The sports media rights landscape in 2025 doesn’t just involve leagues and broadcasters. There are many companies connecting the two in innovative ways. One of those is Two Circles, which works with both leagues and broadcasters to grow revenues and audiences.
The company takes a data-driven approach to their sports work, and they cover a broad swathe of terrain. That has them doing everything from advising on and helping to negotiate rights deals (as with the new Grand Slam Track and the UEFA Women’s Champions League) to providing fan behavior data to leagues and helping them to market particular products (such as the NFL’s NFL+ direct-to-consumer streaming service).
Sam Yardley, Two Circles’ executive vice president (North America), recently spoke to Awful Announcing on what the company is up to. He said their overall focus is finding ways to facilitate sports’ continued shift to a digital landscape.
“Our point of view at Two Circles is that the sports industry has been made and set up for an analog era, and we’re trying to help usher in the digital era,” Yardley said. “That sounds kind of stupid to say that given that we’re 35 years into the Internet era, but sports still has some of the same hallmarks of bygone eras before that.”
Of course, there are broadcasting shifts well beyond sports. But Yardley said the sports landscape is particularly interesting because it’s been slower to make some of these changes, and some of that’s about where its revenues come from.
“I think if you think about the way in which people consume media now, the way in which fans want to consume sports, the way in which people want to get in touch with athletes. all of those things I think the sports industry is still trying to wrestle with. Because a lot of its business models are tied to the old ways of doing things.”
Where does Two Circles come into that? Yardley said the wider shift is about trying to reach individual fans in a way sports leagues and broadcasters haven’t always done. And his company takes a different approach to that by focusing on collecting fan data and bringing that to the partners they work with.
“Ultimately, we see ourselves as an agent of change for the sports industry, and one that can bring about that kind of pivot from what was an analog traditionally, a B2B [business-to-business] model into more of a DTC [direct-to-consumer] and digital era,” Yardley said. “Our proposition is all really centered around knowing fans best by understanding what makes fans tick, what they want from products and services in the sports and entertainment industry, and then trying to serve more of that to them.
“Which is, I think, a difference in other, bigger, maybe more established agencies have worked down the years, which is more about how do broadcasters want to work and how do sponsors want to work, and trying to serve their needs above the needs of the fan. So that’s our sort of modus operandi, our starting point, if you will.”
A specific example there comes from the work Two Circles has done with the NFL on NFL+.
“We’re basically their kind of data analytics and strategy partner for NFL+,” Yardley said. “Our role is to really help them drive the growth of that business. They’ve got a really great internal team who we support, but we’re looking at the numbers as they’re coming in every hour and helping them adjust strategies, marketing tactics, products, all the things you can do in apps and on websites now to help enhance conversion. We’re supporting on all of those things.”
NFL+ is a particularly notable product, as it’s a shift for the league to have its own direct-to-consumer service stateside. (Indeed, that service grew out of the combination of the former domestic version of Game Pass and the mobile rights previously held by Verizon and Yahoo.) Yardley said Two Circles focuses on finding ways to help the NFL maximize the growth of that service.
“Obviously the big acquisition windows are going be around the live games that they have on that platform, so it’s helping make sure that everything is in order to really capture the most traffic and the most subscriptions during those windows,” he said. “We’re sort of behind the scenes with the NFL, helping them maximize the revenue they can drive from that platform. Which is a very different place for the NFL to be in: traditionally, it’s been a licensing-based organization, and now it’s moving into this direct-to-consumer era without jeopardizing the value of their other rights, which is, I think, the interesting needle to thread.”
Why did the NFL choose Two Circles to help boost NFL+? Yardley said that came from their previous successful work together on the international version of Game Pass.
“We’ve had a track record of delivering for the NFL. We had previously worked on the international streaming business, Game Pass, for a number of years and saw record growth of that platform. And then when the NFL was then looking more at domestic and how they could take the rights they had domestically and repackage them into more of a streaming product, I think from their perspective we felt like a natural fit.”
Another big project Two Circles works on is UEFA women’s soccer. Last summer, they were appointed as the exclusive sponsorship agency for UEFA Women’s Football and as the exclusive media sales agency for the UEFA Women’s Champions League for the 2025- 2030 commercial cycle. Yardley said that deal means a lot to the company given the overall rise in interest in women’s sports.
“That’s a really seminal deal, I think, because it mirrors what’s happening within the wider industry, which is obviously a much greater focus on women’s sports,” he said. “We saw there was a big, big unmet need for the women’s game to really stand on its own two feet. The partners that want to support the women’s game are going to be different to the ones supporting the men’s games. The media coverage needs to be a bit different. And so we’re able to to work with UEFA to decouple those things and show that on the sponsorship side, there was really a strong business case there for supporting the women’s game in isolation from the men’s game and demonstrating the value to partners of that.”
Yardley said that approach has worked out very well so far with the sponsors they’ve attracted, and he’s optimistic the media deals they’re working on there will also reflect the value of UEFA women’s soccer.
“The sponsors that we brought in with UEFA on that side of things are really amazing. They’re all top tier brands, they’re all engaged, they’re all activating, whereas that wasn’t the case previously. And I think the same thing will happen on the media rights side when that process comes to fruition.”
The UEFA women’s soccer deal is also a case in point for Two Circles’ focus on reaching passionate fans with the broadcasts they want.
“Women’s soccer in Europe is not yet at the scale of men’s soccer,” Yardley said. “However, it’s got a very, very engaged audience that are willing to seek it out and are willing to tune in. All the digital stats that we see on women’s soccer, the engagement is so far above men’s soccer on a per-viewer basis.
“Women’s soccer fans are much more engaged than men’s soccer fans on average, because it’s more of a niche play still. But that has huge value to broadcasters, because you want people to tune in. You want people to engage, you want people to pay attention to the advertising.”
He said there’s a lot of potential growth ahead across many women’s sports for similar reasons.
“In general, I think it’s such an under-monetized space still,” Yardley said. “We see huge opportunity for women’s sports, not just soccer but basketball, golf, tennis. All of the big women’s sports, I think, are going through a significant growth over the next 10-15 years. We’re not just in the ‘Hey, women’s sports is coming’ era. I think women’s sports is here now.”
The NFL and UEFA are obviously two massive organizations, and they actually placed No. 1 and No. 2 respectively in a Two Circles report this week on the biggest 20 sports IP owners by revenue. (The Hong Kong Jockey Club was No. 3, while EA Sports was No. 4.) But Two Circles works with smaller leagues too. One example there is the recently-launched Grand Slam Track league.
“We helped them with media rights, both strategy and representation,” Yardley said. “We helped them broker those deals. Their key goal was distribution: they’re a startup league, they want to be on platforms that have the most reach.”
Yardley said the Grand Slam Track deals illustrate a lot about the current marketplace. Internationally, they have deals with more than 20 broadcasters in more than 160 countries. Domestically, they have deals that include a traditionally sports-heavy broadcast network in NBC, a streamer in Peacock, a less-traditional broadcast network in The CW, and still retain some rights for the league’s own platforms.
“NBC obviously has a huge history in track and field with their coverage of the Olympics, all the other track events that they cover, so NBC was the most logical choice from a network perspective,” Yardley said. “And with Peacock, obviously there’s the ability to then capture the streaming audience as well. The CW is one of those channels that’s in more households than you might think: it has huge distribution, it’s also increasingly in the sports rights game. So it’s coming to the table at the right time, I think. And they’ve held back some rights to themselves to help grow their own social and digital channels, which is also an important component of it.”
In Yardley’s mind, it’s crucial for properties like Grand Slam Track to still hit a wide audience with broadcast TV, but to also try and connect with younger, highly-engaged fans on digital.
“They’re trying to maximize their reach because they know they still need the power of NBC behind them. But they’re also trying to broaden. So they’re not just going to be on a linear stream. They’re going to be on digital, they’re going to be on Peacock, on The CW as well. So they’re trying to reach a lot of different bases with that, to capture a younger audience because that’s where the properties are pulling. Because the properties need to be where the audience is too, to make the most out of it.”
Yardley said those digital avenues have become crucial in entertainment programming, and he thinks they’ll continue to grow in importance for sports as well. But he said the sports shift has been slower, and the linear audience there remains valuable, because of the continued drawing power linear sports have.
“The backdrop is cord-cutting, right? The audience has been eroding away on linear channels for decades now. It’s really interesting to me: I was reading something the other day about how many people watched the finales of things like MASH and Friends, those big kind of water-cooler moments. Really, sports is the only thing that does that now.
“The equivalents of those comedy shows now get maybe two or three million viewers at best, whereas back in the day half of the whole viewing audience was watching when MASH finished. And so sports I think is uniquely positioned as the thing that holds the broadcast model together still, because without sports the whole thing implodes.
“But that does create a really interesting tension. The traditional broadcasters, the networks and the cable broadcasters, need sports more than they ever needed sports. But then you have the new entrants, particularly the streamers, who can serve audiences more in the way that audiences want to be served today, who are kind of straddling that divide.”
Read on for more from Yardley on alternate broadcasts and digital’s place in the sports ecosystem.
