Beyond the Event: What Sports Audiences Are Signaling for 2027
Most brands planned 2026 sports as a calendar of major events: the Winter Olympics, Champions League final, FIFA World Cup, Wimbledon and Tour de France.
As brands begin looking toward 2027, from the FIFA Women’s World Cup and Rugby World Cup to another year of Grand Slams, Formula 1, cycling and major club competitions, there is an opportunity to plan differently.
Dailymotion’s 2026 audience data shows why.
World Cup followers represented 47% of the sports audience measured, while Champions League followers represented 25%. But scale tells only part of the story. The behaviors surrounding those audiences were markedly different.
Champions League followers were 1.6 times more likely to invest in premium products, reflecting an audience associated with the prestige of the competition. World Cup followers were 1.3 times more emotionally driven than other sports fans, with strong preferences for athlete stories and inspirational content.
Smaller sports communities revealed different commercial signals again.
Grand Slam followers represented 11% of sports fans measured and skewed older and female, with 45% aged 50 or above. They were 1.7 times more likely to purchase experiences, with strong preferences for event tickets, travel and wellness. Tour de France followers also represented 11% of sports fans, were 59% female and were 1.5 times more likely to purchase cycling equipment.
The differences matter because all four groups could easily sit within the same broad “sports fan” audience, despite demonstrating very different interests and purchase behaviors.
The broad sports fan is not an audience
Treating sports fandom as one audience category can obscure more than it reveals.
People move between sports, competitions, athletes, content and screens. The behaviors they demonstrate around those interests are not necessarily the same.
There is significant crossover between sports, too. Among the cycling audience measured in Dailymotion’s study, 96% also followed FIFA content and 92% followed Copa Libertadores. Among tennis followers, 13% also followed the Tour de France.
Even within a single competition, attention can become concentrated around particular personalities and stories. During the World Cup, for example, Dailymotion viewing data showed that a relatively small group of players accounted for the majority of player-related viewing, while high completion rates showed audiences actively staying with that content.
The same variation appears across screens and throughout the day.
Dailymotion’s 2026 research found mobile dominating pre-match content and social engagement around major football moments, while CTV was strongest for live matches and full replays. Desktop played a greater role around news and analysis.
Tour de France audiences produced a different pattern. Attention peaked between 1 p.m. and 5 p.m., followed by another peak between 6 p.m. and 9 p.m. around highlights and review content.
For buyers, this turns the sports calendar into more than a schedule of events. Viewing behavior can show when attention is building, where audiences are watching, which content is driving engagement and which interests are emerging around the event, giving brands more precise signals for when, where and how to reach them.
The signal does not come from one place
Sports audiences move across TV screens, publishers, creators, and social platforms.
A fan might encounter an athlete through creator content or a social clip, read analysis from a sports publisher, watch highlights on a publisher site and later move to longer-form video or a full replay on CTV.
Across Dailymotion’s ecosystem, audiences engage with sports content from major publishers and broadcasters including L’Équipe, La Marca, Gazza Dello Sport, and CANAL+, as well as content around properties such as the Tour de France, major CTV networks, and creator content.
Those environments reveal different parts of the audience journey. Publisher consumption can show which teams, athletes, competitions and stories people are actively seeking out. Broadcaster content can provide signals around sustained engagement with premium sports programming. Creator and social-native signals can help identify the personalities, conversations and cultural moments gaining traction around an event.
That last layer is particularly important in sport, where audience behavior can change quickly. A breakout performance, an athlete or a cultural moment can suddenly shift what people are watching and engaging with. A static “football fan” or “tennis fan” segment may still describe that person, but it does not necessarily capture what is driving their attention at that moment.
This is where signals become useful. Rather than relying on a single audience label, Ray brings together video consumption, contextual, behavioral, device, timing, intent and social-native signals to identify the patterns forming around an audience as they emerge.
For advertisers, that means understanding not only who the audience is, but what they are signaling now. Ray can use those patterns to identify the audiences most relevant to a brand, understand when their interest is intensifying and find them across relevant video environments when those signals are strongest.
That changes the role of the sports calendar. Instead of simply telling a brand when an event will happen, it provides a framework for anticipating moments of attention, while audience signals help determine which consumers within those moments matter to the brand.
Build Smarter Sports Media Strategies with Audience Intelligence:
We used Ray to build a France 2027 Sports Signal Map across major sporting moments including the Six Nations, Roland-Garros, Champions League, FIFA Women’s World Cup, Wimbledon, Tour de France, Formula 1 and Rugby World Cup.
France provides a clear example of why a broad “sports fan” audience can hide very different opportunities.
Across Dailymotion’s French sports-category viewing, audiences generated nearly 2 billion views between August 2025 and July 2026. Viewing increased from 780 million between August 2025 and January 2026 to more than 1 billion between February and July 2026, an increase of 37%.
But the opportunity is not simply in the growth of sports viewing. It is in understanding what sits beneath it.
Rather than treating the sports calendar as a list of sponsorship and media opportunities, we used Ray to analyze the audiences forming around individual sports and events, comparing their behaviors with a broader sports-fan baseline. The analysis examined audience profiles, video interests, adjacent passions, purchase signals, cross-sport overlap, screens, dayparts and how behaviors shift around different sporting moments.
Across more than 10,000 media-owner and content-partner properties, Dailymotion’s ecosystem reaches more than 400 million people each month. This gives Ray signals from across the video journey, helping identify patterns that can disappear inside a broad sports segment.
The 2026 findings demonstrate why that distinction matters.
Grand Slam and Tour de France followers each represented 11% of the sports audience measured, yet displayed different audience profiles and commercial behaviors. World Cup and Champions League audiences were significantly larger, but they too revealed distinct interests and signals.
And some of the most interesting shifts were happening beyond mainstream sports.
Surfing views increased 132%, from approximately 182,000 to 421,000, while triathlon views increased 359%, from approximately 147,000 to 673,000. Motorsports remained the largest named niche, generating 5.6 million views across the period.
These patterns point to very different planning opportunities within the same sports market:
- Surfing signals growing interest in outdoor, lifestyle and action-sports content.
- Triathlon signals concentrated demand around endurance, preparation and major participation moments.
- Motorsports demonstrates the power of tentpole events, where audience attention can intensify rapidly around a specific moment.
The broader takeaway is that sports growth is rarely linear. Audiences form around different combinations of sport, moment, content, context and mindset. Surfing, triathlon and motorsports may all sit within the sports category, but the signals surrounding them point to very different opportunities for brands.
And, importantly, a sports fan does not exist in just one place.
The same person watching the Champions League may also be consuming travel, luxury, automotive, entertainment or lifestyle content before and after the match. Their value to a brand is defined not simply by the sport they follow, but by the wider set of interests, behaviors and signals they demonstrate across the video journey.
That is where Ray changes the way brands can plan around sports.
By identifying audiences through signals across content, interests, behaviors, screens and moments, Ray can uncover relevant sports fans wherever they are watching, not just when they are consuming sports content.
For brands, this means moving beyond buying against an event or relying on a broad “sports fan” segment. Instead, they can identify the audiences most relevant to their objectives, understand what else those audiences care about, and reach them across the moments and environments where they are most engaged.
A smaller sports audience with strong signals around a brand’s category or objective may ultimately represent a greater opportunity than a much larger general sports segment.
The value of the sports calendar is not simply knowing what audiences will watch next. It is using intelligence to understand who those audiences really are, where else they spend their attention and when the right signals emerge to connect with them.
With Ray, brands can find the sports fan beyond sports.
Ready to find your perfect audience, contact us to learn more.
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