Every few months, something shifts the entire attention economy in one direction. A match kicks off. A starting gun fires. An opening ceremony begins. For a few hours — or a few weeks — hundreds of millions of people are pointed at the same thing, together, emotionally invested, and watching across multiple screens simultaneously.
That moment is the closest thing modern media has to a guaranteed mass audience. And new research from Teads and Censuswide — 9,000 fans surveyed across nine countries — reveals something even more interesting than the scale: these audiences arrive unusually open to brands. Not just tolerant of advertising. Actively receptive to it.
The question isn’t whether live sports is a brand opportunity. It’s whether you know how to use it.
The Year Is Stacked
2026 is not a typical sports year. Milano Cortina just wrapped the Winter Olympics — 3,500+ athletes, 93 countries, 195 medals, and a global audience that had been building for months before the opening ceremony. That attention doesn’t evaporate with the flame. It flows forward, into search, social, news sites, and CTV, where fans keep processing, replaying, and discovering.
Ahead lies the FIFA World Cup — the largest single sports event on Earth, arriving on North American soil for the first time. The UEFA Champions League continues through spring. Wimbledon. The Tour de France. The Premier League restart. ATP Finals. The calendar doesn’t relent, and neither does the audience’s appetite for it.
Each event is its own concentrated window of attention with its own audience chemistry. Understanding the differences — and the patterns that cut across all of them — is where the real insight lives.
The Biggest Stage. The Most Open Audience.
The FIFA World Cup arrives in the US, Canada, and Mexico this summer — and no event delivers a casual viewer pool at this scale. 30% casual fans means millions of people who don’t follow football but are watching anyway: for national pride, for the shared social occasion, for the spectacle. Entertainment and spectacle lead fan excitement at 61%. Moments with family and friends at 48%. For Gen Z and Millennials, even the commercials are part of the appeal — they’re watching the ads at +3pts above the overall average.
Who Is Actually Watching
The most important thing to understand about sports audiences is that they are not monolithic. Five distinct fan profiles show up at every major event — and each one requires a different creative approach, a different message, and a different channel strategy.
What varies is the mix. The UEFA Champions League skews toward the most devoted fans — 33% superfans versus 27% for FIFA. The World Cup, by contrast, attracts the largest casual viewer cohort of any major event, at 30%. These are people who don’t think of themselves as sports fans, who have tuned in for the cultural moment, the national pride, the social occasion of gathering around a screen. That 30% represents an enormous brand audience that traditional sports marketing consistently underestimates.
Source: Teads and Censuswide, 2026
Millennials lead in overall sports devotion — overindexing on superfan status by +6 points — while Gen Z is redrawing what fandom looks like at every level. For brands, these two generations represent the clearest growth opportunity: high engagement, high CTV adoption, and measurably more open to discovering new brands in a sports context.
Brands that align with these sports moments become part of the cultural story fans share — making an impact that reaches far beyond the die-hard core.
The Living Room Is Now a Media Environment
Nearly three in four fans watch major sports events at home — 74% for the World Cup specifically. The majority watch with family (51%) or friends (23%). These are high-attention, social occasions where a single brand impression lands in front of multiple household decision-makers at once.
And despite what conventional wisdom might suggest, being in that environment does something to brand perception. 56% of fans say that seeing a brand advertise during sports moments actively strengthens their connection to that brand. Not just awareness. Connection.
Linear TV still leads viewing at 76%, but CTV is the defining story of this sports cycle. At 51% penetration for live sports and growing at 8.3% year-over-year, CTV is no longer a supplemental channel — it’s where the most engaged audiences are migrating. Among fans with the highest sports interest, CTV viewership runs 7 points higher. The passionate audience is moving to a new screen that offers new formats, new targeting, and a new creative canvas.
Generationally, the picture sharpens. Gen Z at 53% and Millennials at 57% follow live sports via CTV — both groups already majority streaming. Baby Boomers remain most loyal to linear TV at 88%, but this spread is actually an advantage for planners: the same event reaches all four generations simultaneously, on different screens, through different ad experiences.
Every Category Has a Seat at the Table
The most persistent myth in sports marketing is that only certain categories belong there — beverage brands, sportswear, automotive. The data says otherwise, clearly and consistently.
Compared to all sports moments combined, FIFA World Cup audiences arrive measurably more open to brands they’ve never tried before — and that openness extends well beyond the usual suspects:
Technology sees a +5pt uplift versus the all-sports baseline. Travel and automotive each see +3pts. Financial services, +2pts. Entertainment, +2pts. Even categories with no obvious connection to sports find meaningful audiences primed for discovery during a major tournament.
That openness converts. 68% of affluent spenders say they’re open to trying brands they discover while following sporting events. Among core household spenders, that figure is 54%. The purchase intent is there at every income level — live sports simply concentrates and elevates it.
Context matters too. 57% of fans say their consideration for a brand is influenced when it advertises next to sport or event-related content — rising to +12 points among Millennials and +10 points among those with the highest sports interest. Placement isn’t separate from creative strategy. It is creative strategy.
The Fastest Growing Fan Base in the World.
Formula 1 has undergone one of the most remarkable audience transformations in modern sports. Its fan base has grown sharply younger and more global — driven in large part by a surge in female fans and new audiences in the US, where three races now anchor the calendar. F1 viewers are among the most commercially engaged in all of sports: high-income, digitally active, and disproportionately likely to be early adopters across technology, travel, automotive, and luxury categories. The season runs nearly year-round, meaning the brand opportunity is sustained, not episodic.
The Second Screen Isn’t a Distraction
While the match is live, viewer attention is already distributed across multiple devices. 63% of World Cup fans second-screen on other devices during the game — and 23% say it happens very often. This isn’t audience fragmentation. It’s audience expansion. Each second screen is an additional touchpoint, a different context, a new opportunity to reach the same person.
That second-screen behavior breaks into three distinct windows:
The shopping window deserves particular attention: nearly a third of fans are actively purchasing during live events. 26% are browsing offers related to the tournament. The second screen is a commerce surface that most broadcast-only strategies miss entirely.
Where Brands Get Discovered
Brand discovery during sports events doesn’t happen primarily on social media. It happens across the open internet — in search, on sports sites, on news sites, on CTV. These are high-trust, high-attention environments where contextual relevance is highest and ad avoidance is lowest.
Source: Teads and Censuswide, 2026
Sports sites (41%), news sites (39%), and CTV (35%) collectively dominate social media (26%) as brand discovery channels. The audiences most likely to act on what they find are doing so in editorial environments — not feeds. AI-powered discovery at 19% is still nascent, but it signals where the next generation of brand discovery is forming.
Omnichannel Is the Performance Driver
Showing up in one place during a sports event is a floor, not a ceiling. The data on multi-screen advertising is unambiguous: fans who see consistent brand messaging across CTV and digital publishers show meaningfully higher recall and stronger purchase intent than those exposed on a single channel.
Source: Teads and Censuswide, 2026
Among Gen Z — the hardest audience to reach through conventional advertising — cross-screen exposure drives 65% brand recall and 67% purchase likelihood. Those are significant numbers for any audience, remarkable for one that actively resists advertising. The sports context is doing real work: it creates a state of sustained, elevated attention that makes consistent brand presence feel relevant rather than intrusive.
The brands that win across 2026’s sports calendar won’t necessarily be the ones with the biggest budgets. They’ll be the ones that treat each event as a sustained, multi-touch journey — building reach on CTV in the living room, extending into premium sports and news publishers across the open web, designing for second-screen behavior as an intentional part of the strategy, and showing up with creative that reflects the tone and culture of the moment.
The arena is open. Every event, every screen, every moment. The question is who shows up.
Ready to Own the Moment?
Teads connects brands to live sports audiences across CTV and premium publishers — from the FIFA World Cup to Formula 1, every major tournament, and every cultural moment that commands a screen.
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