Sports Leagues Only Partially Monetize Highlights. That May Soon Change
I watched Lionel Messi’s Inter Miami debut live on AppleTV. It felt like a historic moment in U.S. sports, and I was rewarded in the 94th minute when Messi won the game with a storybook free kick.
In the moments after the goal was scored, I received texts from a half dozen friends and family members. All were as stunned as I was.
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I was also surprised that so many of them had paid for Apple’s Season Pass product, the new global platform for all live MLS games. Turns out they didn’t. Almost all of them had seen the free kick on social media in the moments after it happened. Their reactions, and mine, just happened simultaneously.
The changing dynamics of sports watching is well documented, but the numbers may still surprise you. About a quarter of all avid sports fans prefer to watch highlights of games rather than the games themselves, according to a recent YouGov survey. For fans aged 18-24, more prefer the short clips to live games.
And it’s easier than ever to do so, as technology narrows the gap between on-field moment and shareable clip. By my count, Messi scored that free kick at about 10:10 p.m. ET. The video was on the MLS Twitter account about 90 seconds later, and it was immediately amplified by media companies around the world.
For the past decade, U.S. leagues have correctly viewed the distribution of highlights as more of a marketing opportunity than a commercial one. But Messi’s goal made me wonder: Could sports leagues better monetize those rights?
High quality sports clips typically reach social media via two avenues—the leagues’ media partners, and the leagues themselves. The NFL, MLS and their peers all have partnerships with various social media networks, like Twitter or YouTube, that let them share in the ad revenue from highlights and game clips. The economics of those deals aren’t covered like the TV agreements, but they are microscopic by comparison. The NFL’s deal with Twitter, which Axios called the company’s “largest” league content partnership, is reportedly worth “seven figures” total over multiple years. So a couple million for social media clips and billions per year for live rights. That feels imbalanced.
One of the biggest hurdles to monetizing social media highlights is the lack of exclusivity. TV networks pay those billions so they can be the only place fans can watch games live, but highlights are a different animal. The NFL wants the right to post exciting touchdowns to Twitter and game recaps to YouTube, and so do its media partners. ESPN fills hours of weekly content utilizing those rights on Sportscenter, NFL Countdown and its own social channels, and that engine is extremely valuable for both Disney and the NFL.
“If everybody has it, it’s less valuable,” William Mao, senior vice president of global media rights consulting at Octagon, said in a phone call. “It would be very hard for a league like the NFL to say to its live broadcast partners that they can’t have highlight rights, because they need them to be a marketing megaphone for their entire brand.”
Social media is also very fractured, with much looser rules about content ownership and IP rights. Fans may have first seen Messi’s free kick on Twitter, Threads, Instagram, YouTube or a number of other platforms. But many of them likely viewed some version of the exact same 35-second clip that MLS originally shared—some with permission, some without it. (MLS’ first tweet has 56 million views; Bleacher Report’s post with the same video, one minute later, has 47 million).
All those views also help leagues with their commercial partnerships. Inter Miami has a jersey deal with XBTO, and a new sleeve partnership with Fracht Group, and those deals are often priced on the media exposure generated by the team’s games and viral clips.
That said, there has to be a middle ground. League partners want to use highlights throughout the week, but there’s unique (and in my opinion, heightened) value in the moment immediately after something happens. More than 4 million people watched that MLS tweet in the hour after Messi’s first goal, and AppleTV’s main account didn’t even package its own clip. It just retweeted the MLS post.
It doesn’t sound crazy to think that leagues could someday sell “flash highlight” packages to media companies that would give them some sort of timed exclusive to immediate highlights. That could even vary by platform, with Twitter and TikTok producing different partners with different aims. This would obviously involve buy-in from the leagues’ current live-broadcast partners, and their own social teams.
It would be a dramatic rethink from the current model, where most leagues have loosely agreed to let their IP fly around social media. “We’ve been incredibly protective of our live-game rights,” NBA commissioner Adam Silver told an audience at the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference in 2015, “but for the most part highlights are also marketing.”
At the time, many people focused on the second half of that statement, but I’m just as interested in the first half. Leagues protect the live broadcasts because there’s so much money tied up in those deals. Now that an entire generation is largely “watching” sports on social media, at some point soon those highlights could command enough financial incentive for a similar approach.
The sports business journalist in me sees that on the horizon. The sports fan in me is hoping the status quo wins out for a little longer. Four days after Messi’s free kick goal, the Argentine star took the field again and was even more impressive, scoring twice in the game’s first 22 minutes. I caught both of those highlights, shortly after they occurred, on Twitter.
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