IBM's 2026 Sports Intelligence Report: highlights are the #1 content fans want

IBM has released its 2026 Sports Intelligence Report, a global study of sports fan behavior conducted by Morning Consult. It is the most useful piece of demand-side evidence the industry has published this year, and for anyone building sports products, one finding sits above the rest: highlights are what fans actually want.

The word 'highlights' appears 105 times in the report. That is not an accident of phrasing — it is because highlights are the top answer to question after question, split by market, by generation and by sport.

The methodology, briefly

• 20,589 sports fans aged 18+, surveyed online June 24–30, 2026.
• Twelve markets: US, Canada, UK, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, India, UAE, Saudi Arabia, Mexico and Brazil.
• Global margin of error ±1%; roughly 2,000 respondents per major market.
• Fieldwork overlapped the 2026 FIFA World Cup, which IBM flags as a likely influence on soccer responses.

Finding 1 — Highlights are the #1 additional content, globally

When fans engage with sports content beyond the game itself, highlight videos of the best moments are the most consumed type of content: 51% globally, ahead of post-match analysis (36%) and player interviews (32%). Highlights are the top answer in Brazil (59%), Canada (56%), the US and India (55%), the UAE (54%) and Italy (53%).

Finding 2 — It is not a young-fan behavior

The easy assumption is that clip consumption is a Gen Z habit that older fans opted out of. The data says the opposite. Highlights are the top response in every single generation, and the share actually rises with age: Gen Z 48%, Millennials 51%, Gen X 52%, Boomers 53%.

Highlights are the top type of additional content for Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X and Boomers alike — and in nearly every one of the twelve markets surveyed.

Finding 3 — Fans want real time above everything else

Asked how generative AI should improve their sports experience, fans ranked real-time updates first — a high priority for 30% globally, ahead of personalized content (26%), unique insights (26%) and predictions (23%). In the fastest-growing markets the number is far higher: India 49%, Brazil 47%, UAE and Saudi Arabia 45%.

Pair that with the highlights finding and the product requirement becomes very specific. It is not enough to have clips. Fans want the right clip, about their team or player, while the moment is still live.

Finding 4 — Social is where the clips are watched

Broken out by sport, watching highlight clips on social media consistently beats watching them on an official website or app: cricket fans 41% vs 34%, basketball 35% vs 26%, American football 32% vs 26%, soccer 30% vs 22%. And among the roughly half of fans who follow sports creators, 55% say game reactions and highlights are what they come for.

That gap is the whole problem for product teams. The best highlight of a given moment is usually not in a rights-holder's neat archive — it is posted to social by a league, a club, a broadcaster or a creator, within seconds, with no structured metadata attached to it.

Finding 5 — Personalization means personalized highlights

When fans pick the single most valuable form of personalization, no feature dominates: tailored notifications lead at 23%, with personalized highlight reels immediately behind at 21%, ahead of player/team content feeds, match predictions and personalized camera angles. Notifications and highlights are also the two that are cheapest to build well — if your clips are already tagged to players and teams.

What this means if you are building a sports product

• Highlights are not a nice-to-have surface. They are the single most consumed form of sports content outside the live game.
• Recency alone is not enough — fans want the best moment, which means clips need a quality signal, not just a timestamp.
• Real time is the top-ranked expectation. A pipeline that surfaces a clip an hour later has already missed the demand.
• Personalization requires entity tagging. 'Show me Curry highlights' only works if every clip carries a player ID.
• The supply lives on social, where the metadata does not. Somebody has to do the tagging.

Where SportFeeds fits

SportFeeds was built for exactly this gap, and being named a finalist in the IBM Sports Tech Startup Challenge put us in the same conversation this report is describing. We ingest sports content from social sources continuously, resolve every post to a sport, league, team and player, score it 0–10 on a fixed engagement ladder measured from publish time, and expose it as one REST API keyed to IDs you already use.

• Real time — continuous ingestion, with breaking-news webhooks for immediate delivery.
• Best, not newest — a 0–10 rating so you can filter to 8+ and show only what a fan would stop scrolling for.
• Personalized by construction — every clip carries player, team, league and sport IDs, so a per-user feed is a query parameter.
• Rights-aware — geo-availability data per source, so you only serve what is viewable in a user's region.

Over 30 platforms already run on it. The IBM data does not tell us anything we did not believe — it tells us how large the gap is between what fans are asking for and what most sports products currently ship.