ContactIn our last sports piece, we examined why rights-held IP is a crucial ingredient when it comes to sports simulation video games, and how the industry’s legacy licensing models often hold back meaningful collaboration between game developers and their rights holder partners. Upfront licensing costs, rigid commercial agreements, and outdated content management systems have kept partnerships expensive and operationally inefficient.
In the broadcast media industry, there has long been speculation that sports bodies could follow the vertical entertainment model by launching their own global subscription platforms instead of licensing rights to regional broadcasters. In 2022, the football governing body FIFA launched a streaming platform, FIFA+, as an ad-supported entry into direct-to-consumer programming. More recently, FIFA has signalled intent to develop a video game, while the English Premier League’s decision not to renew its long-held production deal with sports marketing and media agency IMG has been widely interpreted as a move toward creating its own streaming infrastructure.
According to global strategy consulting firm Altman Solon, one side effect of digital-first fandom is the rising prominence of sports simulation video games as a touchpoint for younger audiences. The NBA stands out in particular, with around two-thirds of fans aged 18 to 34 engaging with the league through NBA 2K. Among that same age group, nearly half of MLB and NFL fans also play their respective leagues’ flagship video games.
As the next generation of fans increasingly interacts with their favourite teams through video games, rights holders are poised to demand greater control over how their IP and associated media inventory are managed and monetised. For the gaming industry, this shift underscores an urgent need for collaborative systems that enable rights holders to build direct relationships with gamers, rather than handing over control of the in-game experience to third parties.
While sports rights holders are finding new ways to go direct-to-consumer in other media verticals, gaming presents a unique challenge because creating a high-quality video game is a monumental undertaking that requires massive upfront investment and a dedicated development pipeline. If FIFA were to become a video game publisher, it would need to transform from being the governing body responsible for organising international football tournaments and overseeing global governance into a bona fide media company that can build and maintain complex technology infrastructure and transact directly with hundreds of millions of consumers across continents, languages, and cultures.
However, while FIFA and other governing bodies face significant barriers in developing and publishing their own video games, teams have an opportunity to assert greater influence over how licensed IP manifests inside existing games. Rather than developing their own titles, teams are well placed to push for new terms with game developers that allow them to independently manage and monetise virtual environments, in parallel with real-world properties, as part of a revenue share, thus lowering upfront licensing costs through carriage deals based on inventory performance.
Consumer brands are already bringing media planning and buying functions in-house, particularly across social and digital channels, to optimise campaigns dynamically and respond to real-world events as they happen. Nowhere is this kind of agility more relevant than in sports. Matches unfold second by second, players trend instantly, and new storylines emerge with every play, making sport one of the richest environments for contextual, responsive messaging. To participate moment-to-moment, sports rights holders need direct control over their in-game inventory. Achieving this level of agility, however, hinges on having the right infrastructure, systems that allow game environments to be segmented, shared, and securely managed at scale.
In the sports marketing and sponsorship space, advertisers want rights holders to provide actionable insights into who their fans are and the tools to engage those fans directly. The more granular the audience segment, the more compelling the advertising proposition. A luxury brand like Porsche, for example, might not benefit from associating with a football team purely on scale if most fans don’t match their customer profile. However, if a club can identify a targeted segment of high-net-worth individuals who are brand-aligned, using first or third-party identifiers or some combination of deterministic signals such as age, gender, or geolocation, then that opens up an entirely new commercial proposition. Here, privacy-enhancing technologies, also known as clean rooms, such as WPP's InfoSum, which are powered by secure multiparty computation, offer the potential for sports rights holders, game developers and advertisers to exchange vital data, enhancing the granularity of audience segmentations and campaign targeting while keeping sensitive player information anonymised.
In general, the future of media spend is migrating into data-rich environments, where you can know your audience in a way that traditional sports sponsorship has not before. Unlike traditional media and many digital environments, video games offer persistent identity, always-on engagement and a rich, addressable audience profile. While sports rights holders have historically lagged behind other consumer and entertainment brands in customer relationship management (CRM) and segmented marketing, the industry now has a significant opportunity to skip a technology cycle and fully embrace and double down on their presence inside IP-licensed video games.
According to PwC, revenues from real-world sports sponsorship are projected to grow to $109 billion by 2030. Still, brand sponsorship in gaming has yet to generate significant revenues. As it stands, an expectation gap exists between go-to-market strategies and underlying content management systems, which prevents collaboration between game developers and rights holders. Although partnerships and use cases will vary in scope, the need for flexible permission-based systems that enable gaming media to be modular and accessible to different parties is universal.
Game developers have an opportunity to close this gap by providing rights holders with the systems required to ringfence and manage their own commercial environments. Modular permission-based systems can be leveraged to assign levels of control to third-party users, allowing sports rights holders to manage virtual placements in IP-licensed gaming environments and monetise them through regional brand deals. Crucially, these systems can incorporate layered permissions, including creative approvals and usage constraints, to ensure campaign activity does not compromise the playing experience.
For rights holders, future growth in sports simulation video games will undoubtedly depend on a mix of complex factors, but three pillars stand out as foundational. First, rights holders must establish greater control over how their IP is represented and monetised, enabling them to shape real-time campaign experiences and build direct relationships with players. Second, success depends on structural models that are commercially feasible, allowing rights holders to participate without needing to build games themselves. Third, there is a growing imperative to unlock data-driven player insights, the kind that power audience targeting and campaign measurement. Ultimately, progress will depend on a technical infrastructure that supports modular and secure collaboration among rights holders, game developers, and brand partners. Sports rights holders that pay attention to these principles now will be best positioned for the future, less as subjects of change and more as masters of their own course.
