When it comes to sports, fandom starts close to home. Whether it’s high school football on a Friday night, college rivalries on Saturdays, or hometown heroes taking the field on Sundays, local viewing builds the foundation for national passion.
Recently at Advertising Week New York, I had the opportunity to join a panel of industry leaders to explore the evolution of sports fandoms. What emerged was a powerful throughline: local communities remain the heartbeat of engagement, driving meaningful connection across every screen.
Fandom Is Everywhere and Growing
The power of live connection has never mattered more. Nowhere is that clearer than in the world of sports -- one of the last great unifiers in an increasingly fragmented media landscape.
In Comscore’s upcoming State of Streaming report, nearly half of custom survey respondents (47%) identify themselves as avid sports fans. That passion doesn’t live on a single platform. Fans are engaging sports across broadcast, cable, streaming, and social media, often all at once, making sports one of the few experiences that transcends both devices and demographics.
Sports are also uniquely cross-generational. From Gen Alpha to Boomers, viewership remains balanced across age groups, which is a stark contrast to news or reality TV that tend to sway into the older or younger ends of the age spectrum, respectively. That balance reinforces what makes sports special: it’s the last true appointment viewing in a world defined by on-demand entertainment.
As I said on stage, “Live drives the viewership, it drives engagement and all of the conversation that follows.” Fans tune in for the unpredictability, but stay for the shared energy, excitement, and community that only live sports can deliver.
The Local Spark That Builds National Fandom
While national events like the Super Bowl or March Madness command headlines, the heartbeat of fandom beats locally.
Comscore’s local television data reveals that in markets like Houston and San Antonio, college and high school football broadcasts often rival - and in some cases, outperform - national telecasts. Early in the 2025 season, nine college games in San Antonio delivered higher household shares than the NFL’s Texans vs. Jaguars matchup, and several didn’t even feature a Texas team.
Meanwhile, CW and MyNetworkTV affiliates airing high school football regularly compete head-to-head with cable and broadcast sports for leagues like the NFL and MLB. These results underscore a powerful truth: fandom starts at home. Local communities don’t just reflect national passion, they ignite it by building the energy and connection that sparks the larger sports ecosystem.
Why Local Measurement Matters
In a fragmented media landscape, seeing the full local-to-national picture has never been more important.
Comscore’s stable, granular measurement methodology empowers leagues, broadcasters, and advertisers to connect those dots with precision. By starting with accurate local data, we are able to give partners the insight to understand audience performance at every level from small-market affiliates to national networks.
As I shared during the panel, “It all goes back to having that clean base of stable, granular audience measurement to build from.”
When marketers and broadcasters can see how local viewing contributes to national engagement, they’re better equipped to plan effectively, invest confidently, and tell richer stories about the fans who make the games matter.
Back to the Future: Innovation and the New Local
Even as new platforms multiply and viewing habits evolve, live sports remain a core anchor to communities. Distribution is expanding across streaming, and even returning to over-the-air (OTA) channels, creating a kind of “back to the future” moment where traditional access meets modern flexibility.
At Comscore, we’re energized by innovations in cross-platform deduplication and audience mapping that help our partners understand how fans move across devices, and how those behaviors translate into real outcomes.
The future of measurement lies in connecting every screen and every fan, while never losing sight of where engagement begins: in the shared moments that bring people together.
Fandom Without Borders, Rooted in Home
Fandom today may be global, but it all still starts at the local level. From high school stadiums to streaming platforms, every viewing experience contributes to the larger ecosystem of sports engagement.
Women’s sports have become fully mainstream, and emerging sports like lacrosse are gaining new momentum as we look ahead to the 2028 Olympics. With more options than ever, every sport has a home and every fan has a voice.
That’s what drives us at Comscore. We want to tell the complete story of fandom, connecting local passion with national engagement and making sure that every fan, every game, and every platform matters.