The global sports industry is worth over $512 billion in annual revenue today, up from $300 billion just ten years ago. It seems like we’re living in a new golden age of sport, with online streaming, commercial rights deals, and access to new markets all coming together to cause interest in this type of competition to expand like never before.
T20 Cricket
Cricket is by no means a new sport. It has been around since at least the 1500s in one form or another. However, cricket has always struggled to break out of its traditional audiences thanks in no small part to the extreme duration of games. A traditional cricket test match consists of games over five days, amounting to around 30 hours of play per match. While many love this herculean affair, it has somewhat limited Cricket’s ability to market itself in a world full of sub-2-hour televised sports.
Thus it should come as no surprise that when T20 was introduced – a hugely sped-up variant with games lasting only 90 minutes – the market for it would soon follow. In India, where cricket is the national sport, the https://www.iplt20.com/ league was created in 2007.
Then, in 2022 it struck a new broadcast rights deal for over $6.2 billion and overnight became the second most valuable league in the world. The future of cricket is now looking brighter than ever, as this variant has invited thousands of new players and spectators into the sport.
Mind-Sports
This side of the millennium we have begun to see a growing number of games or other pursuits begin to acquire the accolades and prestige typically associated with sports. This process of validation has come about as people have begun to expand the definition of sports beyond the more traditional notion that relied on there being demonstrations of physical prowess.
Partly this is because it is becoming clear that physical prowess has more dimensions than simply how fast you can run, or how high you can jump. Esports, the largest segment of the mind-sports category, has burst onto the scene in the 2020s and has acquired a huge cultural cache as it attracts widespread investment and a surging fanbase. Here, hand-eye coordination is a must, and it’s difficult to challenge the notion that this isn’t a type of physical prowess.
More broadly, mind-sports refer to those cerebral games that can be elevated to professional heights. Poker, and other leading table games, are incredibly popular in their digital variants today and have become home to pro-circuits and bona-fide athletes. Much of this is a side-effect of the growth of this sector, thanks in no small part to the emergence of dedicated comparison platforms like https://bonuses.com/ which have come to serve as community and competitive hubs.
In furnishing the next generation of mind-sports athletes with competitive welcome offers and other sign-up deals on leading casino mind-sports, these affiliate networks are serving as grassroots hubs for this sporting category.
Finally, it would be a mistake not to mention the mindset that started it all – chess. Chess has been seemingly at the edge of sporting validation for decades, and with rumors that the International Olympic Committee is looking to include chess in the coming Olympic games. What’s more, chess has emerged as one of the fastest-growing esports in recent years thanks to its growing prominence on both chess and the esports streaming platform Twitch.
Formula 1
The world’s premier motorsport has never been one to struggle to attract the crowds, but certain ideas on how it should grow and be marketed led to its potential revenues plateauing. That was, before Liberty Media – an American sports investment consortium – purchased the broadcast rights to the sport in 2017.
Since then, they’ve sought to introduce the world to the thrills of this sport by opening its doors to the Netflix all-access documentary Drive to Survive which has introduced thousands of new fans to the passion and intensity of the pinnacle of racing.
This is particularly pertinent in America, where F1 has historically failed to gain traction. F1 is now the fastest growing sport in America aside from Major League Soccer, and has added two extra USA-based races to its championship calendar – Miami and the Las Vegas strip – in the past two years.
