For most of sporting history, fandom was inherited. You supported the team your family supported, watched the league your city cared about, and absorbed its rivalries by osmosis. The streaming era has quietly rewritten that script. A well-made documentary series can now do in ten episodes what decades of broadcast coverage could not: turn someone who has never watched a sport into a fan who plans their weekend around it.
The clearest case study is Formula 1. When Netflix launched Drive to Survive in 2019, F1 was a niche product in the United States. According to figures reported around ESPN’s coverage of the sport, American race audiences averaged roughly 554,000 viewers in 2018. By 2022, that average had climbed to a record 1.21 million, with 2023 close behind at 1.11 million. Nielsen research found that more than 360,000 US viewers who had not watched F1 in late 2021 tuned into races in 2022 after first watching the series. Surveys have suggested that roughly one in five F1 fans credit the show for bringing them to the sport. The documentary did not just grow the audience; it taught newcomers the sport’s storylines, team politics and personal feuds, the very material rivalries are made of. That fan economy is now reshaping the calendar itself, as we explored in our piece on Formula 1’s global expansion.
Nostalgia as an acquisition channel
Documentaries do not only create new fans; they reactivate dormant ones and hand old rivalries to a new generation. ESPN’s The Last Dance, the 2020 series chronicling Michael Jordan’s final season with the Chicago Bulls, premiered to an average of 6.1 million viewers for its first two episodes and averaged 5.6 million viewers across all ten, making it the most-viewed documentary content in ESPN’s history. With time-shifted and on-demand viewing included, ESPN reported the per-episode average swelled past 12.8 million. Crucially, much of that audience was too young to have watched the 1990s Bulls live. The series reintroduced the Bulls-Pistons antagonism and the Jordan-era NBA to viewers who then carried that historical context into modern NBA storylines and debates.
The Wrexham effect: from documentary to balance sheet
If Drive to Survive proved a documentary could grow a global sport, Welcome to Wrexham proved it could transform a single club. When Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney bought the Welsh side, it was a non-league club drawing modest crowds; pre-pandemic average attendance sat around the 4,000 mark. By the 2024-25 season, average attendance had risen to 12,781, and the club’s annual accounts for the year ending June 2025 showed record turnover of about £33 million, up roughly 24 per cent year on year, with the club attributing the growth largely to global interest generated by the documentary. Remarkably, the majority of the club’s income now comes from outside the United Kingdom. On the pitch, Wrexham became the first club in the English football pyramid to win three consecutive promotions, climbing into the Championship. Suddenly, century-old local rivalries in Welsh and English football were being followed by viewers in North America who had never heard of the town before 2022. It is a striking example of how modern club ownership models increasingly treat content as core infrastructure rather than a marketing afterthought.
Golf, and the formula behind the format
Netflix applied the same template to golf with Full Swing, and the measurable effects followed. Data released by the PGA Tour and Netflix indicated that 63 per cent of Full Swing viewers went on to watch PGA Tour coverage in the two months after the show’s debut, and that 11 per cent of viewers who had not watched tour golf in the previous six months tuned in afterwards. The show also turned lesser-known professionals into recognisable characters, demonstrating that the documentary effect works on individuals as well as institutions.
Why does the format work so reliably? Because documentaries solve sport’s oldest onboarding problem: context. Live sport is dense with history, jargon and unwritten narrative. A newcomer watching a race or a derby cold sees only the surface. A documentary supplies the backstory, the grudges, the stakes and the faces, so that when the new fan finally watches live, the event feels charged rather than confusing. Rivalries, in particular, are pure narrative; they are the easiest asset for a documentary to transfer. That is one reason soccer’s great rivalries travel so well on screen.
What it means for leagues and fans
The lesson leagues have drawn is that storytelling is now a fan-acquisition channel with measurable return, and nearly every major property has commissioned its own behind-the-scenes series as a result. Not all of them land; access without genuine tension produces promotional video, not drama, and audiences can tell the difference. The series that moved the needle shared a willingness to show conflict, failure and personality.
There are caveats. Documentary-acquired fans arrive through narrative, and some drift away when the storyline that hooked them ends. Converting them into durable supporters still requires the traditional machinery of fandom: accessible broadcasts, community, and live moments worth caring about, a challenge tied closely to how streaming platforms are reshaping sports broadcasting. But the broader shift is real and probably permanent. The first touchpoint for a new fan is now as likely to be a streaming menu as a stadium, and the old rivalries, the sport’s richest stories, are the bait. For leagues sitting on a hundred years of feuds and folklore, the archive has never been worth more.
