Sports conversation is growing on Reddit. During a recent Sunday Night Football game, for instance, separate live chats—one devoted to general NFL fans, one for Chiefs and Lions diehards, and another for Taylor Swift lovers—played out on the platform’s forums.
Across 1,000 sports-themed Reddit topic pages (known as Subreddits) last year, engagements jumped 35%, the company said. And leagues are spending more time there too.
The NFL and Reddit recently extended their content tie-up through the 2026-27 season, which will see the league post more from its own account, focus on growing international communities in places such as Berlin and offer advertisers real estate on the site for NFL highlights, text posts and “Ask Me Anything” (AMA) Q&As.
Crucially, Reddit head of content partnerships Sarah Rosen said, the league’s posts are functionally treated like any other user’s posts. The league doesn’t control r/NFL, and its social media managers have met with the page’s longtime moderators to ensure smooth cooperation. The community has nearly 10x’d in subscribers from the 1.4 million fans it included when the NFL initiated its relationship in 2019.
“u/NFL is just a participant, just like many other top posters and community members,” Rosen said. “They’re just one of 12 million.”
Reddit launched a partnership program with major sports leagues—including the NFL, MLB, PGA Tour and NASCAR—in 2024 as it helps them identify the right content and voice for the platform. Earlier that year, it launched a suite of tools for businesses to maximize their impact.
“There’s a whole lot of NFL conversation happening … with a large group of our most avid fans,” NFL VP, media strategy and business development Brent Lawton said. “So we felt like we should try and figure out how we can get there and make that conversation more authentic and be a part of it.”
Structurally Reddit’s league deals resemble those assembled by other social platforms, with leagues making a commitment to post and sharing ad-revenue attached to content. But Reddit’s value to fans has increasingly diverged from its peers as other apps prioritize passive, video-dominated, creator-oriented experiences while Reddit has leaned into fostering grassroots community interactions.
The platform has encouraged leagues to serve the diehard fans that make up the core of each Subreddit. For instance, the NBA hosted an AMA with the league’s head of basketball strategy & analytics, while the NFL offered up the people responsible for building its schedule. Reddit said that NFL content saw a 223% increase in engagements year-over-year through three weeks of this season.
Reddit’s vast conversational trove has proven particularly valuable on a web increasingly dominated by generative artificial intelligence. In August, the site was the third-most visited in the U.S. (behind Google.com and YouTube.com), according to Semrush, after signing more than $200 million worth of licensing deals, including with Google and OpenAI. In July, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman told investors that the company is interested in becoming a go-to search engine itself. Its market cap has grown from $6.5 billion for its March 2024 IPO to $36.8 billion.
For leagues, the ability to leverage Reddit’s reputation to appear more frequently in search results or chatbot readouts should be seen as a nice bonus, Rosen said, rather than the main driver behind their on-platform strategy. After all, the moderators wouldn’t like that.
Fanbases are increasingly fragmented across social media platforms and between video services. “Everybody is in different places, and so our value prop to sports leagues—and media partners at large—is: these communities already exist,” Rosen said. “It’s more about leaning into an existing behavior and adding to that and thinking of Reddit as a place to connect with this community of passionate fans that you just really can’t find in the same level anywhere else.”