The Netflix effect: why are sports docuseries so good, and what can we learn from them?
Last week, one of my closest friends asked if I’d be tuning in to the Italian Grand Prix, and I did a double-take.
I lived with this friend for four years, and during that time not once had we ever ‘tuned in’ to any kind of motorsport, Formula 1 or otherwise. It just never occurred to me that one could acquire a sudden and burning interest in what I consider to be a fairly niche sport, well into their 30s.
But I am wrong on two counts. F1 is no longer niche. And people are adopting new sporting passions in their droves.
The secret? Content. And specifically, Netflix.
The Netflix effect
Since 2018, the global audience of F1 highlight programmes has increased 30% YOY. The Tour de France this year recorded the highest viewership of its final race day since 2019. And in April, Rory McIlroy’s Masters victory broke Sky Sports records with its 1.85 million viewers.
While Netflix docuseries Drive to Survive, Tour de France Unchained, and Full Swing may not take 100% of the credit, they’re surely behind most of it. Let’s face it, if (like me) you developed an inexplicable fascination with cheerleading during lockdown, the chances are you were watching Cheer.
It seems Netflix has cracked the formula for taking smaller sports to the mainstream.
And any strategy that brings more people, coverage and funding into sport deserves attention.
So what can we learn from the fine art of the docuseries?
By no means universally popular (and often dismissed by sport’s ‘real fans’), the wonder of the Netflix docuseries gives us a powerful roadmap of how to keep fading sports alive. This is what Netflix teaches us about creating sports content in today’s content-hungry culture:
1. Engineer the cliffhangers
Perhaps counterintuitively, live sports coverage can lack the drama that finely edited content delivers after the event. Brilliant editorial compression can be used to build narrative beats and dramatic suspense, keeping you on the edge of your seat, even if you know the outcome.
Across Netflix’s most successful sports docuseries, the editing and cutting is brutal – and sometimes a little unfaithful to the true sequence of events – but the impact is bingeworthy drama.
2. Choose perfect protagonists
Every sport has its unique take on commitment, setback, victory, and rivalry. What Netflix docuseries do well is spotlight athletes who perfectly embody the stakes of their sport. When Fabio Jakobsen spoke about his comeback from a near-death crash, it didn’t matter that he had never won a Tour stage (at the time) – his personality and story represented the spirit of cycling perfectly.
3. Dial up the drama
People love people clashes. The sport that we see on the roads, fields, tracks and mats feels so much more alive when we know the micro-tensions that hide behind the scenes between the players and teams. It’s an inconvenient truth to sports purists, but BTS footage doesn’t light us up because of the detail – it’s because of the drama.
4. Translate the sport
The toughest balance to achieve is pitching your content so that it’s interesting and relevant for hard-and-fast fans, while still being accessible for complete newcomers. If you’re totally new to F1, you won’t know the basics of qualification and flag signals. But the best docuseries find a way to introduce entry-level rules and details without dumbing down the sport – and it’s critical that this is done if the sport is to go mainstream (no matter how much long-term fans resent it).
5. Connect to the ecosystem
When sports docuseries are doing their job well, they don’t replace live or linear coverage of their sports; they connect new fans to the coverage. This measurable conversion is part of the success story, and is only made possible when there is a meaningful emotional attachment with the characters or the drama. Viewers must be left thinking: I need to know what happens next.
Why some series have failed
Not all of Netflix’s sports series have met roaring success. Six Nations Full Contact, Break Point and Sprint are among some of the streaming service’s biggest casualties. And from this we have just as much to learn. While Break Point failed to ignite interest because of the protagonists it spotlighted (omitting tennis’s biggest stars), Full Contact failed to land the micro-tensions that keep us invested in the result – focusing too much on match day and too little on the small dramas in between.
The failure of Sprint, meanwhile, holds a separate and more significant warning to guardians of smaller sports. Eagerly anticipated by the global athletics community, the docuseries left fans disappointed by its narrow focus and limited insight into the athletes and the sport.
For newcomers, the series served only to underline the existing barriers in athletics: fragmentation of disciplines and competitions, and subsequent lack of narrative through-line.
The message is clear for any sport struggling to bring new fans in: if you can’t tell a story, you’ll lose your audience.
Where next for sports content?
Netflix is just one of many platforms reinventing the way we consume sport. Live-streamed social, Instagram stories, and ‘crew’ culture are bringing sport into our lives well beyond our TV sets. Sports-adjacent brands should take note: this is where your audiences are.
And guardians of struggling sports should take heed. Content is king. Storytelling is essential. The future of your sport might just depend on it.