Pictures: Netflix / ESPN
The Cage, Senna, the boxing match between Mike Tyson and Jake Paul, the NFL at Christmas, and the WWE at the beginning of 2025—Netflix’s upcoming weeks are set to be quite sporty. With that push towards live sports, here’s a review of the streamer’s efforts in this program category to see what’s working and what’s not.
Note: This is an excerpt of a larger piece delving into live sports programming and sports-adjacent programming at Netflix’s on the Netflix & Chiffres substack (French version available here). That expanded article delves into some other failures, such as the Nike-Netflix collaboration and Netflix’s progress in sports gaming efforts.
First, let’s start with plain numbers. Netflix’s motto, “Crawl, walk, run,” holds true for its sports-adjacent content, with exponential growth over the past decade.
Sports-adjacent programs have been part of Netflix’s lineup almost since the beginning of its push into original productions, but Netflix didn’t exactly “crawl” at the start. Its first international series was Club de Cuervos, a Mexican series set in a soccer club that ran for four seasons.
One of Netflix’s first sports shows, announced in 2016, was Ultimate Beastmaster, an international obstacle course competition similar to Ninja Warrior, which pitted athletes from around the world against each other. Looking back at the press release, it remains Netflix’s most ambitious show in this category. There were three seasons of Ultimate Beastmaster before the show ended, and since then, nothing has matched that level of ambition—but I’ll get back to that later.
In terms of numbers, 2024 is clearly shaping up to be the first year of the “Run” phase, with a noticeable boom, even if not all types of programs are seeing this growth. Netflix appears to have learned from past releases, which is reflected in its current content. Docuseries are on the rise, following the success of Formula 1: Drive to Survive—perhaps even excessively, as we’ll discuss later. Also increasing are live “sports-adjacent” events, which now rank as the third-largest category by volume on par with films in 2024.
Losing momentum: fiction series, though the potential success of La Cage or Senna at the end of 2024 could revive interest in this genre. Films and documentaries remain relatively stagnant, while animated series are more of a footnote.
Which sports are mainly featured in these programs? Football (soccer) leads by far, unsurprisingly, as it’s the world’s number one sport. Next are American football and basketball, which round out the top three, though American football appears overrepresented compared to its global standing. However, as the top sport in the U.S., Netflix has prioritized it, even spending several hundred million dollars on two NFL games to be aired on December 25, 2024.
Next, we see that combat sports are also represented in all their diversity, including boxing, wrestling, pro wrestling, and MMA. Golf and tennis follow closely behind. A few surprises for me include the low number of programs focusing on ice hockey (the same number as those discussing figure skating). Cricket also seems to be a sport that Netflix should pay more attention to, especially in territories like India, although its appeal outside a handful of countries remains to be demonstrated.
Viewership on Netflix’s Sports Adjacent Programming
Since the advent of weekly Top 10 lists and Engagement Reports showing viewership over several months, it has become easier to assess what works or doesn’t on Netflix over an extended period. I have compiled an infographic featuring all the “sports-adjacent” programs released since June 2021 for which we have at least one viewership figure, whether from the first few days or over the initial 180 days.
I then categorized these programs into four groups:
- Sports: Programs that focus on specific sports.
- Athletes: Programs that center around specific athletes.
- True Crime: Programs that explore criminal cases (or not) related to sports.
- Live Events/Reality TV: Live programming and competitive sports shows.
Finally, I established an “area of success” for these sports programs, which I consider somewhat informed (but you can adjust as you see fit): a minimum of 10 million complete viewing equivalents (CVEs) within the first 14 days of release.
Here’s what we find, keeping in mind that the further a program is from the temporal axis, the more it has likely been viewed.
Several insights can be drawn from this data:
- NFL Programs Are Generally Successful: Programs centered around the NFL can usually be considered successes on Netflix. Almost all fall into my arbitrary success zone, particularly Quarterback and the Untold documentary series focusing on various stories within the sport. The issue is that these programs primarily perform well in the U.S., which is sufficient compared to other programs to be regarded as successes, but they don’t achieve global success. The viewership numbers for the two NFL games on Christmas are expected to follow this trend: massive in the U.S. but relatively weak elsewhere.
- Live Sports Events Are Currently Failing: Live sports events have not performed well so far. Whether it’s the Netflix Cup (a golf competition in Las Vegas featuring F1 drivers) or Netflix Slam (the tennis match between Nadal and Alcaraz), their viewership numbers are very low, barely reaching 1 million CVEs after over a hundred days. Worse yet, in the case of the Netflix Cup, the program is absent from the Engagement Report for the first half of 2024, indicating it garnered less than 100,000 CVEs in six months, pointing to a very short lifespan. The two NFL games are expected to perform better, though I’m not convinced they will have sustained viewership in the months following their airing. What has performed better in a live format (and in replay) is Tom Brady’s roast, which, while not a sports program, features a former athlete and has achieved excellent viewership, likely more so in the U.S. than elsewhere.
- Not Every Sports Docuseries Is Drive to Survive (Far From It): Following the success of the documentary series Formula 1: Drive to Survive, Netflix commissioned numerous documentary series following the same model: Break Point for tennis (canceled after its first two parts), Tour de France Unchained for cycling, NASCAR: Full Speed, Full Swing for golf, Sprint for athletics, 6 Nations: Full Contact for rugby, and Quarterback/Receiver for the NFL. Of all these titles, only Quarterback and Receiver have found some success, while the others cannot be considered successes on par with the original model. Worse, there seems to be a growing fatigue with this type of programming, as seen by the absence of LaLiga All Access (focused on the Spanish football league, which should have performed well as one of the top leagues globally) and Starting 5 (focused on the NBA) from the weekly Netflix Top 10. Before the end of 2024, the documentary series Saudi Pro League: Kickoff will likely crash into the wall of subscriber disinterest, as who really wants to follow the Saudi Arabian football league, despite its aging stars?
- Star Athletes Attract More Viewers Than Sports: Athletes like Beckham, Tom Brady, Simone Biles, Neymar, and Schumacher have programs dedicated to them that are successful on Netflix. This raises the question of whether the future of sports documentaries should focus more on athletes than on sports themselves. A peculiar comparison is that in the true crime documentary genre, a series focused on a specific case generally performs better than a broader series covering multiple cases, particularly when each episode focuses on a different case. This suggests a similar potential for sports-adjacent documentaries. The upcoming release of a documentary series on Carlos Alcaraz following the cancellation of Break Point indicates that Netflix seems to be making this choice, which makes sense given what performs well. However, these should not be athletes who are too old or from less popular sports, as seen with the relative failures of documentaries on basketball player Bill Russell and cyclist Mark Cavendish. Be careful of follow-up seasons as the very recent flop of season 2 of Simone Biles Rising might suggest that there’s a limit on how long are audiences ready to follow a famous athlete.
- Competitions in “Other” Sports Can Work: An example from the past two years is the success of the competition reality show Physical: 100, which managed to exceed its home territory (South Korea) and become a global hit. Season 2 saw a slight decline in viewership, but one could envision adaptations of the concept in other parts of the world.
Most Watched Sports Adjacent Films and Series Released since June 2021
Let’s now look at two categories of programs that have been set aside for now: films and scripted series set against the backdrop of sports. Their number remains relatively constant year after year, and there are a few clear successes in this area, starting with Hustle starring Adam Sandler. While it’s likely that Sandler’s presence played a major role in its success, the film’s sports theme (along with its quality) probably contributed as well.
Behind it, the comedy Home Team starring Kevin James and the film Bruised featuring Halle Berry have achieved respectable but not extraordinary numbers, for fairly obvious reasons. Home Team is heavily geared towards a U.S. audience, thus reaching its ceiling fairly quickly. Bruised, despite Halle Berry’s performance, remains a prestige film that doesn’t necessarily resonate with the broader public. Internationally, the German film Sixty Minutes found some success, as did The Swimmers, which focused more on the plight of Syrian swimmers exiled in Germany. NYAD didn’t make much of an impact, despite Netflix’s Oscar push for Annette Bening and Jodie Foster. I forgot to include the film The Beautiful Game featuring Bill Nighy in the graphic, but with 19 million CVEs in 90 days, it’s not considered a significant success.
On the series side, surprisingly, no scripted series set in the sports world has made it into the Top 10 since June 2021. During the period from January 2023 to June 2024, only one scripted sports series was released: the Mexican show Against the Ropes, centered around wrestling, which totaled 5.5 million CVEs over its first 157 days—clearly not a success. This is a rather striking finding of this study. Certainly, there have been far fewer sports-themed series in recent years, but it highlights the challenge that the French series La Cage and the Brazilian series Senna will face in the coming weeks. Will they be able to break the curse?
Most Watched Sports Programming In First Half of 2024 That Were Released Before 2023
One of my pet projects since the release of Netflix’s Engagement Reports has been to examine the “older” programs that are still among the most-watched on the service years after their release. The only methodology applied here is that I only selected programs released before 2023, which are thus presumably navigating the depths of the Netflix catalog.
Let’s start with the Netflix Original documentaries that were released before 2023.
The number one documentary is the one dedicated to Michael Schumacher, but there’s a small caveat here. The film was removed from the Netflix catalog after two years before being reintroduced a few weeks later. This “re-release” gave it a boost, landing it in the top spot. Following closely is the documentary The Redeem Team. Similar to the films, there seems to be a permanence of hits over time; if you refer back to my chart with all the titles from recent years, both Schumacher and The Redeem Team are among the successes with good viewership figures upon their initial release. There are also several documentaries from the Untold series focusing on various sports stories and short documentaries like Zion and Lorena: Light-footed Woman.
On the docuseries side, basketball remains at the forefront, with The Last Dance (which is not available everywhere on Netflix) leading, followed by Season 1 of Formula 1: Drive to Survive (boosted by the release of its new season) and the true crime documentary about Aaron Hernandez.
We see the presence of less prominent sports like extreme sports, rodeo, and cheerleading, but ball games dominate the rest.
The trend for films is similar, with older successes taking the lead, such as Hustle, far ahead of Home Team and The Swimmers. However, some surprises exist, like certain sports films for young audiences or teenagers, including The Main Event (WWE) and A Second Chance: Rivals (in gymnastics).
We also note the strong performance of the films Amateur and First Match, which are among the oldest Netflix Originals. While basketball seems to be the sport whose programs hold up best over time, this isn’t necessarily the case for all programs. For instance, the film High Flying Bird by Steven Soderbergh about the world of NBA agents has completely disappeared from the radar in the first half of 2024, as it did not appear in the latest Engagement Report.
Finally, let’s conclude with the sports series that have performed best over time, as there are many insights to draw from this. The first is that the A Second Chance franchise remains a reliable value on Netflix, even though the streamer chose not to renew the series set in the world of gymnastics for teenagers. The top four series were canceled after just one season (The Big Show Show received a “fake” renewal for a second season ordered in advance but was canceled after its second season), which indicates that even though these series performed respectably within the sports genre, they did not achieve enough viewership upon release on Netflix to ensure their renewal.
There are also two series about figure skating, several series focused on football, and at the bottom of the rankings, we find the sitcom The Crew with Kevin James set in the world of NASCAR, which had all the elements to be a success, at least in the US, yet it was canceled after rather disastrous viewership numbers. If you’re wondering where GLOW is—the wrestling series that had three seasons and was canceled during the COVID crisis despite supposedly being a huge success (not)—it is outside this Top 10 because its viewership is genuinely low.
Zooming out to examine the three Engagement Reports covering the period from January 2023 to June 2024, a few sports programs have gained viewership semester after semester, such as the biographical series Apache: Carlos Tevez, which increased from 0.4M CVEs in the first half of 2023 to 1.1M in the first half of 2024, Killer Inside: The Mind of Aaron Hernandez, which went from 1.3M to 2M CVEs, and Coach Snoop, which rose from 0.2M to 0.3M CVEs.
As a reminder, the full article on Netflix & Chiffres provides much more analysis of Netflix sports programming.
