RUGBY’S FIGHT FOR GEN Z
BACK IN September 2020, Mark Cuban, the billionaire businessman and owner of the Dallas Mavericks NBA team, tweeted out a piece from the American outlet Morning Consult, simply dubbing it: “The future of sports media in one article.”
The article, called The Sports Industry’s Gen Z Problem, foretold of difficulties on the horizon for US sports because far fewer from Generation Z – a term loosely bracketing those born from the mid-90s to the early 2010s – identified as sports fans, compared with millennials and older adults. Furthermore, their polling showed “Gen Zers are half as likely as millennials to watch live sports regularly and twice as likely to never watch”. Rounding into 2021, US sports noticed.
Here in Europe, by early 2021 a pandemic-hit sports media landscape was taking stock. As the hosted their Business of Football summit in February, talk turned to shrinking broadcast deals. Andrew Georgiou, president of Eurosport, spoke for more than just soccer as he proclaimed: “The underlying demand of the consumer is something that everyone needs to be worried about, not just the competition between the
