DAZN Launches New Global Sports Creator Initiative ‘Playmakers’

Sports broadcaster platform DAZN has announced the beginning of the new platform, which aims at making the streaming service the ultimate home of sports on social media.

The platform will partner with Social media personalities from across the sporting world and give them access to DAZN resources, events, merchandise and more, in return for content creation.

‘Creator-led content consistently outperforms brand-owned assets…creators are essential to shaping conversation in sport’ the company said in a press release about the platform.

The initiative will start with recruiting social media personalities to compliment current DAZN projects and content, in a comparable way to how Sky Sports operates with content creators.

Long term plans involve Playmakers becoming a standalone ecosystem in which influencers can move between and grow inside of, with continuous daily content.

Adam Knappy, CMO of DAZN Group, has big ambitions for the project:

‘Our ambition is to build the world’s largest and most credible creator community across every sport’

The move is one never seen before in sports media, with the platform giving social media influencers more of a stable involvement with the company, as opposed to freelance type hiring seen in the industry currently.

From a business stand-point, the goal seems clear: Make popular social media personalities synonymous with the DAZN brand, and create recognisable faces of the company.

This may be new in the sports commentary scene, but DAZN’s project seems to have taken a note out of the fashion industry, specifically with the likes of JD Sports and FOOTASYLUM, two companies that have seen almost an entire separate culture surround them from their involvement with UK Influencers including Angry Ginge and the Sidemen.

With a new wave of sports commentary influencers on the rise on TikTok especially, DAZN are the first ones to fully embrace the swing in viewership from traditional sources to peer created ones. 

DAZN is not the first of the so-called ‘traditional media’ to recognise social media creators’ part to play in the future of sports reporting, with Sky Sports’ football-focused ‘Saturday Social’ seeing relative success since its launch in 2019.

With big ambitions for the future of Playmakers, it seems DAZN are willing to gamble on social media's continued growth in sports consumption, and will be one to watch should it pay off.