Key Highlights
- 83% of Gen Z viewers use multiple screens simultaneously when watching sports. India’s sports fans are 50% more likely than the global average to watch games on mobile. These two facts together describe the viewing reality that the majority of Indian sports properties — outside the IPL — are still not designing for.
- IPL 2025 offers a partial template: JioHotstar’s digital viewership crossed 652 million, overtaking television’s 537 million for the first time in the league’s history. Nearly 90% of IPL streaming happened on mobile, with 44% of mobile viewers actively participating in a live play-along game. But the IPL’s digital infrastructure is not the industry’s infrastructure — it is one broadcaster’s product, built for one property, inaccessible to the 99% of Indian sports leagues that don’t have JioStar’s balance sheet.
- The “second screen” is not a distraction from sports viewing. For Gen Z, it is sports viewing — the social, interactive, participatory layer that makes a match feel like an event rather than a broadcast. Sports properties that design against it (by producing passive-only broadcast content) are not competing with the second screen. They are irrelevant to it.
- Sports fan engagement in India’s Gen Z era requires a fundamental redesign: from passive broadcast to interactive participation, from mass-reach to community-first, from post-match highlights to in-moment social content architecture. GSK’s sports marketing and brand development pillars exist precisely to help Indian sports properties make this transition.
Table of Contents
- The Numbers That Look Good — and the Problem They’re Hiding
- How Gen Z Actually Watches Sports: The Research Is Unambiguous
- India’s Specific Viewing Reality: Mobile-First, On-the-Move, Distracted by Design
- What the Second Screen Actually Is (and Why Most Indian Leagues Don’t Have One)
- IPL 2025: What a Good Second Screen Strategy Looks Like in Practice
- The Gap: Everything Below IPL
- Five Things Gen Z Needs from Indian Sports That It Isn’t Getting
- The Community Problem: Why Gen Z Watches Sports with Friends — Just Not on Your Platform
- What Fan Engagement Actually Needs to Look Like for Indian Sports in 2026
- FAQ: Gen Z, Second Screens, and Sports Fan Engagement in India
- The Audience Is There. The Experience Isn’t.
The Numbers That Look Good — and the Problem They’re Hiding {#numbers}
IPL 2025 produced numbers that are genuinely staggering. Over a ten-week season, the tournament clocked 1.19 billion viewers across TV and digital — one of the largest sustained sports broadcast audiences ever recorded anywhere in the world. JioHotstar’s digital viewership reached 652 million, overtaking television’s 537 million for the first time in IPL history — a milestone that signals India’s definitive shift to digital-first sports consumption. The IPL final alone drew 426 million viewers. JioStar recorded 3.83 billion social media interactions across the season. JioHotstar’s subscriber base grew from 50 million in February 2025 to 280 million by May — an addition of 230 million paid subscribers in thirteen weeks, driven almost entirely by cricket.
These numbers are extraordinary. They are also, for anyone who wants to understand the broader health of Indian sports fan engagement, deeply misleading.
The IPL’s performance numbers describe a single property — one with a ₹48,390 Crore broadcast rights deal, a broadcaster in JioStar that invested hundreds of crores in interactive technology, and eighteen years of brand equity behind it. They do not describe the Indian sports industry. They describe what the Indian sports industry looks like at its absolute commercial and technological peak, for one sport, produced by one of India’s largest media conglomerates, during a ten-week window.
Below the IPL — in the PKL, the ISL, the Hockey India League, in state-level leagues, in non-cricket sports properties nationwide — the fan engagement picture is radically different. These properties are producing broadcasts without interactive layers, without Gen Z content strategies, without second-screen architecture, and often without the basic digital infrastructure to know who their audience is. They are producing content for a viewing experience that Gen Z has already moved past — and losing the next generation of fans in the process.
Understanding why requires understanding how Gen Z actually watches sports. And that data is unambiguous.
How Gen Z Actually Watches Sports: The Research Is Unambiguous {#genz-habits}
There is no longer any ambiguity in the research on how Gen Z consumes sports content. Multiple independent studies from 2023–2025 converge on the same set of behavioural patterns, and the implications for sports properties are significant.
They watch with a second screen — always. 83% of Gen Z viewers use multiple screens simultaneously when watching sports (GlobalInsightNews, 2025). 94% of Gen Z frequently multitask with a second screen during any TV viewing — not just sports. For sports specifically, the FIFS-Deloitte Report confirms that over 80% of sports fans in India use a second screen while watching a live TV broadcast. The second screen isn’t an exception for a minority of distracted viewers. It is the standard behaviour for the entire generation.
They don’t watch full matches. Just 31% of sports fans aged 18–24 watch live full-length matches, compared to 75% of fans aged 55 and above (Skyrim.AI, 2025). 23% of Gen Z sports fans would rather watch highlights than a live game. 17% prefer to watch matches on their own schedule rather than live. More than 40% of those who do watch live prefer “catching up” during breaks via shorter clips, social reactions, and score updates rather than following the broadcast continuously.
They use short-form to qualify long-form. 85% of Gen Z use short-form video content as their discovery mechanism for longer content they plan to watch later. Before a young fan commits to watching a full IPL match, they have typically already encountered a specific player’s performance, a controversial decision, or a dramatic last-over through Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts, or Twitter clips. The short-form content is not competition to the broadcast — it is the funnel that converts casual followers into committed viewers.
They want to participate, not just observe. Gen Z is 21% more likely than the average viewer to play games on mobile while watching sports, and 20% more likely to simultaneously use social media. 41% are willing to provide personal data in exchange for personalised experiences. 61% prefer user-generated content over brand-produced content. 70% have joined an online community specifically for the sense of belonging it provides. They are not passive viewers waiting to be broadcast at. They are active participants looking for platforms that give them something to do with their sports fandom beyond watching.
Authenticity is non-negotiable. 60% of Gen Z will permanently disengage from a brand that feels inauthentic. Corporate messaging, over-produced content, and the traditional broadcast “talking head” format read as fake to this generation. They respond to real stories, real moments, unfiltered access, and content that acknowledges them as insiders rather than audiences.
These are not trends unique to India. But India has a specific dimension that makes them particularly urgent for Indian sports properties to understand.
India’s Specific Viewing Reality: Mobile-First, On-the-Move, Distracted by Design {#india-reality}
Indian sports fans are 50% more likely than the global average to watch games on the move — on mobile devices, during commutes, between classes, in canteens (GWI, 2025). India has 954 million internet users as of 2024, with 95% of villages covered by 3G/4G networks. Data costs are among the lowest globally. The JioHotstar app crossed 1.04 billion downloads on Android.
This is a market in which mobile-first consumption is not a trend in progress — it is already the baseline. Nearly 90% of IPL streaming during IPL 2025 happened on mobile, with 62% of that audience in the 18–34 age bracket. India’s Gen Z is not occasionally checking their phone during a match. They are watching the match on the phone — often on the bus, in a hostel room, between lectures, or in a shared household where the TV is occupied.
The implications for sports content design are significant. A Gen Z viewer watching a PKL match on a mobile screen while commuting is not in a context where a traditional 45-minute broadcast experience is accessible or appropriate. They need content that works in vertical format, that compresses key moments into shareable clips, that allows engagement through a tap rather than a keyboard, and that gives them something to share with their network immediately — because the social act of sharing is as much part of their sports experience as the match itself.
Sports fans in India also show a pronounced regional language preference that directly affects engagement depth. IPL 2025 demonstrated this commercially: Telugu viewership on JioHotstar grew 87% year-on-year. Kannada grew 65%. Tamil 52%. The fans who engaged most deeply were watching in their native language, responding to content that felt made for them rather than translated for them. Regional language content is not a nice-to-have for sports fan engagement in India. For Gen Z fans outside Hindi-belt metros, it is the difference between passive viewership and active community membership.
What the Second Screen Actually Is (and Why Most Indian Leagues Don’t Have One) {#second-screen}
The “second screen problem” in Indian sports is widely discussed as a challenge — the idea that sports broadcasts are competing with smartphones for viewers’ attention. This framing is wrong, and getting it wrong leads to the wrong solutions.
The second screen is not competition to the sports broadcast. For Gen Z, the second screen is the sports broadcast — or at least the part of it that makes the experience worth having. The social interaction, the live prediction games, the real-time stats, the shareable reaction content, the community commentary — these are not distractions from the match. They are the engagement layer that converts passive viewing into active fandom. A fan who watches a match while participating in a live prediction contest, sharing a reaction clip with friends, and arguing about a selection decision in a WhatsApp group is more engaged with that sport than one who watches the same match silently on a TV. They are more likely to return for the next match. More likely to buy merchandise. More likely to attend live.
The second screen, properly understood, is not the problem. The absence of a designed second screen experience is the problem. Sports properties that don’t give Gen Z something to do during a match on their phones will not stop them using their phones during a match. They will just lose the fan engagement opportunity that those phones represent — to Instagram, to WhatsApp, to YouTube, to whatever else is competing for that screen time.
The sports properties that understand this — JioStar with the IPL, the NFL with its fantasy football integration, the Premier League with its official match-day apps — design the second screen experience as an integral component of the broadcast, not as a secondary feature or an afterthought. The ones that don’t, broadcast to an audience that is technically watching but is not engaged, not building loyalty, and not becoming the next-generation fanbase that converts viewership into revenue.
The critical question for Indian sports in 2026 is: which category does your property fall into? And for most leagues below the IPL, the honest answer is that they have no second-screen strategy at all.
IPL 2025: What a Good Second Screen Strategy Looks Like in Practice {#ipl-case}
IPL 2025 is the most useful available benchmark for what well-executed Gen Z fan engagement looks like in Indian sports — and it is worth examining in detail precisely because it demonstrates what is achievable, even if the production investment behind it is beyond most properties.
JioHotstar’s suite of interactive features for IPL 2025 was designed explicitly around the multi-screen, participatory Gen Z viewer:
MaxView offered a vertical viewing experience — the match optimised for portrait-orientation mobile viewing — with the ability to swipe up for key moments or swipe sideways for alternate camera angles. This is not a minor UX feature. It is a fundamental acknowledgement that a significant portion of the audience is watching in vertical format on a phone, and that the broadcast experience should be designed for that reality rather than forcing a horizontal TV format onto a vertical screen.
Multi-Cam in 16:9 allowed viewers to switch between camera feeds — Batter Cam, Bowler Cam, Stump Cam — giving the audience agency over their own viewing experience. The passive broadcast where a director decides what you see was supplemented with active viewer choice. Gen Z, which expects digital products to offer personalisation as standard, found this intuitive.
360° VR streaming let fans experience matches immersively on mobile or through JioDive headsets. While take-up for VR is still limited, the feature signals direction of travel and contributes to a broader perception that IPL digital viewing is technologically premium.
‘Jeeto Dhan Dhana Dhan’ play-along game was perhaps the single most significant second-screen feature of the season: a live prediction and participation game that 44% of mobile viewers actively engaged with during matches. Almost half of IPL’s mobile audience was not just watching — they were actively participating in a game layer built on top of the broadcast. The engagement implication of this is profound. A fan who participates in a prediction game during a match has made micro-commitments to the outcome of every over. They are not distractable. They are the most engaged viewer the broadcast has.
AI-powered highlights generated full match summaries within minutes of the final ball — shareable, personalised, and optimised for the 40%+ of Gen Z viewers who prefer catching up through short-form content after a match rather than watching live. This feature converts the post-match second screen from a competitor (social media pulls fans away from the broadcast replay) into a channel (the broadcast itself delivers the short-form content that Gen Z will share on social media).
The result: 3.83 billion social media interactions, the most interactive IPL season on record, and 44% mobile participation in the play-along. These are not passive viewership numbers. They are evidence of active fan engagement at scale.
The lesson from IPL 2025 is not that every Indian sports league needs a ₹48,000 Crore broadcast deal to engage Gen Z fans. It is that the design principles — vertical-first, participatory, short-form-enabled, community-driven — are replicable at much lower cost. The question is whether other properties are applying them.
The Gap: Everything Below IPL {#gap}
The IPL’s Gen Z engagement success creates a dangerous illusion for the Indian sports industry. Because IPL numbers are so large and so frequently cited, they create the impression that Indian sports broadly is winning with younger audiences. It isn’t. The IPL’s digital engagement infrastructure is a JioStar product, not an industry product. It did not exist before JioCinema invested in it. It does not transfer automatically to any other property.
The Pro Kabaddi League — India’s second most-watched sports property, with 201 million viewers in Season 11 — runs a digital engagement operation that is competent but nowhere near the second-screen architecture that IPL deploys. PKL’s social media presence is active, but its broadcast experience lacks the participatory layer that defines Gen Z engagement. There is no in-match prediction game. No vertical viewing experience. No AI highlight generation within minutes of matches. The gap between what PKL offers digitally and what Gen Z expects from a sports entertainment product is significant and growing.
The Indian Super League, the Hockey India League, and every state-level league below them face a more fundamental version of the same problem. Many don’t have dedicated apps. Most don’t have structured second-screen content strategies — no live social content playbook, no in-match engagement mechanics, no community platforms owned by the league itself. Their Gen Z audience interaction happens entirely on third-party social platforms where the league is one account among millions competing for attention, with no ability to contextualise that interaction within the match experience.
For properties like CHL 2026, which launches in June with zero existing audience, this gap is both a challenge and an opportunity. CHL enters a market where Indian sports’ Gen Z engagement problem is clearly understood, the design principles for solving it are documented, and the baseline cost of implementing a mobile-first, participatory fan engagement architecture — while not trivial — is not prohibitive.
| Engagement Feature | IPL 2025 (JioHotstar) | Non-Cricket Major Leagues | State-Level Leagues |
|---|---|---|---|
| Vertical mobile viewing format | ✅ MaxView | ❌ | ❌ |
| In-match participation game | ✅ 44% mobile participation | ❌ (limited) | ❌ |
| Multi-camera viewer choice | ✅ | ❌ | ❌ |
| AI-generated highlights (minutes post-match) | ✅ | ❌ | ❌ |
| Live regional language commentary | ✅ 12 languages | Partial (2-3 languages) | ❌ |
| League-owned community platform | Partial (JioHotstar-owned, not IPL-owned) | ❌ | ❌ |
| Real-time social content during match | ✅ (franchise + league accounts) | Partial | Minimal |
| Short-form content funnel | ✅ (AI highlights + social clips) | Partial | Minimal |
| Second-screen strategy document | ✅ | Unlikely | No |
Five Things Gen Z Needs from Indian Sports That It Isn’t Getting {#five-things}
The research on Gen Z sports consumption, combined with the Indian market’s specific characteristics, points to five specific needs that most Indian sports properties are currently failing to meet.
1. Something to do during the match.
The most urgent design requirement is also the most counter-intuitive for traditional sports broadcasting, which has always prioritised the content on screen. Gen Z doesn’t want to sit and watch. They want to predict, vote, react, compete, and share — during the match, in real time. The play-along format that JioStar deployed (44% participation rate) is the most direct evidence that when you give Indian sports fans something to do on their phone that is connected to the match, they do it enthusiastically. Properties that don’t build this layer are leaving the most engaged slice of their potential audience unserved.
2. Short-form content before and after — not just during.
85% of Gen Z uses short-form video to discover long-form content they’ll watch later. This means the match broadcast is downstream of the short-form content ecosystem. A Gen Z fan doesn’t decide to watch a PKL match and then look for clips. They encounter a 45-second Reels video of an extraordinary raid, they want to know more, and they end up watching the match. The short-form content is the acquisition channel. For most Indian sports properties outside cricket, this content architecture doesn’t exist in any systematic way — there are no dedicated short-form production pipelines, no platform-specific content strategies, and no measurement of how short-form drives live viewership.
3. Behind-the-scenes, unfiltered athlete access.
61% of Gen Z prefer user-generated content over brand-produced content. 60% will permanently disengage from content that feels inauthentic. The most effective Gen Z sports content globally is not polished broadcast production — it is raw locker room footage, training day access, player-run social accounts, unscripted athlete moments. Indian sports properties tend toward the opposite: formal post-match press conferences, heavily produced promotional videos, and brand-safe athlete content that Gen Z can immediately identify as corporate output. The leagues that win Gen Z loyalty will be the ones that give athletes the tools and permission to produce authentic, unfiltered content — and then amplify it through league channels rather than filtering it through PR.
4. Community ownership.
70% of Gen Z have joined an online community specifically for belonging. They are not looking for broadcast audiences — they are looking for communities where their specific fandom is understood, shared, and deepened. Discord servers for team fanbases, Reddit communities for specific sports, WhatsApp groups for real-time match commentary — these exist for Indian sports already. But they exist on third-party platforms where the league has no presence, no data, and no ability to deepen the fan relationship. Indian sports properties need to build and own their fan communities, not simply broadcast at social media followers and hope they self-organise into loyal audiences somewhere.
5. Personalised, regional, identity-reflective content.
The 87% growth in Telugu IPL viewership and the 65% growth in Kannada on JioHotstar is a precise commercial signal: Indian sports fans engage most deeply with content that reflects their linguistic and cultural identity. For state-level leagues like CHL, this is a structural advantage. A league set in Raipur, featuring athletes from all 33 districts of Chhattisgarh, with tribal culture woven into its identity, has identity resonance for Chhattisgarhi young fans that no national league can replicate. The Gen Z fan in Raipur watching players from their district compete in a professional franchise league is not a passive audience member — they are a deeply engaged community participant. Capturing that engagement requires content that reflects and celebrates that identity specifically, not generic national cricket-style production.
The Community Problem: Why Gen Z Watches Sports with Friends — Just Not on Your Platform {#community}
One of the most misunderstood aspects of Gen Z sports engagement is that it is intensely social. 61% of Gen Z fans enjoy watching sports with others — higher than any other generation. They are not isolated, atomised digital consumers watching alone on a phone. They are watching together, reacting together, sharing together, arguing together — just on WhatsApp, Discord, and Instagram rather than in living rooms or sports bars.
This creates a fundamental problem for Indian sports properties: the social engagement that is deepest and most loyal happens entirely outside their platforms. A WhatsApp group of twenty young CSK fans reacting in real time to every wicket is generating intense brand loyalty — but no data, no revenue, and no direct relationship with the league. The same social energy that built sports fandom through communal TV viewing in previous generations is now happening in places that sports properties can neither see nor participate in.
The leagues that solve this problem in the next five years will build the most durable Gen Z fanbases. The solution is not to try to pull fans away from WhatsApp and Discord. It is to build owned community features compelling enough that fans want to bring their social sports experience onto the league’s platform — and to seed those communities with the behind-the-scenes content, athlete access, and interactive features that give fans reasons to be there rather than elsewhere.
This is the deepest layer of the second screen problem. It isn’t primarily a technology challenge. It is a community design challenge — and it requires sports properties, sports marketing teams, and sports brand development strategists to think about fan engagement as community architecture, not content production.
What Fan Engagement Actually Needs to Look Like for Indian Sports in 2026 {#playbook}
Translating the Gen Z engagement research and the IPL benchmark into practical strategy for Indian sports properties — at every level of the market — requires thinking about five distinct design layers.
Layer 1: The Broadcast Layer — Design for vertical, not horizontal.
Every Indian sports league that streams digital content needs a vertical viewing format in 2026. This is not about production cost — it is about orientation. A match broadcast produced in 16:9 horizontal resolution and delivered as-is to a mobile screen is designed for a television. A match broadcast with a dedicated vertical cut, optimised for portrait viewing, with key moments and scorecard overlays visible without rotating the phone — is designed for the audience. The incremental production cost of vertical optimisation is modest. The engagement uplift is significant.
Layer 2: The Participation Layer — Build something to do during the match.
Every league, at every budget level, can implement in-match prediction and participation features. At the simplest level, this is a poll on Instagram Stories (“Who takes the next wicket? Vote now”). At a more sophisticated level, it is a league-operated web or app-based prediction game with points, leaderboards, and match-specific challenges. The specific mechanic matters less than the principle: give Gen Z fans something to do during the match that is connected to the action on the pitch, and they will do it — converting passive viewers into active participants.
Layer 3: The Content Layer — Short-form first, long-form downstream.
Indian sports leagues need dedicated short-form content pipelines — dedicated personnel or brief production processes that convert match moments into vertical Reels, Shorts, and Clips within minutes of the action. AI highlight generation (as JioHotstar deployed for IPL) makes this achievable at scale. But even without AI tools, a designated social media producer clipping key match moments for platform-specific distribution during and immediately after matches is the minimum viable second-screen content strategy for any sports property in 2026.
Layer 4: The Access Layer — Athlete-generated content.
The highest-engagement content Indian sports leagues can produce has zero production cost. It is athlete-generated — players posting their own training footage, match-day routines, and candid reactions on their personal accounts, tagged to the league. Indian leagues need to build formal athlete content programmes: a content playbook that coaches athletes on what to share and when, tools that make social posting easy, and amplification commitments from league channels that give athletes an incentive to produce content. The league that turns its players into its content team will outperform the league that tries to produce all its engagement through a central marketing team.
Layer 5: The Community Layer — Own the conversation.
The final and most important layer is community ownership. Indian sports leagues need owned digital spaces where their most engaged fans congregate — not just social media followers who see posts in an algorithm-controlled feed, but genuine community members who come to a league-owned platform because their fandom lives there. This could be a Discord server for franchises within a league, a league app with community features, or a web platform with match-day live blogs and fan commentary. The technology is not the challenge. The commitment to building, moderating, and activating fan communities as a core business function — rather than treating social media management as a peripheral marketing task — is.
GSK’s sports marketing campaigns and fan engagement strategy work is built around exactly this five-layer framework. For properties like CHL 2026, building these layers from launch — rather than retrofitting them onto an existing broadcast operation — is both more cost-effective and more strategically valuable. The leagues that design engagement architecture before their first season have audience data, community relationships, and content infrastructure that competitors who start later spend years trying to build.
You can learn more about how GSK helps sports properties design their events and fan experience and sports analytics to serve the next generation of Indian sports fans.
FAQ: Gen Z, Second Screens, and Sports Fan Engagement in India {#faq}
Q: What percentage of Gen Z uses a second screen while watching sports?
Multiple studies from 2024–25 put the figure at over 80% — with some research (GlobalInsightNews, 2025) citing 83% of Gen Z viewers using multiple screens simultaneously during sports. The FIFS-Deloitte Report confirms that over 80% of Indian sports fans broadly (not just Gen Z) use second screens during live TV broadcasts. For Gen Z specifically, second-screen usage during sports is effectively the standard behaviour, not the exception. The implication for Indian sports properties is direct: designing for a passive, single-screen viewer is designing for an audience that no longer exists among under-25 fans.
Q: Is the IPL losing Gen Z fans, or is it actually succeeding with younger audiences?
IPL 2025 performed strongly with Gen Z and Millennial audiences — JioHotstar’s audience skews heavily toward 18–34 (over 64% of its user base), and the platform’s engagement features drove genuine interactive participation, with 44% of mobile viewers actively participating in the Jeeto Dhan Dhana Dhan play-along game. The IPL is not losing Gen Z. However, IPL’s success has required significant and ongoing investment from JioStar in interactive technology that most other Indian sports properties cannot match. The league-level challenge is that IPL’s Gen Z engagement model is not replicable for smaller properties without equivalent investment — and without replication, the rest of Indian sports will progressively fall behind the experience standard that IPL has set.
Q: What does Gen Z want from sports content that traditional broadcast doesn’t provide?
Research consistently identifies five core needs: something to do during the match (prediction, polling, participation games); short-form content before and after matches that fits their discovery habits; behind-the-scenes, unfiltered athlete access that feels authentic rather than produced; community belonging — shared spaces where their specific fandom is understood and celebrated; and personalised, regional, identity-reflective content that acknowledges their cultural context. Traditional broadcast delivers none of these. Properties that build digital engagement architecture around these needs convert casual viewers into loyal fans.
Q: Why are Indian sports fans specifically more dependent on mobile than global averages?
GWI data shows Indian sports fans are 50% more likely than the global average sports fan to watch games on the move — on mobile devices during commutes, between activities, in shared households where TV access is not always available. This is driven by India’s mobile-first internet infrastructure: 954 million internet users, ultra-low data costs, and near-universal 4G coverage. For Indian Gen Z specifically, the phone is often the primary screen for all digital consumption, not just sports. Sports properties that design for mobile-first viewing — vertical format, touch-based interaction, social sharing built into the experience — align with this reality. Properties that produce TV-first content and distribute it digitally without adaptation do not.
Q: How can state-level or smaller Indian sports leagues build second-screen engagement without large budgets?
The most effective second-screen engagement features require production thinking, not production budget. A designated social content producer clipping and posting match moments to Instagram and YouTube Shorts in real time during matches costs the salary of one digital content role. A live prediction poll on Instagram Stories during a match is free. An athlete content playbook that encourages players to post personal training and match-day content — tagged to the league — is primarily a cultural decision, not a financial one. A WhatsApp community for the league’s most engaged fans, seeded with insider content and player access, can be launched in an afternoon. The barrier to building Gen Z engagement for smaller leagues is not money. It is the strategic decision to prioritise it.
Q: How is the regional language shift in Indian sports viewership relevant to Gen Z engagement?
IPL 2025 produced some of its most striking engagement growth in regional languages: Telugu viewership on JioHotstar grew 87% year-on-year, Kannada 65%, Tamil 52%. These growth rates significantly exceed the overall viewership growth, indicating that regional language content is driving deeper engagement than Hindi-language broadcast. For Gen Z fans outside Hindi-belt metros, content in their native language is not a bonus — it is the baseline for genuine engagement. State-level leagues like CHL 2026 have a structural advantage here: a Chhattisgarhi young fan watching a league that features players from their district, broadcast in a language and cultural context that reflects their identity, is not a casual viewer. They are a community member. Building that identity-level engagement is the highest-value fan engagement strategy available to regional leagues — and it costs less than national broadcast production.
The Audience Is There. The Experience Isn’t. {#conclusion}
India has 400 million Millennials and Gen Z sports fans. They are watching on phones, scrolling during matches, sharing clips with friends, building communities on Discord and WhatsApp, and expecting sports content to behave like the best digital products they use in every other area of their lives — personalised, participatory, responsive, and social.
The broadcast numbers are impressive. 1.19 billion IPL viewers. 652 million digital viewers overtaking television for the first time. 3.83 billion social media interactions. These numbers confirm that Gen Z has not abandoned sports. They have abandoned the passive broadcast format that much of Indian sports still defaults to. They are watching — on their terms, on their devices, in their communities.
The second screen is not the problem. The absence of a designed second screen experience is the problem. The leagues that treat their mobile audience as a broadcast overflow channel — people watching TV on a smaller screen — will progressively lose the generation that watches everything on that smaller screen by choice. The leagues that treat mobile as the primary engagement surface — the screen where participation happens, communities form, and fan identity is built — will own the next two decades of Indian sports fandom.
IPL 2025 demonstrated what that looks like at scale. CHL 2026 is an opportunity to demonstrate what it looks like when built from scratch, for a new audience, with community identity at its core. The principles are the same whether the budget is ₹500 Crore or ₹12 Crore: vertical-first, participatory, short-form enabled, athlete-authentic, community-owned.
GSK’s sports marketing and sports brand development teams help Indian sports properties design and execute the fan engagement strategies that Gen Z actually responds to — from content architecture and community design to in-match participation mechanics and athlete content programmes. Whether you’re launching a new league or rethinking how an existing property engages its youngest fans, the conversation starts with understanding who they are and how they watch.
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