Child’s Play: Why Participation Is the Strongest Signal of Fandom 🏃🚴♂️
To reach the next generation, sport needs more entry points. It needs to be physical and digital, structured and social.
14 May 2025
If you want someone to care about your sport tomorrow, get them playing it today.
That’s the simple but strangely overlooked insight at the heart of Leanne Bats’ career, which has taken her from working with global powerhouses like FC Barcelona and the All Blacks to now driving innovation at a regional sports trust in New Zealand.
And the conclusion she’s drawn across both elite and grassroots settings is clear: participation is the leading indicator of fandom.
“If you want people to be a fan of your sport or team, you need them playing that sport. That’s the best way to do it,” Bats said on the Sports Pundit Podcast.
But getting people to play is no longer as simple as offering a Saturday morning match and hoping they show up. The habits, preferences, and expectations of young people have fundamentally changed. And sport, in many cases, hasn’t kept up.
Bats calls it the Netflix effect: an entire generation raised on frictionless content, custom algorithms, and unlimited choice. Why would they commit to rigid training slots or fixed leagues when every other part of their life is flexible?
“They want to do things as and when they kind of vibe them,” she said. “When I grew up, I had three TV channels. They have a hundred million channels on YouTube to choose from.”
That’s not a generational flaw. It’s a design mismatch. Sport was built for scheduled, centralised delivery. But participation today needs to be as accessible and adaptable as everything else in a young person’s world.
“Team sports... that you have to rally around 21 other people just to even get a game on... are becoming increasingly difficult and counterintuitive to today and the world.”
In Bats’ region of New Zealand, she’s seeing a 10 percent annual decline in participation for these structured formats. Yet many organisations are still trying to solve the problem by doing what they’ve always done, only louder.
At Sport Waikato, where she is Head of Digital and Innovation, her team is trialling tools that meet young people where they already are, primarily in digital and gaming environments.
One example is GameFit, a pilot using VR headsets in high schools to engage students who have either dropped out or wouldn’t typically engage with physical activity.
“They’ll do everything to get out of PE,” Bats said. “But they’ll jump right into this and then they’ll take off the headset and be like, ‘That was the coolest thing we’ve done.’”
It’s not just fun. It’s also real movement. Heart rate monitors show it delivers the same intensity as a hard bike ride. But more importantly, it opens the door. And Bats and her team are actively tracking whether getting students engaged with something new can lead them to something else.
The same principle applies to their upcoming Virtual Cycling League, where students receive two-week fitness challenges that can be completed anytime, anywhere. It’s designed to reduce the friction that keeps kids from showing up. It has also been developed on top of hardware that already exists, making it easier to implement quickly and to test and learn.
To this point, Bats doesn’t see innovation as a synonym for technology or invention. It’s about proactively responding to the context, and that context is always shifting.
The fundamentals of sport are strong. But the formats must reflect how people live today.
“Sport is the core, but not the whole,” she said. “Today, it’s also entertainment, culture, and belonging.”
To reach the next generation, sport needs more entry points. It needs to be physical and digital, structured and social.
“I thought the motivations would be totally different,” she said. “But they’re not. The way younger generations engage with fandom is incredibly similar to how they want to engage with participation.”“You don’t have to be Barcelona to do this,” Bats added. “You just need to offer an entry point that resonates.”