Last week I met up with a friend who chairs three businesses in sport. I asked him how his working year had been. ‘Hard!’ he said, puffing out his cheeks. ‘Nothing has come easy. Generally we’ve made progress, but not without an awful lot of graft.’
You may share our common desire to fall into the week ahead with a beer and a polite but firm out of office. That said, I am not sure 2026 is going to be any more straightforward, so I think we need just a little reflection first.
What does 2025 actually tell us about what 2026 may hold?
Now, I understand entirely if you’re fried and would rather watch Home Alone instead than think back to the year’s highs and lows. But I actually am home alone today and so thought I would share my thoughts as to why this year has felt a total blur.
Let’s start unashamed good news. Sports participation in the UK has bounced back healthily since the pandemic.. Running is booming, my gym is heaving and you can’t move for young girls wanting to learn to play cricket at our rural club. That said, we’re still struggling to shift the dial with older generations and inner-city populations. We’ll return later on to these segments of the population.
Re-Thinking the Status Quo
While participation is holding up, the industry underneath feels hard work. Like many other industries, the only defensible positions sometimes feel like market leadership (the NFL and Premier League roll on) or being a very fast growth challenger. Bravery and thick skins have been needed to re-draw the lines of some sports this year. One example being the Professional Triathlon Organisation (PTO’s) commercial merger with World Triathlon, the international federation of the sport. Well-executed this will simplify elite triathlon’s athlete journey, sporting narrative and commercial storytelling over the next two years.
The Top of the Market?
Even at the top of the sporting food chain, growth has still brought pains. Although it’s normal for column inches to be filled by warnings of sky-high ticket prices and impossible temperatures six months out from a major global sports event, the men’s FIFA World Cup has had a particularly rough ride.
Pity the organisers of the 2026 Winter Olympics, too – not only is the snow late, but the artificial snow machines are late arriving, too. Climate resilience will be an increasing headline story in 2026.
I’m old enough to just about remember the slight recalibration of the Olympic Games to a less explicitly commercial space after Atlanta in 1984 and do wonder if FIFA are about to bash their heads on the ceiling of athletic and commercial capacity with their non indigenous event in the US, Canada and Mexico . While they’re unlikely to take a backward step regardless, empty seats seem inevitable in some of the lower profile games.
Never Let a Good Crisis go to Waste
As sport continue to tiptoe it way through issues of gender, drugs usage is likely to become similarly complex in the questions it raises. Loathe the Enhanced Games as I already do, I do think it might force us to think properly about the threat of drugs on elite competition for the first time in a while. The emergence of bespoke medicine brings a wider ethics discussion to the fore that is going to become increasingly nuanced in amateur sport. As the Editor of the Economist’s ‘the World in 2026’ Tom Stantage puts it, ‘’Better, cheaper weight-loss drugs are coming…. But is taking them cheating? (They) extend the debate about the ethics of performance-enhancing drugs to a far wider group than athletes or bodybuilders. Few people compete in the Olympics. But anyone can take part in the Ozempic games.’’
In the UK, the reduced fat Commonwealth Games in Glasgow will once again put the Home Nations’ ability to host Austerity Games to test. Given money will be too tight to mention at the Glasgow Commonwealth Games, it’ll be fascinating to see what is judged as too fundamental to lose. My money is on the events industry learning a few things that will stand it in very good stead. Zero sum event management might actually be very healthy.
I bet they wish they’d made Infront-owned HYROX an exhibition and participation event to make a dent in their revenue targets. I went to watch in London a couple of weeks ago, and have never seen anything like it. Financially lucrative and building a groundswell of avid competitors at pace, it’s the epitome of the fast-growth challenger. Almost as many athletes competed at the Excel Centre in Docklands 2 weeks ago as ran the London Marathon earlier in the year.
Meeting the Investment World Half Way
The same need for agility will be needed in sport’s supply chain. Certain areas of the agency economy have worried me in particular this year. As I write, there are far too many agency owners with half-complete business and sub-scale P&L’s taking affront against nervous investors. who can’t see their way to granting a double-digit profitable multiple to a likeable-but- leaky bucket of a business with little in the way of IP beyond a woolly story about the future role of AI.
Equally, there still investors with funds burning a hole in their pocket talking a good game about sport but acting surprised when an innovative, boot-strapped business working on incubating a women’s sport property has only been able to roll out its minimum viable product to date. Or when they discover a $500m revenue business that hasn’t grown for 3 years in a bull market might have some more fundamental issues than lack of ability to leverage AI in its business model.
It’s easy for those of us in sport to raise our eyebrows next year and say, ‘potential investors just don’t get it’’. That’s as much our fault as theirs. I thought a recent report from Apollo – who’ve recently launched a $5bn sports fund – summed it up really well, ‘’To capture this opportunity, we believe investors will need flexible mandates that span credit and equity, straddle private and public markets, and incorporate both tangible and intangible drivers of value into their underwriting approach. The ability to operate across that spectrum—structuring bespoke solutions in an asset class defined by scarcity, durability, and global relevance—is set to shape the next generation of returns in sports finance.’’
There’s lessons here if you’re going in search for investment next year. Even if you know your ‘intangible drivers’ inside out, that doesn’t absolve you from the hard business hygiene factors. Next year’s sports industry rock stars are the leaders who can become as focused on process improvement as pitches. CFOs who make calls with empathy and instinct as well as pragmatism. On the investment side, watch out for Ali Brownlee and Andy Murray at venture capitalists Redrice – both are consummate winners and very fast learners with ice as well as fire in their veins.
Cricket as a Melting Pot
We’re way beyond the stage that investment needs a meeting of minds at the pre-deal stage alone – the rubber is hitting the road daily. It’ll be fascinating to see the world’s divergent sporting investment hypotheses meet together as the new franchise owners within The Hundred. They won’t all want the same things, but as The Hundred’s Managing Director Vikram Banerjee laid out in our recent Unofficial Partner ‘Other People’s Money’ podcast at EY’s office, it’s likely to be worth the effort.
Certainly the completion of 2025’s deals for each franchise guarantees valuable funds for a sport bucking many trends for the decline of team sports. My bet is on the Women’s T20 World Cup next Summer turning many heads as a further catalyst to the next stage of growth across the women’s game which is already driving overall growth of the game up and down the country.
Sport as a Soft Target
Next year more than most, we can expect more exploitation of sport’s role as a soft target for political positioning. Remember the Men’s Football World Cup I mentioned earlier in this article? Truth is it’s co-hosted in a divided America which is celebrating it’s 250th anniversary this year….. while threatening Canada with territorial extension. All while its President wins the inaugural FIFA Peace Prize. Soccer is part of a game in which the possibility of some empty seats at Saudi Arabia vs Cape Verdi is a mere irrelevance.
There’s no place for tutting and moving along if you’re English. Yes, we will cheer on a multicultural England team led by a German as they prepare for another tilt at the ultimate prize. However, remember the older and urban populations I mentioned earlier on who continue to resist the allure of playing sport? Well, they’re the heartland of an ultra right-wing Reform Party whose odds are currently evens of winning most seats at the next General Election.
Is the relationship between less sport and support of the Reform Party cause, correlation or coincidence? That’s a question I think we can all comfortably kick into next year.
