Younger sports fans are watching more live games than they did a year ago, with the sharpest gains among teenagers, according to new data from Hub Entertainment Research. Fans under 18 are about seven times more likely to say they are watching more sports on television than less, more than double the ratio among sports fans overall.
Viewers ages 13 to 17 reported watching 50 percent more sports on TV than a year earlier, including 17 percent who said they watch “much more” and 32 percent who said they watch “somewhat more.”
The increase is driven more by rising interest than extra free time. Among teens who said they were watching more, more than two in five pointed to stronger interest in sports generally or in a specific team or athlete. Older fans, by contrast, more often cited additional free time.
Those same younger viewers are not finding or following sports the way previous generations did.
Forty-five percent of fans under 35 get most or all of their non-live sports content from social media, more than four times the rate among fans 55 and older. Social platforms have become a primary source of highlights, commentary, and discovery rather than a supplement to traditional programming guides or appointment viewing. The second screen is part of the live experience for younger fans, not a distraction from it.
Among fans ages 13 to 34 who use social media during a live game, 62 percent said that activity is about the game itself, compared with 33 percent of fans ages 55 to 74. Sixty-five percent of younger fans who post during a game post about that game, versus 29 percent of older fans.
“One factor driving the success of sports today: younger fans are just more interested than the generation before them,” said Hub principal Jon Giegengack. “But as with scripted content, their fandom is diffused across multiple kinds of media and content. It shows up as a YouTube stream, a group chat during the game, watching live stats on social while the game is on. The industry is built to reach the fan who plans their Sunday around kickoff. Now they need to adapt to fans that watch the game on TV and spend the rest of the week following it everywhere else.”
The findings come from Wave 6 of Hub’s “Evolution of Sports – What’s the Score?” study, based on a July 2026 survey of 3,814 U.S. sports fans ages 13 to 74. The results challenge the assumption that younger audiences are drifting away from live sports even as they abandon traditional methods of discovering what is on and when.