Reddit has dropped a treasure trove for sports marketers: its new 2025–26 Sports Playbook, offering a 26-page guide packed with data, trends, and tactical advice for brands targeting sports fans across its platform. The findings are compelling as the platform shows soaring engagement in sports communities, setting the stage for serious opportunity in the year ahead.
Community-Driven Sports Engagement
The report highlights that sports fans on Reddit are not just active, they are more engaged than their social media peers. Based on a U.S. survey of 750 users, Redditors demonstrate higher sports passion compared to users on other platforms.
Sports-focused subreddits are booming, growing 26 percent year over year, while Reddit’s daily active users climbed by nearly 20 million. That means more fans, more interactions, and more content creation centered around beloved teams, leagues, and match days.
Reddit With Brands and Leagues
Reddit breaks down how marketers can effectively connect with these fans using ad tools like Sponsored Posts, Video Ads, and custom activations. But the insights go deeper. They show fans are clamoring for:
- Real-time game banter
- Exclusive insider content
- Emotional storylines and highlights
- Authentic league-hosted AMAs and behind-the-scenes media
Reddit also offers a calendar of major sporting events for planning campaigns around key moments, ensuring marketing hits at the right time.
Reddit’s rising sports momentum is not happening in a vacuum. The platform has already struck multi-year partnerships with major leagues like NFL, NBA, MLB, PGA, and NASCAR. These collaborations introduced video highlights, AMAs, and league-generated content directly into native communities, boosting screen views by 26 percent and generating 20.4 billion total views.
To amplify its global appeal, Reddit recently appointed Indian cricket legend Sachin Tendulkar as a brand ambassador. He will engage with fans in subreddits like r/SachinTendulkar and r/IndiaCricket, underscoring Reddit’s growth strategy in sports-heavy regions such as South Asia.
Way Ahead on Sports Engagement
Marketers stand to gain immensely from Reddit’s surging sports ecosystem. By leveraging its passionate and highly active fan communities, brands can tap into engagement levels that outperform other platforms. Creating campaigns around AMAs, exclusive highlights, and authentic behind-the-scenes content allows for deeper audience impact, while embracing global sports cultures such as cricket provides added reach.
With celebrity ambassadors driving massive fan bases into the platform, Reddit offers marketers a unique opportunity to build authentic, high-energy connections with sports enthusiasts worldwide.