The National Football League, National Hockey League, National Basketball Association, Major League Baseball, and NCAA.
That is a list of some of the world’s biggest sports properties, all of which have staged regular-season games in international markets across 2025. This year has proven, if nothing else, that internationalization is here to stay among elite sports properties.
Go deeper with GlobalData
Discover B2B Marketing That Performs
Combine business intelligence and editorial excellence to reach engaged professionals across 36 leading media platforms.
This is not the start of the trend; indeed, the US major leagues have been playing games abroad for decades already, but it has been kicked into overdrive as of late. Thus far in 2025, European soccer’s Serie A and LaLiga have both joined the swathes of leagues looking to grow revenue by bringing games to new audiences (although LaLiga has already scrapped those plans).
Of course, monetizing these games, which for the likes of the NFL and MLB have become tentpole events, is more complex than simply placing a fixture in a new country. Areas such as ticketing, hospitality, and travel must all be considered as tools to power the commercialization of these events, ensuring they are as sustainable off the pitch as well as on it.
Among all these weapons, merchandising remains key.
These leagues, by and large, are partnered with Fanatics. NFL, MLB, NBA, and NHL, the four most prominent sports properties in the US, all have partnerships with the US-based e-commerce giant, but its influence stretches far further than just the US.
US Tariffs are shifting - will you react or anticipate?
Don’t let policy changes catch you off guard. Stay proactive with real-time data and expert analysis.
By GlobalDataElsewhere, Fanatics also has deals in place with major soccer leagues and clubs, rugby competitions and teams, professional wrestling promotions (WWE), motorsport series (F1), prominent golf events, tennis tournaments, and more. These deals span areas such as merchandising, retail operation, e-commerce, uniform provision, collectables, trading cards, and even, recently, live events.
The scale of Fanatics’ business is such that in 2024, the business said its revenue totaled $8.1 billion, up 36%, putting it ahead of other major sports-focused consumer-facing businesses such as video game company EA and sportswear heavyweight Puma. Over 900 sports properties globally are partnered with Fanatics, with the firm subsequently servicing over 190 territories with its delivery business, aided by over 80 international facilities. Much of this has been powered by the growing interest in US sports, which has expanded retail sales globally as these leagues enter new markets.
“The growth in American sport is unstoppable,” commented Stephen Dowling, to Sportcal (GlobalData Sport).
As the president for international business at Fanatics’ commerce arm, Dowling oversees the company’s global expansion push, which has gone hand in hand with that of its major US clients. While soccer, he admits, is Fanatics International’s most popular sport by far, the growing number of international games at the likes of the NFL is driving significant growth for both the company and its partners.
Capitalizing on events
Dowling speaks to Sportcal in between fixtures of the NFL’s annual slate of international games, which now total seven across five markets. The most recent of these, in Berlin, Germany, took place on November 9, and Fanatics’ ubiquitous presence around the city is illustrative of its international growth over the past number of years.
The business, Dowling says, has grown “at a clip of 40% to 50%” when focusing on non-US business alone. Australia and New Zealand, he adds, have been the fastest-growing markets for Fanatics over recent years, although they are also the company’s newest international markets. This again has been powered by the massive expansion in the business’s partnership portfolio in these markets, which in a short time already includes
Year-round presence alongside leagues and clubs is obviously the bread and butter of any merchandising and e-commerce offering, but with association to major sports properties comes access to major tentpole events, access that has quickly become a major revenue driver for Fanatics, not solely through simple merchandise provision, but by improving the fan experience
“Our idea is, from the airport to the final whistle, no matter where you are, no matter what type of product you want, we can get it to you,” explains Dowling.
This means that, around the NFL’s international fixtures, Fanatics established airport pop-ups in each of the host cities to facilitate merchandising for those flying in and out to the fixtures from the teams’ home markets, and facilitate click-and-collect sales for those who wanted to pre-purchase items before arriving, an effort that also helped to reduce queue lengths.
Dowling adds that efforts such as this have helped NFL e-commerce to grow at “about 50%”. For last weekend’s NFL game in Berlin, the first-ever fixture in the city (which is situated in one of the NFL’s biggest international markets), Fanatics once again managed e-commerce and opened a physical retail store in the city center for 10 weeks to support the endeavor.
“We like partners who want to break the mold, because that's where the growth will come from. I like to write the news rather than read the news.”
“The number one question I ask [to prospective partners] is,” Dowling reveals, “Can I make your fan experience better? If Fanatics can't make it better than it already is, then there's no point in us partnering. We look for partners that push us and that are ambitious.”
The success of such projects is already evident in what Fanatics has done in global markets this year through other collaborations, says Dowling, claiming that it pulled in $40 million in merchandising sales for the MLB Tokyo Series back in March.
“In Tokyo, we had a 27,000 square foot megastore, with 200 tills and 400 staff,” he says, before explaining: “If the leagues, the teams, and the players are going to invest in internationalization, then as the official retail partner for the NFL, we want to set the pace as well.”
Focusing on the fan engagement element of all these events ties into one of the core tenets of the business’s overall consumer growth strategy, which is to leverage the emotion that comes with sports, both in the digital realm and the physical one.
Fanatics, in total, operates over 75 stores globally and covers over 400 annual events, but Dowling says they are not just a “rack and stack” company.
“I'm a huge believer in the role of people being able to see, touch, smell, stretch, and try [the merchandise]. You just can't replicate some of that online. Sport has emotion. This isn't stocking a supermarket. If you walk into our NBA store in London, one of the first things you see is a display where a kid can compare their hand size to LeBron James’.
"Whether they buy something or not, I promise you the family is taking a photo of that, and they're talking to their friends in school about that. That's the emotional part of sports retail and fandom that our stores have to have.”
Story-led growth
This focus on leveraging the emotional aspects of sport fandom is a core aspect of Fanatics’ revenue generation strategy and goes hand in hand with the partnership strategy.
“I think brand-led, story-led growth and full price growth is a key metric. Anybody can grow a business by trading something into the ground, so what I'm proud of in the last year and a half, for all of our partners who are driving the KPI of full price demand, what you're seeing is an explosion [because] the matrix of what you can buy around a club now from technical [to] collaborations… is exploding.”
This has meant not only sports property collaborations, but additionally combining those with cultural properties to widen the target audience.
At the MLB Tokyo Series, Fanatics partnered with Japanese designer Takeshi Murakami to produce a merchandise capsule collection surrounding the event, while in Berlin, the company has produced co-branded clothing utilizing popular German children’s TV cartoons Benjamin Blümchen and Bibi Blocksberg, capitalizing on nostalgia for these characters and combining that with affinity for local teams, a move that serve to ingratiate the franchises with the local market as well as inspiring sales.
Over the past few years, as cultural tastes and fan demographics change, sport has bridged a gap from the area of niche teamwear to attain crossover fashion and lifestyle brand appeal. This is a trend that has manifested not just in domestic markets but international ones, particularly regarding the major US sports leagues, which have made themselves and their franchises internationally recognized brands, which is why such crossovers hold wide appeal beyond the primary sports market.
In many cases, it even helps to bring merchandise to underserved markets. Dowling points to a recent collaboration between the NFL, NHL, and female-focused athleisure brand Lululemon.
“Most of the buyers of that collection were new. So ask yourself, why? And it's probably because the sport hasn't done a service in serving ‘her’, versus just shrinking and pinking a jersey, right? So new product segments, [particularly] fashion, are a huge growth opportunity, and as long as you do it right, with the right taste.”
All of this is in service of not just the ‘fan’, Dowling explains, but rather every fan, as personalization now is the biggest differentiator in a crowded sports merchandising marketplace.
“Today, a challenge for the industry is that it's too average. One size fits all executed at retail or e-commerce just isn't good enough.
“We want to max the average fan’s experience. And you could say is that fans who want a luxury product and a designer like a Burberry or Murakami, or is it fans that actually want value because they don't have that much to spend on sports merchandise? We have to have something for everybody, and show the same experience for those consumer sets.”
Story-led growth must, he says, no matter the market, be done atop a strong e-commerce backbone. Scarcity, for example, is both a tool and a dangerous pitfall, he explains. While not being afraid to sell out of a limited-time capsule collection can help drive up values and consumer interest, it shouldn’t be at the expense of your primary purpose. An example he points to is perhaps the cornerstone of every individual club partner, the first-team home shirt.
“I think clubs should be careful to never forget their roots. You're a sports club, and if your home jersey is not available, but you're pushing fashion collaborations to people, something's gone wrong.”
Indeed, at the Fanatics NFL store in Berlin, ahead of Sunday’s game, while collaborative and single-event limited merchandise is front-and-center, the racks throughout the store are lined with Indianapolis Colts and Atlanta Falcons jerseys, which have been drafted in to replace the hefty number that have already been sold.
