Fandom is Cyclical, Not Youth-Dependent

While every rights owner feels pressure to modernize its product and cultivate the next generation of fans, not every property needs to be optimizing for Gen Zs and Alphas. 

That’s because the assumption that fandom is linear, that a rights owner must attract fans at a young age and deepen engagement through their teens and twenties so they can monetize them for decades into the future, is flawed. 

It fails to account for “each sport having a unique cycle that determines how and when core fandom forms, and how fans interact with the property throughout their lifetime,” Patrick Crakes (founder, Crakes Media) said. 

Rarely do people go from five to 80 years old as rabid fans. Fandom intensifies at different life stages depending on the sport, the value it offers, and its key touch points.

There is an abundance of tired tropes associated with sports fandom. The idea that young adults don’t watch baseball, and thus MLB is in trouble long-term, is among them.

The problem with that logic is “if you go back and look at stories from 1996, Fox came to baseball to ‘Foxify and save the sport’ because it had no young people watching at the time,” Crakes said. “Well, Fox didn’t attract millennials en masse.”

And yet, MLB still managed to record its highest postseason viewership in 15 years in 2025.

So, if few young people were watching baseball in the ‘90s and the average fan from that era is now into their 80s (if not 90s), who is watching the game today? 

The answer is largely the same life-stage demographic that has always fueled the sport. The reason is that MLB, like every other property, has a clear fan engagement trajectory. 

“It is a sport that people interact with when they’re young with their family. Children go to games and it impacts them. Baseball is one of the most interesting in-stadium experiences for young kids because typically it’s played outdoors in the summer and the sport has natural pauses, which enable families to interact with each other,” Crakes said. 

That dynamic makes it critical for MLB to prioritize getting families through the gates (think: game time scheduling and pricing). Equally important is ensuring the experience is memorable, seamless, and engaging once inside.

Children also tend to play baseball or softball when young (think: tee ball, little league).

Then, as those kids mature to become young adults, other interests emerge and they lose touch with the game––until they start a family and gravitate back towards it with their own kids.

“The now older guys find they too like watching the sport on TV,” Crakes said.

The truth is there has never been a true golden era of young people consuming baseball. The sport’s audience was considered old in the mid-1990s and remains old today. And comparing modern youth viewership totals to an era 40-50 years ago, when there were only three broadcast television networks, is as useful as suggesting “The Beverly Hillbillies” could attract a 70 share of all U.S. TV households in the current media environment.

Thinking that MLB, or any other league, must attract fans between the ages of 13-24 to enjoy future growth is simply incorrect. 

While some sports’ fan lifecycles and on ramps mirror one another, others differ dramatically.

NFL fandom tends to develop early as a result of family experiences in the home around the television. Most football fans will never attend a league game.

By contrast, the NBA leverages star power to cultivate fans as young adults and provides the communal in-stadium experience that demo desires. NASCAR’s combination of speed, danger is most appreciated by those between the ages of 35-54, who no longer encounter that kind of risk in their daily lives. 

The racing fans’ “development comes along when those watching can appreciate how much drivers are laying it on the line,” Crakes said. “NASCAR then develops deep fandom in people who remain supporters for life.”

To be clear, it’s not wrong for sports properties to want to reach next-gen fans.

“There is something to kids getting there early,” Crakes said.

It’s just that not every sport is designed and/or presented to do so effectively within the context of the audience’s lifestyle or how they want to engage with a property, and fandom that occurs later in life can be as or more durable. So, straying too far away from the core product or its positioning to attract young people is a recipe for disaster (see: NASCAR’s failed ‘Car of Tomorrow’ redesign experiment).

Instead, “embrace what you are and your development cycle,” Crakes said. “Hardcore fans are going to be your best ambassadors. If you're a NASCAR fan and you've been developed a certain way, you're very likely to try to get your wife, your friends and your kids into it.”

That doesn’t mean all properties with an older fanbase enjoy a healthy fan lifecycle. Structural decay can and does occur (see: horse racing). 

But smart operators know fandom isn’t all youth driven, it’s cyclical, and that their growth depends on understanding when —not just how— to engage the next generation.