The African Sports Content Opportunity
Why athlete-led media from Africa is the most undervalued content category, and how to build lasting properties around it.
There is a simple way to identify undervalued markets: look for the largest gap between audience size and revenue capture. By that measure, African sports content is arguably the most undervalued category in global media.
The audience is already massive
Africa's sports viewership is not an emerging story -- it is an established reality that is poorly monetised. The 2024 AFCON drew over 1.4 billion cumulative TV viewers. The 2025 edition reached approximately 3.45 billion across TV and digital. These are among the largest sporting audiences on earth.
Beyond football, the Basketball Africa League reported record attendance of 111,000 fans and 2.7 million YouTube views in its 2025 season. Athletics events draw massive audiences across East Africa. Combat sports, cricket in Southern Africa, rugby -- the breadth of sporting culture across the continent is vast.
More than 225 million amateur footballers play across Africa, according to the ASCI Strength in Numbers report. Over 60% of the continent's 1.4 billion people are under 25, making Africa home to the world's youngest and fastest-growing sports fan base. Sub-Saharan Africa had 320 million mobile internet subscribers in 2023, contributing $140 billion to regional GDP. The audience infrastructure exists.
The monetisation gap is enormous
Africa's $12 billion sports market sounds significant until you compare it to what comparable audience sizes generate elsewhere. African sports sponsorship spending averaged approximately $1.3 billion in 2024 -- less than 7% of European sports sponsorship and less than 7% of North American spending.
The reasons are structural, not fundamental. As detailed in a 2025 analysis by Sports Business in Africa, the barriers include: lack of verifiable audience data and standardised metrics that sponsors require; infrastructure inconsistencies in broadcast quality and event scheduling; currency volatility that complicates ROI forecasting for multinational brands; and an over-reliance on government funding rather than commercial innovation.
Deloitte's 2025 sports sector outlook emphasises that modern sports organisations must invest in analytics and fan databases to increase sponsorship value. Most African sporting organisations lack these systems, creating a cycle: without data, brands will not invest, and without investment, organisations cannot afford data infrastructure.
But these are solvable problems. They are infrastructure gaps, not market limitations.
Where athlete-led media fits
Traditional sports media in Africa has been dominated by broadcast rights -- who has the rights to show the matches. This model concentrates value at the federation and broadcaster level, with little flowing to athletes or independent producers.
Athlete-led media operates in the space around and beyond the match. The stories behind the sport: the journeys from Makoko to Manchester, from Soweto to the Premier League. The cultural intersections: sport and music, sport and fashion, sport and diaspora identity. The expertise: tactical analysis, training methodologies, career advice from those who have lived it.
This content does not compete with match-day broadcasting. It complements it, extending the engagement window from 90 minutes per match to daily content consumption. And unlike broadcast rights, which are controlled by federations, athlete-led media can be owned by the athletes themselves.
In the US, this is already a proven model. LeBron James's SpringHill Company, the Kelce brothers' podcast, and PlayersTV (backed by Chris Paul, Kyrie Irving, and others) demonstrate that athlete-led media is not a side project -- it is a media business. African athletes have equivalent cultural reach across the continent. The production and IP infrastructure to support them is what is missing.
The diaspora multiplier
One of the most underappreciated advantages of African sports content is the diaspora audience. Nigerians in the UK, Ghanaians in the US, Kenyans in the Middle East, South Africans in Australia -- the African diaspora is a global audience with high digital engagement, higher purchasing power than continental averages, and deep emotional connection to sport as a cultural anchor.
When an athlete-led format is designed for distribution-native delivery -- working across YouTube, podcasts, social platforms, and potentially broadcast licensing -- the diaspora audience expands the total addressable market significantly. A format produced in Lagos can resonate in London, Atlanta, Toronto, and Dubai simultaneously.
Rwanda understood this when it invested in Premier League and NBA partnerships. Visit Rwanda's sponsorship deals with top European and American teams, valued at over $30 million, are explicitly designed to reach diaspora audiences and drive tourism. The same logic applies to athlete-led content: build on the continent, distribute globally, and the diaspora becomes a revenue multiplier, not an afterthought.
Building for the next decade
The African sports audience is projected to exceed 800 million by 2030. The continent's sports market is expected to surpass $20 billion by 2035. Infrastructure investment is accelerating, with more than 109 stadiums above 30,000 capacity already built and landmark projects underway across Ivory Coast, Senegal, Rwanda, and beyond.
The question is not whether African sports content will be valuable. It already is -- the audience proves that daily. The question is who will own the IP.
The athletes who structure their media properties as documented intellectual property now will own the most valuable sports content catalogue on the continent in a decade. The ones who continue to trade their attention for one-off appearance fees will remain talent-for-hire.
The opportunity is not just to create content about African sport. It is to build the IP infrastructure that turns Africa's sports attention into Africa's sports wealth.