’t manufacture that moment… but you can create the conditions where it’s more likely to happen”
Keegan Pierce, director of international relations at LaLiga
Embrace being the other woman
For many leagues, it’s not a matter of becoming the top property, but about introducing a new sport into the mix.
“We come into every market outside of the US knowing that we’re very clearly a challenger brand, that there are sports locally that are much more popular,” says NFL’s Hodgson. “As sport fandom evolves, it’s very easy to be a fan of multiple sports, to love multiple sports. I don’t see it necessarily as competition in terms of it being binary – you’re either a fan of this or a fan of that. You can be a fan of all of these things.”
And when a fan’s home team is struggling, sometimes solace can be found in a successful team overseas.
Hodgson says that many fans abroad become attached to a team after seeing it win the Super Bowl. So much so, that the league is sometimes able to ‘carbon date’ when the NFL made a push into a specific market based on the most popular teams.
In Mexico, where the league first started being broadcast in the 1970s, the Pittsburgh Steelers and Dallas Cowboys over-index in support compared to other teams. The two teams won five Super Bowls between them in the 1970s.
Don’t forget the IRL experience
Sometimes it’s a matter of taking a trip to know how you really feel about somebody. Or – having them come visit you.
The trend of international games is not new but has been on the considerable uptick over recent years. The NFL is now allowed to schedule up to eight international regular-season games per season.
As of 2025, all 32 NFL teams are a part of the league’s ‘global markets program’ – an initiative launched in 2022, awarding NFL teams international marketing rights to build up their brand and fandom in a specific international market.
As part of the program, NFL clubs submit proposals to the league’s International Committee for review each spring. Rights are awarded for a minimum of five years, during which teams can hold activities in markets that are ‘consistent with what they can do in their home market’.
In 2024, the NFL added Argentina, Colombia, Japan, Nigeria and South Korea, extending the initiative to 19 international markets, with 25 of 32 NFL teams engaged. The Kansas City Chiefs, for example – the most-searched team in the league outside of the US according to Google trends – are able to market themselves in Austria.
In the UK, marketing rights are held by the Bears, Jaguars, Dolphins, Vikings, Jets and 49ers – with all but the Dolphins having played in a NFL game in London.
“It’s very clear from our research that you’re more likely to become a more avid fan of the NFL – and I would presume any sports – if you fall in love with a team. Out of that insight came the global markets program,” Hodgson said.
“I think the frequency of a touchpoint, more than just a single game, is what grows fandom and shows a connection with a fanbase in a country.”
The Premier League, while having never played regular-season international games, has put more emphasis into its Summer Series in the US which it has held since 2023.
The Spanish and Italian Super Cups have been staged in Saudi Arabia – for the Spanish FA, as part of a long-term deal. With LaLiga’s Relevent partnership through its LaLiga North America joint venture, a match between Villarreal and Barcelona in Miami is in the works.
As leagues grow more global each year, leagues have had to be more creative about, quite literally, meeting fans where they are.
But any move towards international games does not come without a backlash. Fans in the US complain of time differences when watching their teams, and of losing the ability to watch their teams play in front of home crowds.
FIFPRO, the football players’ union, as well as top European leagues, have filed a complaint focused on the men’s international match calendar, alleging the moves – which include the expanded Fifa Club World Cup and men’s World Cup – “risk player safety and well-being”.
And football fans have fought back as well. Following the Spanish Football Federation’s green light of international games in August 2025, the Spanish supporter organisation claimed the move “breaks the integrity of the competition” and affects season ticketholders.
As of September 2025, Uefa has launched a consultation on whether to give approval for the staging of regular-season league matches outside Europe – with delays welcomed by the Football Supporters Europe (FSE) group.
The basis for a successful relationship
While there’s no set recipe for success – and many challenges – there are specific ingredients that leagues can look to. That includes finding a unique international media rights strategy, investing in sponsorship activations, relinquishing marketing control of individual teams, finding palatable ways to go to where the fans are and, of course, the odd explainer or two.
And then – maybe – there will be a moment of magic.
As Pierce says: “You can’t manufacture that moment. People fall in love with a person, with the league, or with a hobby at a moment that is really down to that person and the circumstances around them. But you can create the conditions where it’s more likely to happen.”
Maria Kholodova is a senior reporter for SportBusiness Media. Maria’s focus is on North America and tennis, as well as markets including Russia, Italy and the Nordics.
