27 August 2026
The Code-Share Era: Why Sport's Next Growth Market Is Someone Else's Audience
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Why some fixtures carry a weight the league table cannot explain, and how sport turns that emotion into economic value.
Data as of August 2026. Study citations are included in the sources at the end of this article.
There are matches whose importance makes perfect sense on paper. Finals. Title deciders. Relegation battles.
Then there are derbies.
Their significance can appear completely disproportionate to what is actually at stake. Three points remain three points, yet losing to one particular opponent can hurt far more than losing to another. Supporters know the distinction instinctively. Psychology has begun to measure it.
One of the more unusual studies into sports fandom placed committed Boston Red Sox and New York Yankees supporters inside an fMRI scanner. Researchers showed them sequences involving their own team, their principal rival and a neutral opponent, the Baltimore Orioles. When supporters watched their rival fail, including against Baltimore, where their own team gained nothing, activity rose in the ventral striatum, part of the brain’s reward system. The effect went further than simply enjoying a sporting result. Stronger reward responses were associated with a greater self-reported willingness to behave aggressively toward rival supporters.
The commercial equivalent of that emotional response can be seen in the audience figures.
When the Yankees and Red Sox played a winner-take-all MLB Wild Card game in October 2025, an average of 7.439 million people watched. It became the largest audience recorded for a Wild Card Series game under the current format and ESPN’s biggest MLB audience since the same two teams met in another Wild Card game in 2021.
A deciding game will naturally draw viewers, so it would be wrong to credit the entire audience to the rivalry. The more interesting point is that rivalry appears to magnify the value of an occasion that is already important.
That pattern stretches well beyond baseball. Real Madrid and Barcelona, Celtic and Rangers, Boca Juniors and River Plate, Yankees and Red Sox, India and Pakistan: the sports change, the countries change, but the underlying mechanism looks remarkably similar.
At their strongest, rivalries stop being contests between two teams and become contests between identities.
Once that happens, the commercial equation changes with them.
7.439 million: average audience for the Yankees-Red Sox Wild Card decider, a record under the current format
Nearly 3x: reported premium for a ten-second India-Pakistan advertising slot compared with IPL playoff pricing
4.92 seconds per kilometre: estimated performance improvement among runners competing against a personal rival
278,117 transactions: secondary-market ticket sales used to measure how much supporters were prepared to pay for particular opponents
+36%: average increase in reported domestic violence in Strathclyde on Old Firm match days in one specification
650 million: the potential global reach LaLiga has attributed to El Clásico
Competition and rivalry are often treated as interchangeable. Psychologically, they are not.
Competition is created by circumstance. Two teams, athletes or organisations pursue the same scarce outcome: a trophy, a victory, a place in the table or prize money.
Rivalry exists between the competitors themselves.
The foundational academic work on the subject describes rivalry as a relationship that increases the psychological importance of a contest beyond its objective incentives. Beating a rival can therefore feel more important than defeating another opponent even when both victories deliver exactly the same points, prize money or sporting consequence.
That relationship does not appear overnight. It is built.
Repeated meetings matter. So does similarity between opponents. Closely fought encounters add another layer, particularly when they accumulate over years or generations. Geography can intensify all three factors at once, which helps explain the durability of so many city and regional rivalries.
Manchester and Liverpool are not competing solely over the result of one football match. Neither are Celtic and Rangers in Glasgow, Inter and Milan, or Boca and River in Buenos Aires. Around the sporting contest sit questions of local standing, historical memory, supporter identity and, in some cases, cultural territory.
Over time, those accumulated encounters begin influencing behaviour.
Research into long-distance running provides a particularly clean example. When athletes competed in races that included somebody they regarded as a personal rival, they ran significantly faster, even after the researchers controlled for other factors that could influence performance. The estimated difference was around 4.92 seconds per kilometre, close to 25 seconds across a five-kilometre race.
The opponent, effectively, changed the athlete’s performance.
Yet the same increase in psychological stakes can produce less desirable behaviour.
Another programme of research examined 2,788 Italian Serie A matches alongside a series of controlled experiments. On the football side, rivalry was associated with more unsportsmanlike conduct as measured through yellow and red cards. In experimental settings, participants facing rivals were also more willing to deceive others and employ unethical negotiation tactics than participants facing ordinary competitors.
The researchers linked part of the effect to the additional meaning attached to the outcome. Rivalry heightens concerns around status, self-worth and what victory or defeat represents.
That creates the contradiction running through almost every commercially valuable rivalry.
The emotion capable of making the contest more compelling is also capable of making it more unstable.
| Study | Finding | Published |
|---|---|---|
| Cikara, Botvinick and Fiske | Failure by a rival activates reward-related areas of the brain, with stronger responses associated with aggression toward rival supporters | Psychological Science, 2011 |
| Kilduff, Elfenbein and Staw | Rivalry increases the psychological stakes of competition beyond the objective incentives involved | Academy of Management Journal, 2010 |
| Kilduff | Runners improve by approximately 4.92 sec/km when competing against a personal rival | Social Psychological and Personality Science, 2014 |
| Kilduff, Galinsky, Gallo and Reade | Rivalry is associated with more unethical conduct, from Serie A disciplinary cards to deceptive negotiation | Academy of Management Journal, 2016 |
| Sanford and Scott | Analysis of 278,117 ticket resales shows supporters attach different financial value to different opponents | Journal of Sports Economics, 2016 |
| Angell, Gorton, Bottomley and White | Rival supporters notice opposing sponsors, while schadenfreude influences their reaction to those brands | European Sport Management Quarterly, 2016 |
| Dickson, Jennings and Koop | Reported domestic violence increases by approximately 28-41% on Old Firm match days, depending on the match outcome | Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics, 2016 |
The first route from psychology into economics is relatively simple.
People care more, and greater emotional importance changes what they are prepared to consume and pay for.
Sports economists have tried to separate this rivalry effect from the variables that would normally be expected to increase demand: better teams, stronger league positions, larger stadiums, attractive kickoff times or matches with direct sporting significance.
Research covering Major League Soccer and the NHL found that measures of rivalry helped explain attendance beyond those conventional factors. Measures based on supporters’ own perception of rivalry performed particularly well, outperforming cruder assumptions such as simply treating nearby teams as rivals.
The ticket market allows the same phenomenon to be examined in financial rather than attendance terms.
A study of Southeastern Conference college football analysed 278,117 individual resale transactions across 171 home games over two seasons. Because seat quality, team performance and stadium differences could be controlled for, researchers were able to use the price supporters actually paid as an indication of how much additional value they attached to particular opponents.
That distinction is commercially important.
Rivalry is not simply producing additional emotion around an unchanged product. Under the right circumstances, it alters the price of the product itself.
The same seat can command a different value depending on the visiting team. The same advertising slot can become more expensive depending on the two names appearing on the scoreboard. A broadcast window can acquire greater strategic importance even when neither team happens to be enjoying its best season.
The opponent becomes part of the inventory.
Few sporting relationships demonstrate that more clearly than India and Pakistan.
Their meeting at the 2023 ICC Cricket World Cup produced extraordinary viewing figures.
The game reached a peak live television audience in India of 76 million, according to ICC and Disney Star figures, while the concurrent digital audience peaked at 35 million. Ratings-based reporting put the total television audience for the fixture at approximately 173 million.
Advertisers respond to concentrations of attention on that scale.
For the India-Pakistan meeting at the 2025 ICC Champions Trophy, reported prices reached INR 5 million for just ten seconds of advertising. Business Standard put the comparable rate for an IPL playoff at roughly INR 1.8 million, meaning the India-Pakistan inventory was approaching three times the price. More than 90% of available advertising inventory was reportedly sold before the match.
Nothing about the physical advertising product had changed.
Ten seconds remained ten seconds.
What had changed was the audience expected to be on the other side of it.
That is what makes the example so useful commercially. Rivalry concentrates attention intensely enough for broadcasters to convert emotional significance into a measurable advertising premium.
For a tournament organiser, the effect extends beyond a single broadcast. A fixture with that pulling power becomes part of the competition’s overall commercial architecture: something broadcasters can promote, sponsors can activate around and audiences will seek out irrespective of their engagement with the rest of the schedule.
Football follows much the same logic, although the way media rights are bundled makes the value of individual matches more difficult to isolate.
Real Madrid against Barcelona sits in that category.
LaLiga has distributed El Clásico across more than 185 countries and has historically referred to a potential global audience of approximately 650 million people.
The wording is important.
That figure represents potential reach, not 650 million independently verified viewers. Actual measured audiences are considerably smaller. But the size of the distribution footprint still tells us something about the function El Clásico performs inside LaLiga’s international product.
The league’s domestic audiovisual revenues for the 2027/28 to 2031/32 cycle exceed EUR 6.135 billion across the different packages, around 9% more than in the preceding cycle.
There is no credible way to carve out a specific portion of that figure and label it “El Clásico revenue.” Media rights are packaged and sold collectively, rather than pricing Barcelona-Real Madrid as a standalone asset.
Its commercial contribution operates differently.
Every league needs a limited number of fixtures capable of becoming international appointment viewing.
A normal domestic league match will draw supporters of the participating teams, established league followers and regular subscribers. A major rivalry has the potential to travel beyond that core audience. It can be marketed across territories, used by broadcasters to acquire or reactivate subscribers and built into campaigns by sponsors seeking moments of unusually concentrated attention.
The effect reaches several revenue streams at once: television, digital subscriptions, advertising, hospitality, sponsorship activation, merchandising and social engagement.
Psychology helps explain the pulling power.
Supporters are not simply assessing which of two talented football teams will win.
The result changes the status of one identity relative to another.
Traditional sports economics has often focused on uncertainty of outcome. Part of the attraction of a match is that nobody knows the result beforehand.
Rivalry introduces something else.
Fans can obtain emotional satisfaction not only from their own side’s success, but from somebody else’s failure.
The Yankees-Red Sox brain-imaging research illustrates the point unusually well. Participants displayed reward-related neural activity when the rival team suffered a negative outcome even in circumstances where their own team gained no direct sporting advantage.
For the sports business, that widens the field of engagement.
A deeply identified supporter does not necessarily consume only content about their own club. They may watch the rival, discuss its defeats, follow its transfers, read stories about its problems and notice the commercial partners attached to it.
Attention crosses the rivalry line even when affection does not.
Sponsors are therefore pulled into the relationship as well.
A study involving 300 Newcastle United and Sunderland supporters examined reactions to companies sponsoring the opposing club. Greater team identification was associated with greater attention toward the rival’s sponsor. More intriguingly, schadenfreude, pleasure derived from the rival’s misfortune, proved an even stronger predictor of certain emotional and behavioural reactions toward those brands.
For sponsors, that produces a complicated form of value.
A rivalry can expand exposure because the opposing fanbase is watching too. But visibility and favourability are not the same thing.
A brand attaching itself to a club is entering an identity relationship, not buying neutral media space. Some of the people seeing the logo may define part of their own sporting identity through opposition to everything represented by the club wearing it.
That complication becomes considerably more serious when symbolic hostility turns into behaviour outside the commercial environment.
Few fixtures illustrate those wider externalities more clearly than Celtic against Rangers.
Researchers examining domestic-violence data in Strathclyde identified an average increase of approximately 36% in reported incidents on Old Firm match days in one specification. Depending on the result, estimated increases ranged from around 28% to 41%, with the highest figure occurring when Celtic lost.
Those results require careful interpretation. They identify a statistical association around match days. They do not establish that football directly caused any particular act of domestic violence.
Even with that qualification, the finding matters when considering the broader economics surrounding major rivalries.
The overwhelming majority of supporters will attend, watch and return home without incident. Yet fixtures carrying unusually high emotional intensity can create costs that never appear in ticket revenue or broadcasting accounts: police deployments, additional stewarding, fan segregation, transport planning, property protection, emergency services, regulatory scrutiny and reputational exposure.
At the extreme end, those costs can begin to interfere with the event itself.
The second leg of the 2018 Copa Libertadores final between Boca Juniors and River Plate provides perhaps the clearest modern example.
The match was supposed to be played at River’s Monumental stadium in Buenos Aires. After Boca’s team bus was attacked on its way to the ground, the fixture was first delayed, then postponed again. Eventually the decisive leg was taken out of Argentina altogether and staged at Real Madrid’s Santiago Bernabéu.
River were subsequently fined $400,000 and ordered to play two continental home fixtures behind closed doors, sanctions later upheld by the Court of Arbitration for Sport.
Moving the game did not eliminate the security issue. It exported it.
Madrid assembled an operation involving close to 4,000 personnel. More than 2,000 were national police officers, supported by municipal police, private security teams, emergency personnel and civil-protection services. At the time, it was described as the largest security deployment ever organised for a football match in the city, approaching twice the scale of a typical Clásico operation.
There was, however, a second financial ledger.
Madrid’s business confederation, CEIM, estimated that staging the match would generate roughly EUR 42 million in direct economic activity for the city. Broader estimates put the upper range of the overall impact at around EUR 92 million.
The relocated final eventually drew 62,282 spectators. River won 3-1 after extra time.
| Measure | Figure |
|---|---|
| Fine imposed on River Plate | $400,000 |
| Continental home matches behind closed doors | 2 |
| Security personnel deployed in Madrid | ~4,000 |
| National police included in deployment | 2,054 |
| Estimated direct economic impact for Madrid | ~EUR 42M |
| Estimated total impact, upper range | ~EUR 92M |
| Attendance at the relocated final | 62,282 |
Few events demonstrate the two-sided economics of rivalry more clearly.
The intensity surrounding Boca and River was precisely what made the final internationally compelling. Yet that same intensity contributed to circumstances in which South America’s biggest club match could no longer be completed in the city where it belonged.
The value surrounding the game did not vanish when it left Buenos Aires.
It changed location.
Hotels, restaurants, retailers and transport providers in Madrid suddenly captured expenditure generated by two Argentine clubs more than 10,000 kilometres away. Buenos Aires, meanwhile, lost the immediate economic activity associated with hosting the match, while River carried the financial and sporting sanctions.
Rivalry remains commercially attractive only for as long as its emotional premium exceeds the costs created around it.
That is why the economics cannot be reduced to a simple formula in which stronger hostility automatically produces greater revenue.
Rivalries create several effects at the same time.
They can improve performance by giving one opponent more psychological significance than another. They can raise attendance and increase willingness to pay. They can turn ordinary advertising inventory into premium inventory, as India-Pakistan demonstrates. They can supply leagues with internationally marketable tent-pole fixtures such as El Clásico and draw attention from audiences that would otherwise have little reason to consume the underlying competition.
Yet the underlying psychological mechanism carries its own liabilities.
The higher stakes can spill into unsportsmanlike behaviour among players. Rival supporters can react negatively toward sponsors. In more serious cases, the fixture can require exceptional security measures, coincide with wider social harm, trigger sanctions or become impossible to stage under normal conditions.
Commercially, then, the most valuable rivalry is not necessarily the fiercest.
It is the one that preserves the maximum possible emotional importance while keeping the resulting behaviour within manageable boundaries.
That balance matters more now because the product being sold around a rivalry has expanded far beyond the stadium.
Sports organisations sell media rights across continents, digital subscriptions, hospitality, sponsor access, merchandise, tourism and content throughout the year. A major rivalry can enhance the value of all of them at once.
There is another characteristic that makes these relationships unusually powerful assets: they are exceptionally difficult to reproduce.
Players leave.
Real Madrid will eventually sign another world-class forward. The Yankees will replace today’s All-Stars with tomorrow’s. India and Pakistan will field entirely different generations of cricketers.
The rivalry remains.
It absorbs each new match into everything that came before it, carrying victories, defeats, controversies and memories from one generation of supporters into the next.
Individual players create moments.
Rivalries retain them.
And that accumulated memory is one of the few emotional assets in sport that can continue generating economic value long after the people who created it have gone.
A note on process: AI tools were used to support parts of the research, data visualisation and editorial refinement of this article. The analysis draws on the studies and sources listed below.
Sources: Cikara, Botvinick and Fiske, “Us Versus Them” (Psychological Science, 2011); Kilduff, Elfenbein and Staw, “The Psychology of Rivalry” (Academy of Management Journal, 2010); Kilduff, “Driven to Win” (Social Psychological and Personality Science, 2014); Kilduff, Galinsky, Gallo and Reade, “Whatever It Takes to Win” (Academy of Management Journal, 2016); Sanford and Scott, “Assessing the Intensity of Sports Rivalries Using Data From Secondary Market Transactions” (Journal of Sports Economics, 2016); Angell, Gorton, Bottomley and White, “Understanding Fans’ Responses to the Sponsor of a Rival Team” (European Sport Management Quarterly, 2016); Tyler, Morehead, Cobbs and DeSchriver, “What Is Rivalry?” (Sport Marketing Quarterly, 2017); Dickson, Jennings and Koop, “Domestic Violence and Football in Glasgow: Are Reference Points Relevant?” (Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics, 2016); ESPN Press Room (MLB Wild Card viewership, October 2025); ICC and Disney Star (2023 Cricket World Cup audiences); Business Standard and Business Today (2025 Champions Trophy advertising rates); LaLiga communications (El Clásico distribution; domestic audiovisual revenue 2027/28-2031/32); CONMEBOL, CAS and contemporaneous reporting on the 2018 Copa Libertadores final; CEIM and Spanish press on the Madrid economic impact.
A. Strulak writes on sports business, commercial strategy and the economics of rights. Vinciamo Sports, Sport. Reimagined.
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