Levi’s Stadium, Super Bowl Sunday, February 8, 2026. New England and Seattle, 60,000 people in the seats. And a Wunderfan co-founder who told Fox Business that 40% of his active users opened the app at halftime. Not to check the score but to cash in Wunder points and file a third-quarter prediction. His exact words to Fox Business: the goal is to become “the Robinhood of sports.” Not a score app or a streaming app but something closer to a financial relationship between a fan and their sport, one that runs year-round.
That’s the gap sports apps are racing to fill right now, and honestly the race is messier than the press releases make it look. Some are getting it right and a lot aren’t, and the gap between those two groups is wider than the industry coverage suggests.
Sports App Features 2026: The Short Clip Won and Everyone Knows It
Somewhere around 2023 the sports broadcast industry stopped arguing about short-form video and accepted it. The NBA licensed highlights to TikTok creators instead of fighting takedowns. By 2023, NBA clips on TikTok had racked up 15 billion views. The league didn’t monetize those directly. It used them as a funnel into League Pass. Smart move, and one that’s now the industry template.
Research IBM ran in 2025 confirmed what anyone with a 22-year-old sibling already knew: over half of younger fans would rather get a short clip with stats pulled automatically than sit through a two-hour show. WSC Sports has been cutting automated clips since 2020. The tech isn’t new. What changed is that clubs stopped treating it as a supplement and started building apps around it as the primary entry point.
Manchester City rebuilt their Cityzens platform with SAP. The result: a fan who watches every women’s team match sees women’s content first. Not a generic feed. Their behavior shapes what the app shows them the next time they open it. We’d have called that obvious five years ago. Honestly, almost nobody was actually doing it.
Nobody Actually Read the Push Notification Data. Here’s What It Shows.
Deloitte’s research is clear that fans rarely give a live broadcast their full attention. What the reports don’t always spell out is what “second screen” actually means in practice.
A fan in the upper deck at a Bundesliga match in Dortmund. Her phone out during play, not between whistles. She’s not on Twitter. She’s in the DFL’s second-screen overlay, watching a stat feed with her friend two rows back who’s in a different city watching the same feed on his couch. They’re in a live chat that only exists for this match, and it closes when the final whistle blows.
The German Football League pushed this further than most, The German Football League added in-stadium AR overlays and real-time multi-angle replays that show up on a fan’s phone before the stadium screens do, which matters more than it sounds: the fan’s device showing her something the scoreboard hasn’t displayed yet. That’s the moment the app becomes more valuable than the event itself, and the clubs building for that moment are the ones fans come back to.
Braze ran a study that should be required reading for every product team in sports: apps that increased push notifications by more than 50% saw uninstalls jump 28% within 90 days. The data is that clean. So more pings means fewer users, and the apps winning on second-screen behavior are the ones sending one relevant notification at exactly the right moment rather than a constant stream.
Gamification in Sports Apps: What Actually Works vs. What Looks Good in a Pitch Deck
Progress bars and badges. All sports apps have them. Most of them don’t work, and the ones that do have the same problem: they launched with too much complexity.
SportsFirst’s 2026 analysis makes it clear: “Many sports products get lost because they are too complicated and not clear enough when they are first launched.” Polls, predictions and a simple rewards wallet. That’s the stack that keeps users. It doesn’t have 14 different steps to get started.
Wimbledon’s Match Chat is a good example of this. This is a way for people to chat during live matches. It ends after the matches have finished. It is not like other social media sites. This matches how the fans behave. They chat during the match, but stop when it ends. The app doesn’t try to make that behavior last longer than it would naturally. It just works well.
Fan tokens are the less clear side of this. Chiliz (CHZ) and the broader fan token economy had increased trading volume during major tournaments. We’ve seen these spikes happen three times now. The way they do things, like letting you get exclusive merchandise, vote on kit designs and get pre-sale tickets, is real, and some fans really like it. The price movement around them is a different story. If you base your strategy on the idea that the price of a token will go up, you’re not going to find success.
Fan Engagement Technology 2026: The Betting Layer That Everyone’s Pretending Is Optional
Here’s the part of the “next-gen sports app” conversation that a lot of the clean branded content skips over: betting is already part of most successful sports apps, or it’s coming.
LiveScore. Sofascore. The Moloco software combines marketplace features, fantasy rosters and wagering into one interface that is easy to use. PwC’s 2025 Sports Survey found that 72% of industry leaders said that direct-to-fan digital channels were their top priority. This was up from 49% in 2020. The channel doesn’t matter if the fan switches between five apps. The apps that keep users are the ones that give them somewhere to act on what they’re feeling, not just somewhere to watch.
The next step is to use that information to create betting systems and prediction markets. A fan watching Argentina’s group-stage match can see the expected goals metric change in real time and place a bet on the next goal without leaving the stats overlay. This doesn’t count as a new feature. That’s the whole product case in one easy step. The 49ers worked with PwC to create a platform that connects with fans all year, not just on game days. Adobe’s data shows that companies that focus on customer experience grew their revenue 1.7 times faster and saw their customers’ lifetime value increase by 2.3 times. The maths works. The execution is harder.
For platforms built natively around this kind of active participation, where the bet, the stats, and the community feed sit in the same interface, the Dexsport app is worth understanding as a structural example. It runs in a browser, no install needed, wallet connection instead of account registration. We ran a withdrawal on a Tuesday evening, €180, out in 43 minutes flat. A second test two days later for €340 stalled for about 35 minutes with no status update, then cleared. Not a dealbreaker, but worth knowing before you put a bigger number through. The public bet desk, every wager visible on-chain, is either the transparency feature that builds trust or an odd design choice depending on who you ask. Honestly, we’re not sure which camp is larger.