Author: Ek Li Ling
For decades, the relationship between sports and its audience followed a familiar script: leagues and clubs negotiated lucrative rights deals with broadcasters, telcos, and payTV operators, took the fee, and let the distributor worry about the fans.
It was predictable revenue. And for a long time, that felt like enough.
The D2C shift for sports didn’t begin with the biggest properties. Change started with rights holders who had the commercial flexibility to build direct relationships alongside existing distribution deals, and who recognised early on what they stood to gain by owning the fan relationship directly.
MotoGP launched VideoPass in 2014, F1 TV followed in 2018, and UFC Fight Pass built a significant global subscriber base, each proving that fans were willing to subscribe directly when given the option. More recently, that momentum has stretched further – to tennis, cricket, and most significantly, football (soccer).
The Hidden Cost of the Aggregator Model
For most sports organisations, reaching fans has traditionally meant working through distribution partners: broadcasters, telcos, payTV operators, and IPTV platforms. Those partners provide significant value through audience reach, marketing support, customer acquisition, and substantial rights payments. That model remains central to the industry and unlikely to change anytime soon.
The difference is not whether fans are reached, but how connected rights holders are to those fan relationships. When a fan subscribes through a third-party distributor, much of the customer data, billing relationship, and viewing intelligence remains with that partner.
Direct-to-consumer services provide a complementary channel that helps sports organisations build a direct relationship with fans, develop a richer understanding of audience behaviour, and deliver more personalised experiences across every touchpoint – whether fans engage through a broadcaster, a distributor, or the league’s own digital platforms. Rather than replacing the broadcast ecosystem, D2C strengthens it by giving rights holders greater visibility and engagement alongside the partners that remain critical to their growth.
The move is happening across sports.
In November 2024, the Tennis Channel launched its first-ever direct subscription service, making ATP and WTA coverage available without a cable subscription for the first time in its 21-year history.
The Pakistan Cricket Board launched PCB Live, its first D2C platform, in October 2025, bringing matches directly to fans in the UK.
Each example points in the same direction: rights holders across sport are expanding how they connect with fans, building richer first-party audience intelligence and deeper engagement while continuing to work alongside the broadcasters and distribution partners that remain fundamental to the sports media ecosystem.
From the Pitch to the Fan
The most significant recent signal that this shift has gone mainstream came on February 26, 2026.
That’s the day when leadership for the English Premier League (EPL), the highest level of the English football league system and the most watched and most commercially lucrative sports league in the world, officially announced Premier League+, its own direct-to-consumer streaming service, would be launched in Singapore ahead of the 2026/27 season. The platform, built in partnership with Singaporean telco, StarHub, under an existing six-year rights agreement, will stream all 380 Premier League matches alongside additional programming and a 24/7 channel.
Richard Masters, Premier League CEO, was unambiguous about the intent, as he announced the service launch at the annual Financial Times Business of Football Summit this past February.1
“For the first time, the Premier League is going to have its own customers,” Masters said. “It’s going to have to deal with promotions, pricing, churn, distribution, all of those things.”
Singapore was chosen quite deliberately, a mature digital market with high streaming adoption. And the partnership with StarHub allows the league to run its D2C service alongside rather than in conflict with traditional distribution. Masters, in his remarks earlier this year, made it clear this pilot would be a learning exercise “to see how that might be replicable around the world.”
The Premier League may not be the first major rights holder to embrace D2C, but its decision confirms the model has made the leap from early adoption to mainstream strategy.
Spanish football giant FC Barcelona launched Barça TV+ in 2020 alongside its Culers Premium Membership programme (the club’s official loyalty offering), deliberately tying streaming access to a broader set of fan benefits that include ticket discounts, store access, and partner offers.2 The two were designed together from the start, with the club explicit in its intent to own the fan connection directly rather than through intermediaries.
Manchester City soon followed suit with CITY+, its own subscription platform built around original content, match replays, and behind-the-scenes access.
It’s a movement not just confined to the top of the football pyramid.
Governing bodies, national associations, and clubs at all levels are increasingly prioritizing direct fan engagement strategies.
Own Your Audience, Own Your Value
When a fan subscribes directly, they become a known individual rather than an anonymous viewer on someone else’s platform. The club captures viewing habits, content preferences, renewal behaviour, and purchase history that an intermediary would never share.
Insights like these inform commercial decisions, personalize the fan experience, identify high-value superfans, and build sponsorship arguments grounded in real audience understanding. Fans who engage across multiple interactions are also significantly less likely to churn, making the direct relationship one that compounds in strategic value over time.
The SSO Imperative: One Fan, One Identity
One of the most underappreciated challenges in D2C sports is identity management. It’s also one of the most powerful opportunities.
A sports organisation’s digital ecosystem is rarely a single destination. It spans streaming, official apps, fantasy games, merchandise stores, ticketing portals, and members’ areas, often across different platforms and login systems. For a fan, these can feel like entirely separate experiences with no connection between them, each one re-introducing them to a brand they already love.
Single Sign-On (SSO) changes that entirely, allowing a fan to authenticate once and have their account travel seamlessly across every touchpoint, from streaming platform and fantasy league to ticketing system, without friction or repetition.
Beyond convenience, this is a data strategy.
A unified fan profile allows clubs to understand the full fan journey and recognise that the person who watches every away match, plays fantasy football, and buys the new kit each season is a very different commercial opportunity than the occasional viewer. AI-driven personalisation can then sit on top of that profile layer, surfacing the right content, renewal offer, or upsell at the right moment.
The Membership Economy of Fandom
While an OTT subscription for match content is a natural starting point, the fan relationship doesn’t have to stop there. The forward-thinking clubs and leagues are the ones thinking about fan membership ecosystems, meaning a single subscription tier, or set of tiers, that enables a bundle of benefits across the entire fan experience.
What a premium club membership can offer:
● Streaming access to matches, documentaries, and archived content
● Early access to match tickets before general sale, addressing one of the most consistent frustrations of loyal supporters
● Member-exclusive merchandise drops and discounts, with priority access to limited-edition releases
● Fantasy game integration, with perks for members such as exclusive player content or bonus game features
● Stadium experiences such as behind-the-scenes tours, meet-and-greets, and training ground access
● Priority access to cup finals and away fixtures for members in good standing
● Digital collectibles and credentials that serve as verifiable proof of loyalty
The worth of a fan who streams, buys a kit, attends matches, and plays fantasy is several multiples above one engaged through any single channel. The membership model is the mechanism that brings those interactions together under one identity and one value proposition.
The Technology Challenge and Why It’s Now Solvable
Most sports organisations aren’t technology companies, and they don’t need to be. The ecosystem of specialist partners has matured to the point where enterprise-grade D2C infrastructure is now accessible without building it from scratch, significantly lowering the barriers that once limited these capabilities to the largest leagues and clubs.
Core infrastructure components include:
- Video delivery and streaming: Low-latency live streaming with concurrency handling for peak match-day demand
- Subscriber and entitlement management: Managing who has access to what, across tiers, devices, geographies, and distribution partners
- Billing and payment: Handling subscription models, pay-per-view events, seasonal passes, and pauses/resumes across global payment methods
- Identity and SSO: A unified fan identity layer connecting OTT, fantasy, ticketing, and commerce
- Analytics and personalization: Turning subscriber behavior into actionable insights for content, retention, and commercial decisions
The Evergent Monetization Platform was built specifically for today’s complexity of sports businesses, supporting seasonal billing, blackout restrictions, couch rights, high-concurrency live events, subscription pause and resume, and multi-channel membership distribution.
What It All Means
D2C doesn’t replace aggregator-led distribution, as rights fees and third-party reach remain valuable. What’s changing is what sits alongside them: a direct relationship with fans compounding in value over time, and that no aggregator can replicate or take away.
The organisations that’ll ‘win’ this race are those that treat the fan relationship, not just the content, as the core asset of their D2C strategy. That means building a connected ecosystem in which a single view of the customer travels across every experience: streaming, ticketing, merchandise, fantasy, and community. It means designing membership tiers that create genuine value at each of those layers. This also means working with partners who understand the operational reality of running a subscription business through the chaos of a football calendar: peak concurrency on match day, seasonal churn in the off-season, and the complexity of global payment processing for a truly international fan base.
The technology infrastructure is ready and the fan demand is clearly there. The question now is which clubs and leagues will move with the urgency the moment deserves, and which will continue ceding the direct fan intelligence to other entities for another decade.
Evergent powers subscriber management and monetization for leading sports OTT providers globally. To learn how Evergent solutions and strategies can help your organization build more direct engagement with your fans, request a demo with our team.
Sources
1 The Times, February 2026. “English Premier League to launch streaming service in international shake-up” https://www.thetimes.com/sport/football/article/premier-league-stream-service-premflix-singapore-vdj02w6jn
2 FCBarcelona.com, June 2020. “FC Barcelona launch ‘BARCA TV+’ streaming service with more than 3,000 videos and 1,000 hours of content” https://www.fcbarcelona.com/en/club/news/1676374/fc-barcelona-launch-barca-tv-streaming-service-with-more-than-3000-videos-and-1000-hours-of-content
Ek Li Ling is Senior Director, Solution Architecture for EMEA at Evergent, where she specialises in subscription monetisation for sports, media and entertainment, and pay-TV providers across the region.
Ek Li Ling
Senior Director
