There is a version of football’s global expansion story that ends badly. It goes like this: a competition builds international reach by selling rights into new markets, multiplying broadcast windows, licensing content aggressively and growing its commercial footprint until the product is everywhere and means nothing. The emotional bond that made the competition worth watching – the local intensity, the shared history, the sense that what happens on the pitch actually matters – gets diluted by the machinery built to monetise it.
This isn’t a hypothetical. There are competitions that have travelled this road. The warning signs are legible: fans in established markets feeling the product has been stretched to accommodate people who don’t really understand it, local authenticity traded for international scale, the thing being sold gradually becoming less valuable as more of it gets sold.
The question isn’t whether to grow. It’s how to grow without destroying the thing you’re growing.
The 90-minute match is the industry’s most sacred asset precisely because it can’t be replicated. What happens on the pitch happens once. The drama is unscripted, the result is uncertain and the shared experience of watching it – whether in a stadium or on a screen – is unrepeatable. That scarcity is what gives sport its emotional charge, and that emotional charge is what makes it commercially valuable.
Over-commercialisation happens when you try to replicate the product itself. When you treat the match as a format to be endlessly reproduced rather than a scarce event to be carefully distributed. When fan relationships get managed as a generic mass rather than as a community of individuals with a specific, personal attachment to a club or competition.
The answer is to scale the access, not the product.
The distinction sounds simple. In practice, it requires a different architecture entirely.
Scaling the product means more matches, more windows, more content that resembles the core experience but isn’t quite it – neutral-venue fixtures in foreign markets, exhibition tournaments that carry none of the stakes, broadcast deals that put the product in front of people who didn’t ask for it. It grows reach numbers. It doesn’t grow fan relationships.
Scaling access means removing the barriers between existing fans and the thing they already care about. A supporter in Manila who follows a Serie A club through pirated streams and fan accounts on X isn’t a new market to be unlocked through a rights deal. She’s a fan who hasn’t been given a reason to transact. The opportunity is to reach her through content designed for how she actually consumes sport, give her a personalised window into the club rather than a generic broadcast product, and build a commercial relationship that reflects her actual engagement rather than treating her as an undifferentiated unit of international reach.
That requires first-party data, creator networks, digital-first content and distribution infrastructure built for platform-native behaviour. It requires treating personalisation as the product, not a feature of the product.
The LVF partnership is the proof of concept. Italy’s top women’s volleyball league has world-class athletes, genuine on-field drama and a fanbase with deep emotional investment in their clubs and competition. What it lacked was the commercial and distribution infrastructure to extend that emotional investment to audiences that didn’t already know to look for it.
The investment thesis isn’t to replicate the product in new markets. It’s to build the access layer: the content technology, creator partnerships, first-party data capture and digital distribution architecture that lets new audiences find the product and engage with it on their own terms, in formats native to how they consume sport.
Kike watched this problem from the other side for nearly 17 years, when he was at Twitter and Meta – seeing competitions with passionate global fanbases fail to capture the commercial value of that passion because they were distributing through channels they didn’t own to audiences they didn’t understand.
The competitions that get this right will build something more durable than broadcast reach: owned fan relationships, first-party data assets and global communities that deepen over time rather than fragmenting as rights cycles turn.
The ones that get it wrong will grow their headline numbers and watch their core product lose the intensity that made those numbers meaningful.
Sport’s emotional bond isn’t infinitely elastic. It can be stretched by clumsy commercialisation until it snaps. But it can also be extended, carefully, to people who genuinely want to share in it – provided the infrastructure doing the extending is built with that distinction in mind.
Scale the access. Protect the product. That’s the only version of global growth that compounds.