Inside the EY 2026 Sports Engagement Index: The Real Map of American Sports Participation
By — Front Office Sports
Posted — July 20, 2026
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There is a woman in Phoenix who plays padel three nights a week and could not tell you who is starting or the starting goalie for the US men’s soccer team. There is a 19-year-old in Brooklyn who can name every player on the US men’s 3x3 basketball team that went to Paris last summer and has never been to a basketball game. There is a 58-year-old hiker in Boulder whose fitness tracker streak is the longest-standing commitment in her life.
None of them show up in a traditional television ratings report. Yet all of them are sports fans.
That is the gap the EY Sports Engagement Index set out to measure. The EY US Media and Entertainment team surveyed 3,746 US adults across more than 100 sports, capturing not just what people watch, but also what they do, where they show up, and why they care. The result is the most comprehensive look at US sports engagement to date, and it points to a market that has quietly outgrown the way the industry talks about it.
Eighty-six percent of American adults engage with sports in some form. That number alone shifts the conversation. Engagement is not a story about a shrinking audience. It is a story about an audience that has fragmented faster than the industry’s measurement tools could keep up. “The market is not contracting; it is evolving faster than traditional measures can capture,” says Javi Borges, EY Global and EY Americas Media & Entertainment Sector Leader. “Organizations that expand how they define and measure engagement will be better positioned to identify where growth is actually occurring.”
The market is not contracting; it is evolving faster than traditional measures can capture... Organizations that expand how they define and measure engagement will be better positioned to identify where growth is actually occurring.”
Javi Borges, EY Global and USLI Media & Entertainment Leader
The generational picture sharpens the point. Younger adults engage in boxing, running and 3x3 basketball at materially higher rates than older cohorts. Baseball, the sport most heavily invested in legacy infrastructure, ranks lower for them than it does for any generation above.
None of this means the old categories are collapsing. It means the next generation of fans is building its identity around a different set of sports, and the operators that serve them will look different, too.
Eighty-six percent of Americans are already in the game. The opportunity is in finally seeing all of them.
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The most striking finding is what sits alongside the major leagues, not below them. Swimming reaches 95 million Americans. Hiking reaches 88 million. Yoga reaches 72 million. These are not niche pursuits. They are participation-led sports with national scale, generating real time spent, real community and real commercial behavior — all of it largely invisible to a media industry organized around live broadcast rights.
The data shows what every operator in the space has started to suspect. The center of gravity in sports is moving toward participation, wellness and social connection, and it is moving fastest where the traditional model has paid the least attention.
The gender story may be the most actionable insight in the index. Men engage with sports at meaningfully higher rates than women across most traditional categories, but the gap narrows or disappears entirely in participation-led and wellness-oriented sports. The market opportunity is straightforward to name and difficult to ignore.
Women are not under-engaged with sports. They are underserved by the sports the industry has historically prioritized. “The data makes clear that the opportunity is not to generate demand among women,” says Borges, “but to align investment, programming and experiences with areas where engagement is already strong and growing.”
The views reflected in this article are the views of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Ernst & Young LLP or other members of the global EY organization.
As outlined in the findings, the excitement of live experiences still matters. So does social connection, the influence of friends and family, and the rise of wellness as a motivator that cuts across nearly every category in the study. These are not new instincts. They are old human ones, finally being captured at scale in the data.
The data makes clear that the opportunity is not to generate demand among women, but to align investment, programming and experiences with areas where engagement is already strong and growing.”
Javi Borges, EY Global and USLI Media & Entertainment Leader
The strategic question, then, is not whether the major leagues will remain dominant. They will. The question is where incremental growth comes from, and who is positioned to capture it. The index suggests the answer will not look like the last 20 years of sports investment. Lower-cost content, participation-based business models, audience strategies built for all types of engagers and infrastructure aligned with sports that did not exist at scale a decade ago are all live on the table.
According to Borges, the next phase of sports growth will be driven by operators that recognize participation, community and emerging formats as commercially meaningful drivers of value.
“Utilizing tools can help organizations offer more precise, personalized engagement while unlocking the potential of new opportunities for growth and monetization,” he said. “Growth will come to organizations that act before the market pivots toward different opportunities.”
The EY-Parthenon role in the conversation is the one its team has been building toward across media, consumer behavior and capital markets. The index is not a one-off survey. It is a translation layer between how US adults actually engage with sport and how the industry plans, invests and builds around them. That translation is what the next phase of sports growth will be measured against.
For media companies and investors, the implication is sharp. Costs for broadcasting rights in the major leagues continue to climb. Audience growth in those categories does not. Meanwhile, padel, pickleball, cricket, 3x3 basketball and flag football are showing the kind of grassroots traction that historically precedes commercial breakout. The 2028 Los Angeles Olympics will amplify several of them further. The EY Sports Engagement Index identifies these categories as the most credible growth pockets in US sport over the next five years, and the infrastructure investment required to support them is only beginning.