Going Global: How International Expansion Needs the Right Audience Analysis
By Adam Grossman
In 2007, the NFL played a single regular-season game in London. Fast forward to 2025: the league staged seven international games across five countries, including first-ever regular-season games in Madrid, Berlin, and Dublin alongside three London fixtures and a season-opener in São Paulo. Commissioner Roger Goodell has publicly stated a target of 16 international games per year, with every team playing abroad annually.
The NBA has moved just as aggressively. Its first Paris Game tipped off in January 2020. This year, Adam Silver and FIBA jointly confirmed they are moving forward with a new pan-European league, and the NBA has scheduled regular-season games in Berlin and London in 2026, Paris and Manchester in 2027, and Berlin and Paris in 2028.
The Premier League's economics tell a similar story from a different angle. In the 2025–2028 rights cycle, international media revenue exceeded domestic revenue for the first time in league history, with international rights alone worth roughly £2.17 billion or about 30% more than the domestic package.
International expansion is no longer a strategic side bet. It is a key part of every major professional sports league’s strategy and operating model. Every major league, governing body, and tentpole event is now considering plant flags in markets where a decade ago they may not have had a meaningful presence.
The financial logic is obvious to anyone reading a balance sheet. International markets often offer growing middle-class populations, rising digital subscription penetration, and competitive bidding from streaming platforms that often rely on live sports for subscription. Additional viewers outside the home market raises sponsorship inventory, ticketing pricing power, and franchise valuations in ways that an incremental domestic rights bump never will.
The problem is that is often difficult to know who is watching, where those viewers live, what teams or athletes they follow, what they spend, or what brands they trust. Without that understanding, the strategic promise of international expansion can collapse.
Audience analysis in sports has always been difficult, but doing it globally can be more challenging. Measurement systems and approaches can be built on incompatible methodologies, report on different panels, and publish on different cadences. Properties expanding internationally have been forced to rely on blunt estimates, opaque third-party projections
This is the gap ROAR was built to close.
ROAR combines proprietary modeling with a network of data partnerships to produce global audience insights. The technology ingests disparate inputs, harmonizes them against a common framework, and resolves them to specific audiences with defensible methodology.
That means a league evaluating its next international game can see not just that Brazil ranks highly overall but which areas drive consumption which demographics are growing fastest, how fan intensity compares to established markets, and which competitors are winning the attention battle in each city. This can replaces the assumption that “big audience equals right audience” with the granular fit analysis that every other category of marketing spend has had for a decade.
The strategic consequences are significant. Properties using ROAR can prioritize the markets where growth is real rather than the markets where growth is fashionable. Agencies can underwrite international deals with pricing anchored in audience economics rather than broadcast-reach rumors. Brands can allocate global sponsorship budgets with the same rigor they apply to digital advertising, cutting wasted spend in markets where claimed reach and actual relevance diverge.
Each of those use cases compounds. The properties that execute well attract the brands that are spending more carefully, which in turn produces the partnership revenue that justifies further international investment.
International expansion is the defining growth story in sports for the next decade, and the capital being deployed, tens of billions across leagues, events, sovereign funds, and private equity, is a bet that global audiences will generate commensurate returns.
Those returns do not fully materialize without the ability to see the audience clearly. The properties, agencies, and brands that invest in that clarity first should be the most successful in global expansion.