On 14 July 2024, Spain beat England in Berlin and 19.8 million people in the United Kingdom watched it on a television set at home. Ofcom logged it as the most-watched live sports event of the year across the BBC, ITV and STV, with four-fifths of that audience on the BBC. Big number. Also a number about one piece of furniture.
Plenty of people followed the same final without going near that set. A stream ran on a phone propped against a kettle. A live text feed got refreshed between other things. Goals turned up as clips, a few minutes late, pushed by an app nobody had opened in a week. Ask any of them and they will say they watched the final.
Under all of it sits a layer most supporters never see. Live scores, momentum graphics and in-play prices come off a data feed collected inside the ground, and that feed reaches a trading system before the picture reaches a living room. Prices in the live football markets at Virgin Bet move on the feed, not on the broadcast.
That operator publishes its own licensing detail: the Mpumalanga Economic Regulator, licence no. 9-2-1-09938. Betting licences in South Africa come from provincial regulators rather than one national authority, so what is lawfully on offer, and from whom, turns on where a licence was issued and where the customer happens to be.
Football is the only sport that still sets the schedule
Ofcom’s count for 2024 put football at 44% of all sports viewing on the public service broadcasters, up from 38% the year before. The Olympics and Paralympics together took 23%. Tennis held third place on 7%, as it has for three years.
Money follows that attention. Deloitte’s Annual Review of Football Finance, now in its 35th edition, put the European football market past €40 billion for the first time in 2024/25, a rise of 6%, with the big five leagues on €21.6 billion of that and Premier League clubs up 8% in aggregate revenue.
Sport is also the last genre that reliably gets people to a fixed time. The public service broadcasters spent £690m on first-run sport in 2024, a rise of 36% and a quarter of all their first-run original spend, across 2,500 hours of output.
Two paywalls now stand between a supporter and one league
Following a single league from first whistle to last stopped being a single purchase. Sky and TNT Sports renewed their Premier League rights in late 2023 and hold them to 2029, with a minimum of 215 matches a season between them.
The domestic deal that began in 2025/26 is worth £6.7bn over four years, which Ofcom reads as evidence that premium sport still carries subscription revenue even while spending elsewhere is cut back.
The wider picture is less comfortable. Multichannel programme spend fell 5% to £4.6bn in 2024, and sport still absorbed over 70% of it after a 5% reduction of its own. Deloitte is blunter about where last season’s growth came from: expanded UEFA competition distributions did the lifting while broadcast revenue plateaued.
Territory adds another split. Rights are sold market by market, so a fixture sitting behind one subscription in London sits behind a different one in Johannesburg, on a different schedule, sometimes with a different commentary team. Nobody carries their viewing arrangement across a border.
Deloitte’s Digital Media Trends survey, published on 25 March 2026, found 90% of US households holding at least one video subscription and an average of four apiece, with 41% having cancelled one in the previous six months. That is what a fragmented rights market produces. People subscribe for a competition, watch it, and leave.
The phone stopped being the second screen
The phrase assumed a television came first. Ofcom’s Online Nation report, published in December 2025, makes that assumption look dated. Smartphones took 77% of all the time UK adults spent online in May 2025, up from 75% a year earlier, across 49.1 million adults averaging four and a half hours a day.
The younger the supporter, the sharper it gets. Adults aged 18 to 24 spent five hours and five minutes a day on a phone, 81% of their total online time. The average adult used 41 apps across a month, three more than in 2024.
The group chat is not a side effect either. WhatsApp reached 90% of UK online adults in May 2025 on Ofcom’s numbers, up from 87% a year before, at an average of 17 minutes per person per day.
Set that against a match and the shape is obvious. Team news arrives on a phone. The table updates on a phone. The running argument about the substitution runs on a phone. The television, if it is on at all, is the shared screen in the room, and the private one is in a hand. Calling that arrangement a second screen gets the order backwards.
A goal is data before it is a picture
Collection happens in the stadium, not the studio. Genius Sports announced on 9 September 2026 that its GeniusIQ platform runs in all 18 Liga MX grounds, capturing what the company describes as billions of tracking data points across every game.
The output went into TelevisaUnivision coverage from Toluca against Atlas on 12 September 2026, with live probabilities and player milestones stitched into the picture. Mexico is not an outlier here. It is simply the most recent league to have every ground wired the same way.
Once that data exists it travels two ways. One path feeds the graphics a viewer sees: win probability, distance covered, the quality of a chance. The other feeds pricing systems, and it lands there first, because a graphics package has to be rendered and a price does not.
Delivery adds the rest of the gap. A satellite feed, a cable head end and an internet stream do not arrive together, so two people watching the same match on different services in the same room will celebrate at different moments.
Which is why in-play markets suspend. At a corner, a penalty award or a red card, the price on display is describing something the trading system already knows and the screen has not caught up with, so the book stops taking bets until the two are back in line. There is nothing sinister in it. It is a delay problem, and the fan sits on the slow side of it by design.
Clips arrive before the report does
Ofcom’s 2024 figures put YouTube second only to the BBC across all in-home video viewing, and first among 16 to 34 year olds, where it accounted for 22% of everything watched. Netflix took 13% of that group’s viewing and TikTok 9%.
Broadcasters stopped fighting it. Channel 4 signed a multi-year commercial arrangement with YouTube in 2022 under its Fast Forward strategy, publishing full-length programmes while keeping control of its own advertising inventory, terms rather better than the standard creator split where the platform takes 45%.
Live sport pulls the same way. ITV reported that the Women’s Euro 2025 semi-final on 22 July averaged 8 million viewers across all devices, and that the same day gave ITVX its biggest day of the year with 17.2 million streams.
Add notifications and the sequence inverts. A supporter learns the score and then decides whether to watch, rather than watching in order to learn the score. The same Deloitte survey found 52% of consumers saying social feeds are now their main route to new content, rising to 73% among the youngest group it polled.
That is a genuine change in how form gets absorbed, and it isn’t a neutral one. A highlights cut is an argument assembled by whoever edited it, and it flatters sides that attack. Ninety seconds will tell you who scored. It won’t tell you which team spent an hour camped in the other half and found nobody to finish.
What the new habit costs
The gains are real. Anyone following football in 2026 can see more of a match, from more angles, with better numbers attached to it, than the most devoted supporter of 2006 could have bought at any price.
The bill arrives elsewhere. Subscriptions multiply, the feed never stops, none of it feels optional once everyone around you is keeping up, and the distance between noticing something and acting on it has shrunk to the width of a thumb.
That last one matters most for anyone who follows fixtures with money attached. An in-play price is not a forecast. It is a description of what a trading system believed at a moment that has already gone, built from data the viewer does not hold, and the viewer is structurally behind it. Reading a live price as information about the next ten minutes, rather than a record of the last ten seconds, is the most expensive habit a phone makes easy.
The supporter who still watches the full ninety reads form better than the one who watches the highlights. That part hasn’t changed. Almost everything around it has.
Sports betting is restricted to people aged 18 or older. In South Africa, the South African Responsible Gambling Foundation runs a free and confidential counselling line on 0800 006 008.
