In 2024, Sports IP Owners generated $170 billion in revenue worldwide. This figure puts sports as the third largest entertainment industry behind video games and TV, and more than 2x the revenue of the music industry. The resilience of the sports industry isn’t a new phenomenon; it has an inherent ability to captivate audiences and create fans fuelled by passion, who further engage and invest in the sports and teams they love. In 2024, more than a trillion hours of sport was consumed by fans across the globe; this was record-breaking levels, and is only set to grow.
2024 was a bumper year as a result of the Paris Olympics & Paralympics, the year that the Super Bowl LVIII was watched by more people in America than live in the whole of Japan, when challengers such as Baller League evolved to be multi-national rightsholders, and women’s sport generated $1B for the first time.
And whilst 2024 was a record year for Sports IP Owners, growing +7% vs an average CAGR of 4.5% over ten years, not all properties thrived.
2024 was a challenging year across many media markets with media rights payments being withheld, and several major sports IP owners seeing their media rights deals stagnate or decline. At the far end of the spectrum, greyhound racing had another tough year with further racetrack and revenue decline; in the US alone, 19 tracks have closed in the last 10 years, with only 2 tracks remaining open, and revenue has declined from $500M to less than $50M per year; a fraction of previous revenue.
And across all monetisation of IP comes a risk of value leakage or illegitimate copying, piracy of live video rights continues to be the single biggest point of value leakage in the entire industry. Two Circles estimate that 24% of live sport was consumed through piracy in 2024, which we believe equated to $20B in lost consumer revenue annually to piracy.
Of revenue generated by Invasion Sports
Of revenue generated from media rights
Revenue generated in October versus July
In this section, we’ll get into to the detail of why 61% of Sports IP Revenue is generated from invasion sports, why no teams feature in the Top 20 Sports IP Owners of 2024, we’ll discover that October generates +$9B in revenue more than July and name the biggest winners and losers of the last 12 months.
The Top 20 Sports IP Owners drive $76B of the total revenue generated through sports IP, 44% of the total. In this context, the dominance of media rights as a revenue line for these properties heavily skews the market average. This dominance is particularly prominent in the US. Where its biggest IP owners have seen material growth in media rights fees over the last few years with the NFL making more from its media rights than the five major European soccer leagues combined.
This importance of media deals transcends the globe as we look at the AFL, the biggest and fastest growing sports IP owner who in 2024 secured a $4.5B broadcast deal across its full term, delivering an additional A$200m per year for the league.
Within Europe though, some of these dynamics are shifting. UEFA have reported in 2024, for the first time in recent history, that sponsorship and commercial revenues have surpassed broadcast with sponsorship and commercial contributing $9.6B vs the $8.5B generated from media. This is reflected in the wider sports ecosystem with the percentage of revenue generated from sponsorship within the top 500 sports IP owners increasing year-on-year.