The final session of ISC 2025 gathered leaders from some of the biggest sports properties anywhere to explore how a local focus can produce globally significant results.
The Tottenham Hotspur Stadium is a familiar setting for the NFL, which has played regular season games here since 2019. Its International Series will make stops in five countries in the 2025 season but it is only part of the league’s approach to global engagement.
Localised brand partnerships, talent pathways and media strategies have been fundamental in forging stronger links in each target market.
That, too, was the experience of the other US major league represented on stage. The NBA also has a long history of playing regular season and pre-season games overseas – the most recent taking place in Paris in January – but its relevance is driven home by local relationships and cultural connections.
Things are slightly different for the PGA Tour. Its events take place exclusively in North America but golf’s player and fanbase has a much broader global spread. According to Edward Jones, the tour’s senior director for international content, it is now working harder to meet the needs of those audiences. Content teams are now based in different regions – including one in London – and have begun to champion locally relevant narratives and heroes.
The international contingent on the tour is “steadily growing”, and accounted for six of the first seven winners on this year’s calendar. Their success is driving spikes in viewership within relevant territories and the PGA Tour has responded to that trend by developing a global broadcast feed that helps international partners better tailor their coverage.
At the Olympic Channel and Olympics.com, Benny Bonsu heads up a content operation with an indisputably global reach and relevance – but arguably an even greater need to spotlight stories that resonate in each country. Editorial and social output are produced in dozens of languages, while AI is used to cut country-specific highlights packages.
“Sports is not just sports,” Bonsu said, explaining her team’s methods. “It’s more than sports.” As well as leaning into the stories of local hopefuls and champions, Olympics.com content draws on local fashion, culture and history to maximise its impact.
Olympics.com, she added, “never has downtime”. Alongside the Olympic cycle of Summer and Winter Games comes the biennial Youth Olympics as well as coverage of hundreds of individual events. And throughout that time, it is crucial to maintain a focus on athletes and give fans a side of their experience that is not shown elsewhere – via the Olympic platform, through programming partnerships with the likes of Netflix and a multi-platform approach to social.
The panel agreed on what Hodgson described as the need to “show up in the right way” in each market.
For Jones and the PGA Tour, that can mean watch parties in significant local venues, orfreeing up content rights so that influencers can host live streams.
The NBA, said Sharon Fuller, always backs up international tours – such as recent visits to Abu Dhabi – with participation programmes, music and entertainment events to energiseregional fanbases. Basketball has long been taught in schools throughout Europe but the NBA is also committed to working at the grassroots across the continent.
Removing barriers to participation is now a major priority for the NFL. Flag football, which will make its Olympic debut at LA 2028, has become the standard bearer for that push – as a safer, cheaper and more accessible form of the game.
For all of these organisations, this local focus can also empower sport to foster meaningful global change.
Bonsu was speaking as Kirsty Coventry was confirmed as the first female president of the International Olympic Committee – news she announced to applause from delegates in the main conference room. And she is confident that the coverage and leadership of Olympics.com and the Olympic Channel can highlight the positive role played by women in sport – not just at elite level, but in communities throughout the world.
