Growth of Sports Podcasts on Spotify

2020 was dubbed as the year of audio boom and no podcasts played a major role in proving the trend right. The hunger of consumption of good opinionated, informative content further strengthened the need for the podcast boom.

2020 also saw exponential growth in podcast hosting services each fighting to own market share in various categories of podcast topics/genres. It was nothing but a natural evolution for Spotify to enter into the podcast space.

After Spotify announced the buy out of The Ringer, sports podcasts have exploded and Spotify has managed to do a great job in bringing the best of sports podcasts to their platform.

Football is one of the biggest sports podcast categories on Spotify and it has been the fastest-growing sport on Spotify podcasts. COVID-19 has also played a huge role in ensuring the growth of fans wanting to listen to podcasts especially during the lockdown in April when football was suspended. Football so badly missed that according to Front Office Sports, In major football markets like Europe, Africa and the Middle East, Spotify found that a majority of fans miss the sounds of packed games, with a third of them using soccer songs and anthems to recreate the ambience.

Sports will continue to drive the growth of podcasts on Spotify and here is an indication of the current performance of sports podcasts which show the dominance of sports podcasts on Spotify:

Spotify experienced a 30% surge in listeners since the COVID-19 pandemic.

Football (Soccer) is the most popular sport on Spotify.

There are 40,000+ playlists featuring the word “Football”created in the last four months.

One of the fastest-growing sports podcast consuming counties on Spotify is India! There has been a 5X growth of sports podcast consumers from India.