The game has gone global. The broadcast hasn’t.
Sports leagues have spent decades building global audiences. Now, increasingly, they’re taking the product itself to them.
Formula 1 has made the United States a central part of its growth strategy, with races in Austin, Miami and Las Vegas. As SportsPro recently explored, that expansion has gone far beyond simply staging more races. F1 has adapted how the sport is marketed, presented and commercialised for an American audience.
Other major sports are heading in a similar direction.
The NFL will stage a record nine international regular-season games in 2026, across four continents and seven countries. Meanwhile, the NBA has begun a multi-year programme of European games, with Berlin and London in 2026 followed by Paris and Manchester in 2027.
The direction of travel is clear.
International expansion is no longer simply about making a sport available overseas. It’s about making those markets part of the sport itself.
But taking the event global creates another challenge.
Has the media experience travelled with it?
Bringing the game to a market is only the beginning
An international game can create something that no marketing campaign can replicate.
Stadiums fill. Players visit the city. Local media covers the event. Sponsors activate around it. Fans who might previously have watched from thousands of miles away suddenly have the sport on their doorstep.
But an NFL game in Madrid lasts a few hours.
The ambition to create NFL fans in Spain lasts considerably longer.
The NFL’s Global Markets Program illustrates that shift. All 32 clubs now hold international marketing rights across 22 markets, giving teams opportunities to build fandom through events, marketing and commercial activity throughout the year.
Taking the game somewhere can create attention.
Building a relationship with that audience requires something more persistent.
Increasingly, that relationship will be built through media.
Localisation needs to move upstream
For years, sports localisation largely happened at the end of the broadcast workflow.
Produce the main programme. Translate the commentary. Change the graphics. Distribute it into another territory.
That made sense when the primary challenge was access.
Today, the challenge is relevance.
A fan discovering the NFL in Germany, basketball in France or Formula 1 in the United States may not consume that sport in the same way as someone who has followed it for decades.
They might discover a team through TikTok rather than television. They may watch a creator-led show on YouTube, follow individual players rather than teams or consume highlights vertically on their phone.
So perhaps localisation shouldn’t begin with:
“How do we translate the broadcast?”
It should begin with:
“What is the best version of this event for this audience?”
That’s a much bigger question.
One event can become multiple media products
A global sports property increasingly serves audiences with different languages, cultures, viewing habits and levels of familiarity with the sport.
Why should all of them receive exactly the same experience?
A single NFL game could have its primary US broadcast while simultaneously supporting German or Spanish commentary, a creator-led watchalong, a native vertical experience and market-specific highlights.
The underlying event hasn’t changed.
The experience around it has.
Commentary can change. Talent can change. Graphics can change. Editorial emphasis can change. Even the format and orientation of the programme can change.
And this is where localisation becomes commercially interesting too.
It’s often treated as a cost: more commentary, more graphics, more production resources.
But every localised output can also become new commercial inventory.
A German-language programme creates an opportunity for German commercial partners. A Brazilian feed could carry Brazilian sponsorship. A creator-led stream offers brands a different proposition from the main broadcast. A vertical programme can create inventory designed specifically for mobile audiences.
Suddenly localisation isn’t simply an engagement strategy.
It’s a monetisation strategy.
The same rights holder, event and underlying production can support multiple audiences, partners and commercial propositions.
For sports organisations investing heavily in international expansion, that’s an important distinction. The objective shouldn’t simply be getting more international viewers onto the existing feed.
It should be creating media experiences valuable enough to develop audiences, and commercial ecosystems, of their own.
Local doesn’t have to mean less authentic
There is, however, a balance to strike.
The answer to international growth isn’t to remove everything distinctive about a sport.
Part of Formula 1’s appeal to an American audience may be precisely that it doesn’t feel like an American sports league. British NFL fans don’t necessarily need the NFL redesigned to resemble the Premier League.
International audiences are often attracted to the culture, traditions and spectacle of the original product.
The goal isn’t homogenisation.
It’s accessibility without losing authenticity.
That might mean local talent explaining an unfamiliar sport. Commentary in the audience’s language. Creators who understand the cultural context. Graphics that surface information a newer fan actually needs. Highlights built around the players generating interest within that particular market.
The core event remains the same.
The way into it changes.
Technology evolves.
Your production strategy will too.
Most organisations don’t stop at live clipping. As audience expectations evolve, so do production requirements. Teams begin experimenting with vertical-first content. They’re asked to produce more live shoulder programming.
AI becomes part of daily production. New social platforms emerge. Remote contribution becomes routine. Replay workflows become more sophisticated.
The platform that solves today’s challenge should also support tomorrow’s opportunities. That’s why scalability isn’t simply about infrastructure. It’s about giving production teams the confidence to expand their workflows without having to replace the technology sitting underneath them.
Production becomes part of the growth strategy
Historically, production has largely sat downstream from the commercial strategy.
A league decides where it wants to distribute its content, sells the rights and production teams work out how to deliver it.
But that relationship is changing.
Cloud production, remote commentary, live clipping, automated vertical reframing and multi-output workflows make it possible to create different versions of an event without replicating an entire traditional production infrastructure for each one.
That changes the question from:
“Can we afford another broadcast?”
to:
“Which audiences are valuable enough to deserve their own version of this event?”
And crucially, it creates room to experiment.
The media experience that builds an NFL audience in Brazil may be completely different from the one that works in Germany. What attracts a new NBA fan in Manchester may differ from what resonates in Paris.
Flexible production makes it possible to test those differences rather than assuming one global feed will work everywhere.
The next phase of global sport happens after the plane leaves
International games will remain incredibly powerful.
They create moments, headlines and connections with fans that are difficult to reproduce in any other way.
But perhaps the biggest opportunity comes afterwards.
A fan who discovers a team during an international game can now follow that team every day of the year. The battle for that relationship happens across television, streaming platforms, social feeds and mobile screens long after the stadium has emptied.
So the next phase of sports globalisation may not be defined simply by how many countries a league can take its games to.
It will be defined by how many genuinely relevant experiences it can create from every game.
Flying the game around the world is the expensive part. Making it feel local shouldn’t stop when the plane leaves.
The game has gone global.
Now the production strategy needs to catch up.
