Digital engagement trends 2026-2027: Fans don’t take breaks

The digital engagement market is growing in all possible ways as audiences seek interactions. This is especially relevant for sports and gaming domains where engagement is a natural part of the process. This growth is shaped by new technologies and by the global political and economic situation—globalisation meets fragmentation and polarisation, and the highest numbers of social media usage meet the high demand for curated private communities.​

We analysed dozens of industry reports from the entertainment, digital and specifically sports industries to identify current user engagement trends. 

Let's dig deeper!

Continuity = connection + communities 

Trend#1 - Growth of fan communities and their activities

Recent Deloitte Digital Media Trends Research confirms last year’s finding: fans consume more stay engaged for longer and want to have consistent relationships with the intellectual property, teams, and brands they love. Audiences who present themselves as fans spend 16% more time with media and entertainment. Fans, on average, belong to 3-4 fandoms. Fans are really willing to move across formats; they search for continuity, and they need off-season opportunities to stay connected with their fandom.

Convert off-season into a sustained engagement opportunity (Deloitte, Media Trends Research 2026)

Trend#2 - In-between-events engagement

Live between-event engagement exists

Live moments drive interaction, but they don’t sustain it on their own. A peer-reviewed survey of Chinese viewers of sports live streams, published in 2026, found that the immersive state viewers enter while watching, known as flow, was strongly associated with both participating in the stream (liking, commenting and reacting) and discussing sports content with others. While live content creates immediate opportunities for interaction, sustained engagement requires additional reasons for fans to return. Community discussions, personalised content and recurring activities offer ways to maintain that connection between events.

Fans always search for community, Deloitte states in 2026 media trends, and the off-season is an opportunity to make the connections better. As fans are an audience which is always on, they look for engagement in the off-season. So, they need formats that offer connection and community (36% of fan respondents lean on between-season podcasts). Each new release/ new season requires significant investment to rebuild momentum. Rather than restarting the hype cycle, providers can treat fandom as an investment in year-round touchpoints, nurturing fandom and deepening engagement.

Continuous fandom strategy increases LTV, maximises monetisation, and delivers stronger ROI across the fan base. (Deloitte, Media Trends Research 2026)

Sports organisations are building digital products designed to keep fans engaged between the peaks of match days and major events. PwC describes the aim as turning “a few hours on game day” into a year-round relationship. The San Francisco 49ers are a current example. Following a partnership with PwC announced in November 2025, the team launched its new app in April 2026, developed jointly with PwC as a personalised, customisable interface for fans worldwide.

The app’s central feature is Sourdough Sam AI, a generative AI assistant that answers questions about players, stats and team news (also see AI agents trend). It also includes a “For You” section and was promoted as a way to stay connected to the team all year long. The target audience goes beyond stadium attendees: PwC notes that many 49ers fans have never been to a game, which makes digital engagement central to how they experience the team.

Trend#3 - Private and owned spaces

Let people be a part of something they belong to

Audiences are moving into private groups, Discord servers, branded communities, DMs and closed channels. These interactions don’t show up in standard analytics but are often more predictive of brand loyalty than public metrics. Moderation is part of brand experience, not just brand protection, and social listening is now essential. People want calm, curated spaces and offline extensions of online communities.

Fan attention is shifting from open social feeds to private groups and owned communities. The Reuters Institute at the University of Oxford reports that organic sharing has largely moved to private spaces and groups. For clubs, this means more of the fan conversation happens where standard analytics cannot see it, and relying on third-party platforms leaves the fan relationship exposed.

Deloitte shares that respondents in their recent research said they prefer one environment that aggregates content, discussions, and experiences.

An experimental study in the International Journal of Sports Marketing and Sponsorship (January 2026) with 226 fans found that open features, such as public feeds, supported content creation, feedback and word-of-mouth. More intimate features, such as private chat, personalised content and feedback tools, supported mobilising behaviour, such as rallying support for the club. When both were combined, mobilising behaviour was lower, so the authors suggest separate spaces. A general club app helps broaden engagement; invite-only communities mobilise core fans. Social Factor and Hootsuite add that fan channels hold opinions that often predict loyalty better than public social metrics. Also, owned communities provide consented first-party data (See Trend#4).

Personalisation and intelligence: How can engagement data and AI create more relevant experiences?

Trend #4 — Owning the audience and first-party data

Social listening: Audience talk, you note

Third-party cookies are losing value, so consented first-party data, collected through gated content, polls and quizzes feeding the CRM, becomes the payoff. Fan engagement data is increasingly used to anticipate behaviour. A 2026 review in the Journal of Sports Analytics, covering 64 studies of fan sentiment across social media, second-screen use and in-venue signals, finds that fan affect shifts rapidly around goals, penalties and controversial decisions, so online discourse works as a real-time reaction stream. The same review finds that the field detects affective expression well but is weaker at linking it to behavioural outcomes such as sustained engagement, escalation into abuse or disengagement, and concludes that without clear outcome definitions, sentiment analytics remains largely descriptive. The practical lesson is that monitoring signals is only the first step, and value comes from defining the outcomes they are meant to predict, or, as some companies put it, predicting a crisis before it happens, and getting the most from the spikes of success.

The different trade and service companies share that they use behavioural analysis to work more deeply with audiences and stay connected with users globally. This can be performed through social networks — brands can analyse comments and posts on social media, or can do it internally, with real-time analysis processes. Deloitte highlights that AI helps to get nuanced knowledge about audiences and fans, which is key to retention and long-term return on investment for content providers.

Trend and question #5: AI agents and agentic AI

Further implementation and experiments

This trend has various layers and many questions about its future direction.
Consumer-facing assistants: The 49ers app has Sourdough Sam AI, a built-in assistant for questions about players, stats, team news and game-day navigation. Watchers has an AI sports assistant that is adjusted by clients for specific leagues, nations, and sports. AI agents bring users the information—facts and opinions that helps users stay in context, and companies to retain users who often go away while searching and surfing. Now, they can talk to AI agents instead.

Governance: PwC’s “agentic scaffolding” is a structured, governed way to build new AI workflows from the ground up. So it can be the next universal step for AI agent development.
Gartner’s 2026 Magic Quadrant for Personalisation Engines defines these engines as applying AI, analytics and business rules across channels. Its research also covers AI agents for personalised engagement and multichannel personalisation for human and AI agent use. McKinsey’s survey about the state of AI found 23% of respondents scaling agentic AI and 39% experimenting with it in various directions, and these numbers are growing day by day.

The Reuters Institute’s 2026 trends report expects agentic AI to move from prediction to real-world impact. Some sources suggest bots may soon outnumber people reading publisher websites, as tools such as Huxe and OpenAI’s Pulse deliver personalised news briefings at scale, and 75% of survey respondents expect agentic tools to have a large or very large impact on the news industry soon. Publishers also see a possible new revenue stream in licensing content to chatbots. Still, expectations are split: 20% of publisher respondents expect substantial income, 49% a minor contribution and 20% none, the last group mostly local publishers, public broadcasters and those in smaller countries.

Scale and motivation - How do brands adapt engagement across markets and encourage repeat participation?

TrendQuestion #6: Globalisation mixing with fragmentation

Trade is still expanding, and the 2026 forecast has been revised up sharply, but it’s driven by one sector—AI—and it’s being routed around political and geopolitical obstacles. Many analysts call this “fragmentation” or “reconfiguration” rather than a retreat. Services, which are less visible than goods, look weaker on a global scale.

Where globalisation continues, localisation follows

Fans follow clubs across borders. The Global Football Fan Report (Chiliz, 8,000 fans in countries including the UK, US, Brazil, South Korea, Nigeria, Japan, Italy and Turkey) found that 86.6% of football fans worldwide follow clubs from outside their domestic league. It also found that 43% use social media and 23% engage through video games to follow clubs across borders.

Growth now comes from abroad. For instance, Inter reports it added over 16 million new fans in twelve months, driven by YouTube and TikTok, with a media strategy that is increasingly focused on both global and geo-targeted planning. The Americas account for 18% of its global fan base. At the same time, Arsenal’s marketing director said the club was focusing on international marketing as UK revenue growth from football fans became saturated. So, localisation is the current trend when football clubs focus on global localisation to reach international audiences.

Fragmentation: the rules and platforms are diverging

An AIB paper identifies four drivers of internet fragmentation: privacy and data protection, taxation, censorship, and national security. Data localisation laws restrict cross-border data flows and require data to be stored on domestic servers. Platforms are blocked or replaced. Western social media platforms are often blocked in China, giving rise to local giants like WeChat and Weibo. India has imposed data localisation requirements and has blocked access to Chinese apps such as TikTok. Youth access is regulated. Australia’s under-16 social media ban requires robust age verification, which the Internet Society notes creates a privacy paradox because platforms must collect sensitive data to comply.

Likely effects on engagement:

• Global reach, local execution. One global app or channel strategy is getting harder.
• Owned channels gain value. Platform bans, age limits and algorithm shifts make clubs and brands favour owned apps and communities, which fits the dark social and first-party data points.
• Data design becomes a competitive factor. Personalisation and AI agents depend on user data that is now regulated differently by market, so consent and data residency need to be built into engagement tools.

Trend #7: Users set to be gamified

Gamification is an extremely fast-growing market

Roots Analysis values the global gamification market at USD 24.51 billion in 2025, projected to reach USD 84.03 billion by 2030 and USD 234.64 billion by 2035 (CAGR 22.80%). Marketing and sales are the fastest-growing application areas. Telecom is a leading adopter: Verizon’s portal rewards users with badges and leaderboards, and Southeast Asian operators use points-based mini-games that raise app engagement and top-up revenue. The drivers named are digital transformation, demand for personalised experiences, and AI and immersive technologies.

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If you see relevance of these insights to your business or brand and want to develop fan communities and get valuable behavioural insights, connect with us and we will help you to find the most suitable solution and tools for your fan audiences.

Sources

• Deloitte – Digital Media Trends 2026
• Frontiers in Psychology – sports live-stream study
• PwC – 49ers case study
• Reuters Institute – Journalism, Media and Technology Trends 2026
• International Journal of Sports Marketing and Sponsorship – fan engagement study
• Hootsuite – Sports
• Journal of Sports Analytics – fan sentiment review
• Social Factor – social listening and crisis prediction
• PwC – Agentic scaffolding
• Adobe – Gartner Magic Quadrant for Personalization Engines
• McKinsey – The State of AI
• Inside World Football – Chiliz Global Football Fan Report
• Inter – 100 million social media fans
• Marketing Week – Arsenal digital marketing
  Fanbase – State of Fan Engagement 2026
• AIB Insights – internet fragmentation
• Internet Society – splintering of the open internet
• Roots Analysis – Gamification market