Sports
Creators & the Super Bowl: A New Generation of Coverage
Super Bowl LX, the long-awaited finale to the 2025 NFL season, a showdown between the Seattle Seahawks and the New England Patriots has been highly anticipated for months. Between the contentious playoff season or the halftime show headlined by Bad Bunny, this Super Bowl should be one for the books. The NFL has expanded its social media partnerships for Super Bowl LX, bringing creator-driven content to platforms like TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram. Here is a breakdown of the coverage, spanning official NFL creator programs, brand partnerships, and independent influencer content production throughout game week.
Building on a long-term partnership between TikTok and the NFL dating back to 2019, the 2026 coverage will be heavy on the platform. This year the platform serves as a primary hub for Super Bowl creator content, bringing creators into the game week coverage ecosystem through multiple programs and activations.
Dylan Kevitch (@dylan.kevitch) announced his attendance at Super Bowl Sunday 2026, positioning himself as an on-site source for game day and behind-the-scenes content. Kevitch described the opportunity as a dream come true in his announcement post, focusing his content strategy on capturing moments that traditional broadcast coverage typically misses, including arrival sequences, pre-game atmospheres, and fan interactions in and around the stadium. His approach reflects a broader trend of creators filling gaps in conventional sports coverage.
TikTok partnered with Bleacher Report to create the B/Rcade activation on Radio Row, bringing a rotating group of creators to film interviews, arcade-style player challenges, and social-first segments throughout Super Bowl week. Radio Row, the traditional media hub during Super Bowl week, now accommodates creator-specific spaces alongside conventional sports media outlets. The B/Rcade format blends entertainment and sports journalism, allowing creators to interact with players in less formal settings than standard press conferences. This integration of creators into Radio Row signals their acceptance as legitimate media voices within the NFL’s official coverage apparatus.
The platform has aggregated broader creator participation under trend pages like Content Creator for Super Bowl and Super Bowl 2026 Commercials Are Already Live. These collections feature dozens of influencer and fan accounts posting predictions, commercial reactions, and meme content tagged to the 2026 game. The NFL expanded its creator programs with Creator of the Week and Super Bowl Week activations, bringing sports-focused influencers like Tom Grossi and iShowSpeed into official coverage. These creators produce content around events, fan experiences, and have livestreamed during game week, contributing to a distributed coverage model that reaches audiences across multiple platforms simultaneously.
YouTube channels have dedicated episodes to Super Bowl 60 content ahead of the game.The Channel House Call released Reacting To The Funniest 2026 Super Bowl Bets in a podcast format, covering betting lines and prop bets as pre-game entertainment. The format capitalizes on the popularity of prop betting, which has grown significantly as legal sports betting expanded across more states in recent years. Another show, Super Bowl 60 Props + Coaching Carousel Reactions + Way-Too-Early 2026 TE, broke down Super Bowl LX props and broader NFL storylines while distributing content across YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, TikTok, Instagram, and Twitter. This distribution strategy allows creators to reach audiences on their preferred platforms rather than forcing viewers to a single destination.
Yahoo Sports produced a live YouTube show from San Francisco covering Super Bowl predictions, MVP picks, and prop bets. The show, titled Super Bowl PREDICTIONS | Barry Sanders & Joey Mulinaro Join!, featured creator and comedian Joey Mulinaro alongside former NFL player Barry Sanders as on-air personalities. The pairing of traditional sports figures with creators demonstrates how legacy media outlets incorporate creator talent into their own programming to attract younger viewers who follow individual personalities rather than institutional brands.
Players posted their own Reels and Stories throughout Super Bowl week, many working with personal videographers to produce content that matches professional creator quality. Brands sent influencers to the game, with companies like T-Mobile, Poppi, and Gatorade funding creator trips to film watch parties and in-stadium content. The spending reflects a broader shift toward influencer marketing around major sporting events, though the return on investment varies widely depending on creator audience size and engagement rates.
MrBeast participated in NFL-related streams and activations during Super Bowl week. Tom Grossi live-streamed games and appeared in official league creator programming. iShowSpeed contributed live reaction content and fan commentary. The three operate in different content niches but all received NFL support for their Super Bowl coverage, part of the league’s effort to reach audiences across multiple platforms and demographics beyond traditional broadcast viewership.
The Super Bowl airs Sunday, with creator coverage running across TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram before, during, and after the game. Fans can find content by searching Super Bowl 2026, Super Bowl LX, or following the NFL’s official creator program participants and brand-sponsored influencers posting throughout the weekend.
Sports
USA Fencing Bets on Creators Two Years From LA 2028
A sport that cannot outspend anyone is building a fan base one sub-100,000-follower creator at a time. The payoff is a live Pier 17 showdown next month.
A national governing body that admits it cannot outspend anyone is trying to outmaneuver everyone, one sub-100,000-follower creator at a time.
USA Fencing has spent nine months building one of the most aggressive creator strategies in Olympic sport, and the numbers moved. Digiday reported that since the program launched in December 2025, the body’s average monthly impressions are up 36.9%, reaching 4.75 million a month, a figure CEO Phil Andrews attributed to the push.
That is the whole thesis for underfunded Olympic sports staring down the 2028 Los Angeles Games. Fencing does not have a paid-promo war chest. It has creators, and it started courting them more than two years before the flame is lit. The recruiting floor is what makes the model copyable: some of the creators the body is hiring have fewer than 100,000 followers.
One of them is Star Wars stunt coordinator Nick Gillard.
The Star Wars Overlap USA Fencing Is Chasing
Gillard choreographed the lightsaber duels across the prequel films, and USA Fencing is leaning into the overlap. The body will appear at New York Comic Con with a saber and lightsaber masterclass featuring Gillard and two actors who have played Jedi Knights, whom Andrews declined to name. The bet is that a Star Wars audience is a fencing audience that has not been asked yet.
The payoff event comes first. Next month the USA Fencing Creator Showdown runs at Pier 17 on New York’s waterfront, pairing Olympians against creators known for fitness, dancing, and comedy who together hold more than 300 million followers across Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok. USA Fencing has confirmed the dates as September 21 through 23 at the Seaport, with creators on Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube pairing up with elite fencers.
The Impression Target Keeps Climbing
Andrews has already raised his own bar. “Our initial target was 60 million impressions, we’re now reasonably expecting to go over 100 million,” he said, a projection that would nearly double the original goal for a single event.
The logic behind the spend sits in the data USA Fencing is chasing. A recent report from the Acceleration Community of Companies found that 49% of Gen Z sports fans became interested in a new sport or athlete through fan-created content, a channel that costs a small non-profit far less than a broadcast buy.
The Athletes Doubling as the Content Engine
Fencing is also using its own athletes as the content engine. USA Fencing was the only summer-sport governing body to send athletes to the 2026 Winter Olympics in Milano Cortina, where one of its Olympians fenced gymnast and NBC correspondent Laurie Hernandez, who Andrews said now counts as a creator in most respects with over a million followers.
The married Olympians Lee Kiefer and Gerek Meinhardt are part of the same play. They hold more than 100,000 followers combined on Instagram and 1.2 million likes on their joint TikTok account, an audience that travels with them from competition to feed.
Andrews frames the whole effort in blunt terms against his peers. “I think we’ve probably done more than anybody,” he said of the body’s creator work relative to other national governing bodies.
The Comic Con masterclass follows in October. The saber meets the lightsaber, and the door USA Fencing has propped open runs straight to Los Angeles in 2028.
Sports
ESPN Names Fourth Creator Class for Super Bowl Season
A flag football world champion, a former NFL lineman, and a data-native analyst headline ESPN’s fourth Creator Network class, embedded for a full season on the road to the network’s first Super Bowl telecast.
Diana Flores captains a world champion flag football team. Now she has a season-long pass inside ESPN, and a place on the road to a Super Bowl broadcast that has never existed.
ESPN announced the fourth class of its Creator Network on August 4, five independent digital creators who will produce social-first content across the full 2026 NFL season. The group includes Flores, Chase Murman, Isaac Rochell, Simone Scott, and Leah Cammarano. The season builds toward Super Bowl LXI on February 14, 2027, at SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles, the first Super Bowl ESPN and ABC will ever televise.
The move is a legacy sports rights-holder routing its biggest broadcast through independent creators instead of only traditional promotion. ESPN frames the class as part of its yearlong “Year of the Super Bowl” initiative, built to give fans behind-the-scenes access through the football season. The creators will visit ESPN headquarters, work marquee college football and NFL events, and get inside Super Bowl week in Los Angeles.
The Most Sports-Diverse Roster Yet
This is the most sports-diverse class the program has fielded.
Flores is the captain and quarterback of Mexico’s World Champion National Flag Football Team and a bilingual creator on TikTok and Instagram, helping grow the sport ahead of its Olympic debut at the 2028 Los Angeles Games. Rochell is a former NFL defensive lineman, including a run with the Los Angeles Chargers, who now makes content about sports, fatherhood, and life beyond football on TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube. Murman founded The QB Plug, which ESPN calls one of social media’s fastest-growing football brands, posting quarterback storytelling on TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube.
Cammarano brings the data lane. She is a sports analytics creator and former Carolina Panthers Football Analytics intern who works to make advanced football numbers readable, active on TikTok. Scott is a sports host and reporter who covers football, basketball, and more on TikTok and Instagram.
Why ESPN Keeps Coming Back to the Model
The Creator Network launched in September 2022 with 10 emerging creators. The 2024 class ran an all-female roster of 12 sponsored by adidas and generated more than 400 million cross-platform views, by ESPN’s count. The 2025 class narrowed to five creators with a combined following above 6 million. The program has moved from experiment to standing operation, with the same five-creator shape carrying into a fourth year.
Kaitee Daley, ESPN’s senior vice president for digital, social and streaming content, tied the class to the stakes of the broadcast itself.
“Partnering with creators who have built passionate communities through their distinctive voices and storytelling styles will help bring fans closer to the people, culture and highlights that will define the road to ESPN’s first Super Bowl,” Daley said in the announcement.
A Broadcast Two Decades in the Making
Super Bowl LXI marks ESPN’s first-ever telecast of the game and ABC’s first since Super Bowl XL in February 2006, roughly two decades after Monday Night Football moved from ABC to ESPN. That history is the pressure behind the hire. The network is staffing its highest-stakes broadcast with voices built for the feeds where much of the audience already lives.
The class starts its work as the 2026 NFL season opens. Its finish line is fixed: SoFi Stadium, February 14, 2027, the night ESPN carries a Super Bowl for the first time.
Sports
Jake Paul’s MVP Merges With PFL to Form Combat Giant
A YouTuber turned promoter now co-owns a nearly 400-fighter combat sports company, and he plans to fight inside it. The MVP-PFL merger closes a loop no one in the fight business has drawn before.
Jake Paul walked into the fight business selling views. On Thursday he walked out of it a co-owner of one of the largest combat sports companies on the planet.
Paul’s Most Valuable Promotions merged with the Professional Fighters League on July 30, forming a combined boxing and MMA company of nearly 400 athletes under the MVP banner, the two sides said in a joint press release. The PFL brand will phase out and migrate to MVP MMA, with full integration set for the start of 2027.
The arc is the story. Paul, who built his audience on YouTube, co-founded MVP in 2021, turned that reach into a promotion, and has now engineered a full combat sports conglomerate rather than a sponsorship. It is the clearest proof in sports that creator leverage can reshape legacy infrastructure, not just rent space on it.
The Ownership Table and the Distribution It Controls
John Martin, the PFL chief executive, becomes CEO and a board member of the combined business. Paul and co-founder Nakisa Bidarian stay on as co-founders and board members, with Bidarian continuing to run MVP’s boxing operation and live events.
The scale arrives with distribution attached. The new company keeps relationships with Netflix, ESPN and Sky Sports, and inherits PFL’s network of 34 broadcast and streaming partners reaching fans in more than 170 countries, per the release. That footprint is the asset a standalone creator promotion cannot buy overnight.
The merger is backed by existing PFL shareholders 885 Capital and affiliated entities of Knighthead Capital Management, who commit new capital as founding investors. The two sides said the combined company launches with the strongest balance sheet in its history.
PFL brings the roster. Founded in 2018, the league acquired Bellator MMA in late 2023 and sits as the No. 2 global MMA company behind the UFC, with fighters including Dakota Ditcheva, Usman Nurmagomedov, AJ McKee, Johnny Eblen and Cris Cyborg, according to Yahoo Sports. The combined company plans aggressive compensation offers and wants athletes crossing between boxing and MMA.
Paul Becomes the Product and the Owner at Once
Then Paul confirmed the part with no clear precedent. He plans to fight inside the company he co-owns.
“We started MVP to disrupt a broken model. We wanted to give fighters fair pay and a bigger, modernized stage to become global superstars. Joining forces with PFL accelerates that vision by a decade. I look forward to putting my entire promotional muscle into our new company, returning to the boxing ring and making my MVP MMA debut,” Paul said in the release.
He set a timeline on ESPN’s SportsCenter. “I’ve been trying to make [my MMA debut] happen for a long time. It’s really just down to negotiations behind the scenes. I’m going to come back, hopefully, this year into boxing and then looking to do MMA in 2027,” Paul told ESPN.
That closes the loop. Paul is at once the draw, the promoter and the rights holder, a structure combat sports has not seen from a single figure.
Martin framed the deal in terms of what the pieces add up to. “This merger brings scale in operations, in distribution and media rights, in sponsorship, in fighter development and in fan engagement,” he said.
The business is already running. The combined company has five premium boxing and MMA events scheduled for August, and PFL alone will produce 24 events across 11 countries in 2026, roughly 150 hours of live content. That volume feeds the rights conversations Martin now controls.
One open piece hangs over the money. PFL’s domestic broadcast deal with ESPN expires at the end of 2026, and a new distribution agreement is expected before year-end.
The rebrand runs into early 2027. Paul’s MMA debut is scheduled to follow it, inside the company that will carry his name.
