What makes a world champion? In 2023, United States Olympic track and field gold medalist Noah Lyles upended the sports world with a single question critiquing the NBA champion’s branding as “world champions.”

“World champion of what? The United States?” Lyles asked. “Don’t get me wrong. I love the U.S. — at times — but that ain’t the world.”

At first glance, Lyles–who competes in a quintessentially global sport– seems logical. The NBA is a national basketball league, and while it recruits talent from across the world, its only non-American team is the Toronto Raptors. Yet, much of the United States sports world was enraged, blasting Lyles online for pointing out what has historically been an obviously controversial–or even false–equivalence.

However, the modern NBA is a far different league than 30 years ago. In the 1980s, the only overseas NBA players were those who had moved to the United States as children. Stars like Hakeem Olajawon (Nigeria) and Patrick Ewing (Jamaica) found great success, but they entered the NBA through the U.S. collegiate basketball system rather than from an international league. In the 1990s, only five percent of the league’s players had been born overseas.

Today, the number of international players in the NBA has risen 23 percent, including the last six league MVP winners. Much of the NBA’s expansion can be credited to commissioner David Stern, who took over in 1994. Stern had an eye for the business of sport, telling Forbes magazine in 1993 that “There are 250 million potential NBA fans in the U.S., and there are 5 billion outside the U.S. … We like those numbers.”

Globalization in the NBA was inevitable. The league has pursued a strategy of constant expansion in the last 40 years, playing games on different continents, building relationships with foreign markets, and leveraging the star power of its athletes. The NBA was ahead of the curve, previewing what sports leagues look like in the modern era.

“It's all about increasing brand awareness. There's an untapped market internationally, which means an untapped revenue stream,” said Ashi Kumar, a Global Partnerships Coordinator at MSG working with the New York Knicks. “The more fans you get, the more ratings you get. More sponsors will want to buy into your sport because they know they will get the metrics they want. It’s a symbiotic relationship.”

The returns are undeniable. In 1982-83, the NBA total league revenue amounted to $118 million. In the 2023-24 season, the league made a reported $11.34 billion. However, this symbiotic expansion is not limited to basketball or even American leagues. While the NFL, MLB, and MLS have all made inroads internationally, it is difficult to imagine any league can compete with Formula One’s success in capitalizing on untapped market potential.

At the core of Formula One’s exponential growth in the United States is the 2019 Netflix docuseries Drive to Survive. The show gives an in-depth, behind-the-scenes look at one of the world’s most elusive sports, providing the public with unfiltered access to twenty of the most converted athletes and characters in sports media.

“With a lot of sports, nothing has changed from a competition perspective. What's changed is some of those all-access shows and different forms of media,” said Seth Rubinroit, a Senior Manager of Audio and Digital Strategy at NBC. “When you build the stars and get to know these people off the court…people fall in love with the players more than the teams.”

In America, Drive to Survive was an instant hit. Since its debut in 2019, F1 fandom has risen 10 percent in the United States. A March 2022 poll found that over 50 percent of adult F1 fans in the U.S. identified Drive to Survive as their entry point to the sport, while viewership of the races on ESPN has doubled since 2017.

From a financial standpoint, the series’ impact is impressive and quantifiable. In 2018, the year before the Netflix series aired, Formula 1 generated $1.83 billion in revenue. In 2022, the league’s revenue had risen 140 percent to a staggering $2.57 billion. A city hosting a Grand Prix has gone from taking on massive financial risk to a near-certain return on its investment: the $20-60 million fee for hosting a race (before production costs) is now negligible compared to the hundreds of millions the city receives in revenue.

“F1 is a huge wake-up call for how successful you can be by catering to an international presence and growing your fan base,” Kumar said. “Holistically, there is a push in sports, especially in the NBA, to globalize. You can see that across the board, at different leagues, trying to have different marquee games all over the world. That’s just going to increase.”

As leagues expand across borders, the question of what the sports industry will look like in the coming years becomes more pressing. The way that fans consume sports and sports media is constantly evolving. A 2023 study by Greenfly found that 41% of sports fans stream live sports through digital platforms, and 32% use social media while watching live sports. Fans are no longer limited to cable networks on TV or media deals competing over the few primetime slots each day.

“With podcasting and social media, fans can consume different sports whenever they want,” Rubinroit said. “You don't have to worry about finding a sport on a television channel you don't get or being on in the middle of the night. You can consume it on demand when you want to, do it in the way that you want to do it with the personalities you want to hear it from.”

Fans, particularly younger fans, are beginning to turn to streaming platforms and social media over conventional cable television for sports consumption. They don’t always watch full games: many young fans will consume highlight reels and viral plays rather than spend hours in front of the television. Their attention is dragged between hundreds, or even thousands, of tweets and push notifications alerting them to happenings globally.

So what does that mean for leagues and media companies?

“You have got to think globally because we're just becoming a much more connected world,” Rubinroit said. “You're not at the mercy of the programming department anymore. It’s more democratic; if you have a great storyline or performance, it can get seen.”

Diversity in content leads to diversity in fandom. It’s not enough to focus on one sport or team market. Today, the consummate sports fan follows multiple teams, not just from their hometown, and a mix of sports. They are not limited to the major sports, either. Accessible forms of sports media (such as social and digital content) allow niche sports to find viral attention, increasing the viewership and marketability of lesser-known leagues.

“People want to watch the people that they know, and they want to watch it when they're at their best, and they want to watch when they can identify these compelling story lines,” Rubinroit said. “It's not enough just to be the best sport the world, but you’ve got to have the storytelling to support it and get fans invested beyond just the X's and O's.”