Dev Sangha, CEO
In the ever-evolving landscapes of sports and entertainment, innovation and disruption play pivotal roles in continued growth. Some argue that more of both is needed, as ticket sales, merchandise and sponsorship deals face growing investment scrutiny. Others believe the industry is closer to innovation and disruption fatigue, where value simply isn't landing at scale, fast enough.
From a Sports/Entertainment organisation's perspective, the media distribution dynamic is in a state of flux. Whether it's D2C, DAZN acting as 'buyer of last resort' for media rights, or the steady abdication of fan relationships to Big Tech platforms that better match Gen Z and Alpha habits, there is no stability in sight. Coupled with unresolved questions about ROI, growth sits at under 5% year on year in several categories: the same envelope of money doing the rounds, just changing distribution channels.
Or take fan engagement. How much more can the genuine fan pay to follow their passion before retreating to their phone to watch highlights on YouTube instead? What depth of relationship can be built with transitory fans, not the same as the traditional “prawn sandwich brigade”, if organisations only engage with them as a wallet to open? And how much more can be spent fighting piracy, already worth $28.8B a year in lost revenue, with no sign of it slowing?
In the UK, research conducted with Play it Forward and reviewed methodology from Sheffield Hallam University, puts the equivalent uncaptured category at approximately £564M a season across the Premier League alone, a modelled opportunity, not yet a realised one. Applying the same lens to the top six US sports leagues of NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL,MLS and UFC, Mimo's own modelling puts the equivalent category at approximately$3B a year.
That US figure carries the same caveat as its UK counterpart: it is Mimo's modelling, not an academy or league-endorsed number and the full methodology will be published alongside Mimo's forthcoming US Sports Industry Review, the direct US counterpart to the Football Industry Review, benchmarked against the same Sangha Sports Framework. Executives who register interest now will be first to receive it.
So, what kind of 'innovation' and' disruption' has already been tried across sports and entertainment and is there a way to combine what's working into something that reshapes the underlying economics, rather than just redistributing the same pool of money? Some call that Transformation. Let's review what's been done to date, then look at where the next category of value actually sits.
Innovation typically means making incremental improvements to existing products, services or processes, which can better, faster or more efficient within an established framework.
Sports example: When the NBA introduced the shot clock in 1954, it revolutionised basketball without changing its fundamental nature by dramatically increasing scoring, eliminating stalling tactics and creating the fast-paced spectacle fans love today. Formula 1's Drag Reduction System (DRS) did something similar: increasing overtaking opportunities without sacrificing competitive integrity.
Entertainment example: Disney's Marvel Cinematic Universe was innovation within an established industry where weaving characters and storylines across films to create audience investment that turned standalone superhero movies into a cultural phenomenon grossing over $25 billion. The innovation wasn't new technology. It was reimagining how stories could be told across multiple films.
Disruption involves radical change that fundamentally alters an industry, often displacing established players, typically by serving an overlooked segment first, then moving upmarket.
Sports example: When Red Bull created action-sports competitions like the X Games and Crashed Ice, it didn't just sponsor events, it invented entirely new sports categories. It was appealing to younger audiences and transforming from a beverage company into a media empire that owns teams, creates content and hosts events watched by millions.
Entertainment example: When Spotify launched in 2008, the music industry was still fighting illegal downloads. Rather than digitising albums, Spotify reimagined music consumption entirely with unlimited streaming for a monthly fee. It disrupted CD sales and downloads while fundamentally changing how artists release music and how royalties are distributed.
Transformation is a complete reimagining of business models, customer experiences and value propositions. It's often described as the combined effect of innovation and disruption, but it's actually more than their sum. It’s a holistic reinvention that produces exponential, not incremental, change.
When the UFC transformed combat sports, it combined innovations (the octagonal cage, unified rules) with disruption (reality TV promotion, social-media-native personalities) into something entirely new, growing from a $2 million struggling business in 2001 to a $4 billion valuation by 2016.
In entertainment, Netflix's journey illustrates the same pattern: an innovative DVD-by-mail model, disruption of cable TV through streaming and true transformation only once original content, viewer analytics and global distribution were integrated into one ecosystem.
None of what follows is hypothetical. Each of these is already being piloted, funded or seriously discussed somewhere across sports and entertainment. Whether each one works at scale or survives contact with regulators, fans, or both, is a separate question where the answers vary considerably.
• Enhanced Fan Engagement: AR/VR and interactive apps offering personalised, immersive viewing - toggling between pitch-side seats, a player's perspective, or coaching views, while interacting with other fans globally.
• Community-Owned Entertainment: Blockchain and tokenisation explored as a route to fan collectives holding stakes in teams, artists or content, new economic relationships between creators and audiences, still largely unproven at scale.
• Hyper-Personalised Viewing: AI-driven camera angles, personalised commentary in local languages in the voice of their preferred host or player, together with “what-if” scenario tools and extrapolated data analytics, although nascent, appear to turn passive watching into something closer to interactive entertainment.
• Athlete-to-Fan Direct Economy: Platforms and athlete-led ventures exploring direct fan funding of athlete development. This can include tokenised shares of future earnings, but still remains a speculative investment category that hasn't yet been de-risked for fans.
• Physical-Digital Integration: Live events where a smartphone becomes part of the experience itself. For example, a fan can control lighting, contribute to visuals or generate personalised souvenirs from the event.
• Narrative Universes Instead of Products: Companies like Epic Games (Fortnite) building persistent worlds where concerts, gameplay and streaming content intersect, rather than releasing standalone products.
• Climate-Adaptive Entertainment: Early thinking on stadiums and events designed around sustainability commitments, from energy-generating venues to transit-linked event design.
• The Prediction Markets Wave: Prediction-market platforms have moved from a niche curiosity to a genuine force in sports betting. Polymarket alone reportedly saw close to $2.5B in trading volume on the 2026 World Cup winner market, and analysts estimated the tournament could add $5–10B in volume across the sector. Kalshi's sponsorship of the Argentine FA, fronted by Lionel Messi, shows how fast these platforms have embedded themselves in the sport itself. But the growth has run well ahead of governance: nine European gambling regulators across Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland,Portugal, Spain and Switzerland have issued a coordinated statement as the World Cup began, warning that unlicensed platforms lacked deposit limits, age verification and time restrictions and flagging the addictive design patterns some of these products use, particularly among younger users. Spain had already blocked two of the largest platforms outright. It's the same short-term-value-then-crackdown pattern the industry saw with NFTs a few years earlier: real revenue, real fan interest, followed swiftly by a governance response once regulators judge the consumer-harm case as strong enough to acton.
Put together, these are eight genuine signals of where the industry believes new value sits. They also share a common vulnerability. Models that generate fast revenue without consent, licensing clarity or a fan-first design tend to hit the same wall eventually - either fan trust erodes (as with early NFT drops), or regulators intervene (as prediction markets are discovering in real time, mid-tournament). The lesson isn't that innovation should stop. It's that whichever lever an organisation pulls, durability depends on being fan-friendly and compliant by design, not as an afterthought once scrutiny arrives.
Three questions tend to surface once the appetite for transformation is real:
1. Where am I?
2. Where do I want to be?
3. How do I get there?
The first two are diagnostic and aspirational and they depend on benchmarking your organisation's current revenue, cost and governance position against what's actually working elsewhere, not just what's being tried. That's the exercise the Sangha Sports Framework was built for: the same structured diagnostic behind Mimo's Football Industry Review, now being extended to benchmark US sports organisations against the $3B opportunity referenced above.
The third question of how do you get there, is where most transformation efforts stall, because the honest answer usually involves infrastructure most organisations haven't built: a way to register, verify, price and license the content already being generated by fans, players and the organisation itself, without adding to the same fan-trust or regulatory exposure that's undone other attempts. That's the specific problem Mimo is built to solve.
Mimo is building the benchmark for the US Sports Industry Review, using the same Sangha Sports Framework applied in our UK Football Industry Review. If you want early access to the findings or to help shape the questions it answers, register your interest on the Mimo website ahead of the network going live here.