Sports Fans Don't Want More Apps. They Want Fewer Places to Find Everything

Every major league, broadcaster and streaming platform wants its own dedicated app, its own subscription, its own walled-off slice of a fan's attention.

A new global survey of more than 20,000 sports fans suggests that's increasingly the opposite of what fans themselves actually want, and the gap between what the industry is building and what audiences are asking for is getting harder to ignore.

The survey says: fans want simplicity

IBM's 2026 Sports Intelligence Report, based on responses from 20,589 fans across 12 countries including the US, UK, Germany, India, Brazil and Saudi Arabia, found that 46 percent of respondents said their expectations for digital sports experiences are higher than they were just one or two years ago.

That rising bar is showing up directly in viewing habits: 30 percent of fans now say a subscription streaming service is their most likely way to watch live sport, essentially level with the 29 percent who still default to traditional linear broadcast, a genuine tipping point after years of streaming steadily eating into television's share.

The frustration shows up most clearly around consolidation.

Nearly half of fans surveyed, 47 percent, said they'd likely download a single, unified sports app that brought together content, scores and streaming access from across different leagues and competitions rather than maintaining separate apps for each one.

Sports apps already play a central role in how fans engage: 72 percent use them, and 74 percent say they trust them for accurate information.

The appetite for something more consolidated exists on top of that, not instead of it.

But would they actually pay for it?

There's a catch that complicates any simple fix.

Only around 29 percent of fans said they'd actually pay for that kind of consolidated app, meaning the demand for simplicity doesn't automatically translate into a market willing to fund building it.

That gap helps explain why no major player has successfully built the kind of single, unified sports hub fans say they want: the audience wants convenience, but isn't necessarily prepared to pay a premium specifically for it, leaving individual leagues and broadcasters with little direct financial incentive to cooperate on something that would ultimately dilute their own individual subscription revenue.

The survey also found a related source of friction: fans increasingly describe managing multiple sports subscriptions as a genuine hassle, tracking which platform carries which competition, absorbing separate monthly or annual charges for content that used to live in fewer places.

That frustration is compounding at exactly the moment individual streaming services, across football, combat sports and beyond, have been raising their own prices, adding cost pressure on top of the existing complexity.

A structural mismatch

What the data points to is a structural mismatch: leagues and platforms are financially incentivised to fragment audiences into their own dedicated ecosystems, while fans are increasingly telling researchers they want the opposite, one place, one login, one bill.

Until that incentive gap closes, sports fans across a dozen countries appear likely to keep managing exactly the kind of scattered, subscription-heavy experience they've told IBM's researchers they'd rather not have.

Would you actually pay for a single consolidated sports app if it meant cancelling several individual subscriptions, or does the appeal of "simpler" fade the moment there's a specific price attached to it?