Second Screens Take Over Live Sport: What Viewers Actually Do During a Match

ByBNW Staff

A match on the television, a phone in the hand, and a group chat reacting faster than the commentator. Most fans watch this way now without thinking about it. The interesting question is not whether the phone is there. It is what people are actually doing on it.

The phone became part of the broadcast

A US survey of more than 3,000 sports fans found 77 percent doing at least one sports-related thing on a second device while watching from home. Looking up stats, arguing on social media, tracking a fantasy scoreboard, keeping half an eye on another game. Older respondents were the ones most likely to say they simply watch the match. Quaint, in the nicest sense.

Betting and casual gambling sit in that same list, and they behave the same way: short bursts during stoppages rather than sustained attention. A tab left open on Clubhouse casino gets treated like a live stats page, glanced at when the ball goes out of play and abandoned the second it comes back. Nobody is choosing between the match and the phone. Both run at once.

Ranked roughly from most common to least, the second-screen menu looks like this:

  • Player and team stats, usually pulled up mid-argument with someone on the sofa.
  • Social media, where a replay often lands before the broadcast gets round to showing it.
  • Another game entirely, running on a laptop on the coffee table.
  • Fantasy line-ups. Around 57 million people across the US and Canada played in the past year.
  • Betting, which the same survey ties to fans who also buy more tickets and more merchandise.

Streaming delay turned the phone into a spoiler machine

Every February an analytics team measures how far behind the action each service runs during the Super Bowl. The 2025 results were absurd. Tubi sat about 26 seconds behind the field, Fubo about 78, with most of the big streaming names clustered in the sixties. Same game, same night, and nearly a minute between the fastest viewer in the country and the slowest.

An alert travels faster than any of that. Fans learned to silence notifications before kick-off or park the phone face down, because the buzz in a pocket announces the goal before the picture arrives. Numbers from the 2026 game closed the gap somewhat, with broadcast around 19 seconds and the quickest stream near 48. Better. Still plenty of time for the neighbours to ruin it.

Dead time is where the second screen wins

Time a football broadcast properly some evening. Ninety minutes of clock stretches across two hours of substitutions, replays, injury pauses and advertising, and that is the territory the phone colonised. Nobody checks their fantasy points during a counter-attack.

Half-time is the busiest window of the lot. Group chats fill up over the referee, the fantasy app recalculates, someone reopens a tab on Clubhouse for a couple of minutes, and a food order goes in before the restart. Broadcasters sell advertising against that break. The phone competes with it quietly, and mostly wins.

Inside a stadium the pattern repeats with better wifi and worse patience. Fans there reach for their phones between plays for:

  1. Replays of the incident they just watched with their own eyes, from a better angle.
  2. Scores from the other fixtures that affect their table.
  3. Photos, mostly bad, uploaded immediately.
  4. A live commentary feed, running ahead of the picture on the big screen.

The single-screen fan has not vanished

Roughly seven in ten fans still name live events as their favourite kind of sports content. Among Gen Z and millennials that figure drops to 58 percent, which is a quiet warning for anyone selling broadcast rights on the assumption that the match itself is the main event. Highlights, clips and reaction videos are gaining on it.

Scale makes the habit visible. This summer’s World Cup ran 104 matches across 39 days, and every one of them generated its own parallel storm of chats, checks, refreshes and orders. The broadcast was the anchor. It was not the whole experience, and for a growing share of the audience it has not been for years.