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Fans are the lifeblood of sport, they’re constantly told. Football is nothing without the fans. You are the 12th man.
Supporters, we’re reminded, are the real heroes – the ones who turn out in all kinds of weather to support their team through thick and thin. They don’t just put their money into their club, stumping up for season tickets and merch, but devote their precious time too, often traveling long distances at considerable expense to lend their support.
But while fandom is meant to be a two-way street, connecting clubs with communities and star players with supporters, it often doesn’t feel that way. Despite supporters’ money making the game possible, it’s clubs and leagues who call the shots. They dictate the shirt prices, the broadcast deals, and control the precious IP that makes its holders billions.
There’s nothing wrong with that per se – sport is big business after all, and like all businesses, has a mandate to deliver profits to stakeholders. Yet it’s hard to escape the sensation that sports fans are shortchanged. It’s not so much about the price they pay for a hotdog at the game and more to do with the restrictions on the digital content they consume.
We’re talking about intellectual property (IP), which controls what fans can and cannot do when it comes to showing their support for the game they love. Those two letters – IP – hold the key to making the fan economy fair and financially viable for clubs and supporters alike.
In the TV era of the 20th century and the internet era of the 21st, the fortunes of major league sports have been determined by scale. For as long as anyone can remember, building a profitable sports league or team required broadcast contracts, giant stadiums, and a global fanbase to offset the cost of recruiting all those star players and keeping the floodlights on.
If you were a niche sport with passionate but fragmented fans, your growth ceiling was low. Distribution was expensive and monetization depended on convincing a handful of broadcasters and sponsors that you were worth the risk. But thanks to the emergence of innovations such as tokenization and IP attribution, that’s no longer the case.
No longer trapped behind broadcast schedules or constrained by geography, licensed sports content is now being delivered digitally to global micro-audiences. As a result, a netball organization can actually build a viable international business. Women’s leagues can monetize without waiting for prime-time slots. College teams can extend their footprint and with it their finance.
While the Big Four leagues (the MLB, NBA, NFL, and NHL) aren’t about to be displaced by pickleball or disc golf on account of this sea change, the structural hierarchy they once controlled is breaking down. Major and minor leagues alike are now embracing this digital revolution, putting their precious IP to work in ingenious ways.
How do you measure the passion that a fan has for their team? In ticket stubs? In total spend? Number of times they’ve become hoarse from roaring their team on? For a more qualitative approach, and one which embodies the future of fandom, consider SCOR, the Web3 protocol that allows for programmable fandom without losing the raw passion that powers it.
In the old world, being a die-hard fan was a sentiment, whereas in 2026, it can be a proven, onchain record. Thanks to the protocol’s SCOR-ID, fans across the NHL, MLS, and emerging leagues for more niche sports carry a “soulbound” digital identity that aggregates every interaction. Every digital collectible held – not to mention every predictive win in the SCOR Battle League – contributes to a verifiable fan reputation.
Converting sports IP into onchain assets in this manner allows leagues to eliminate value leakage. That’s because instead of fans trading unlicensed merchandise or third-party NFTs, every engagement flows through a protocol that ensures royalties return to the athletes and teams. It also incentivizes global participation, meaning a padel fan in Tokyo or handball enthusiast in Madrid can compete for the same onchain rewards, creating a unified global marketplace for leagues that lack traditional geographic monopolies.
Sports organizations are starting to learn that the most valuable asset they own isn't the broadcast rights to a 90-minute game, but the identity graph of their fans. Instead of trying to copy the NBA, the most successful niche sports are acting like tech startups. They’re using blockchain as the source of truth to verify their audience and keep them active both during the league season and through the off-season.
And the Major Leagues, despite already commanding the majority of the lucrative sports IP market, are also entering this emerging field of play. That’s because they recognize that successful leagues are no longer defined by the size of their stadiums or the number of zeroes in their broadcasting deal, but by the liquidity of their fan economy. In this new arena, every fan is a stakeholder and every engagement is a monetizable event.
As the sports industry transitions from broadcast-first to IP-first delivery, opportunities are emerging for any organization shrewd enough to seize them. This isn’t about squeezing every last cent out of loyal fans, but rather personalizing engagement, which drives greater loyalty and in the process increases total spend.
When you know who a fan is, what they watch, what they collect, and how they interact, you can tailor content and experiences in ways that dramatically increase lifetime value. This is why clubs are investing so heavily in direct-to-consumer platforms and community layers. Instead of relying on a few large sponsorships, organizations can generate revenue from thousands of small transactions. Micro-subscriptions; digital items; prediction markets; loyalty points; you name it, it’s all collectible.
The future of sports won’t be built on bigger stadiums – it will be built on measurable engagement. And in that future, the sports that master the fan economy won’t need to beg for airtime or sponsorship. They’ll go direct to their supporters, wherever they reside, leveraging their IP as the passport to profitability and fan passion as a programmable asset.
