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The Indian Premier League remains the only Asia Pacific sports property priced at the top of the global market, according to new research from Media Partners Asia, which expects growth in the region’s sports rights
fees to slow to 1%–2% a year through 2030, down from about 10% a year since 2021.
The cricket league earns about $12.4 million a match, in line with the Premier League, MPA said. Korea’s KBO baseball league earns about $100,000. India accounted for more than half of the increase in the region’s rights fees since 2021, and 64% of all fees is now concentrated in the 12 most valuable rights packages.
The figures come from “APAC’s Sports Economy and Where Value Goes Next,” an MPA report covering 14 markets that draws on the company’s tracking of 150-plus rights contracts across properties and markets. MPA has published a summary of that report alongside findings from “APAC Sports Fandom: The Consumer’s Voice,” a companion study by ampd, MPA’s data and analytics arm, which polled 10,249 fans across six markets. The summary coincides with the second edition of MPA’s APOS Sports Edge forum, held at The METT in Singapore in the run-up to the city’s Formula 1 Grand Prix weekend.
MPA puts the region’s commercial sports economy at $16.2 billion in 2026. Media rights are the biggest category, worth $6.1 billion, followed by sponsorship at $4.7 billion, ticketing and hospitality at $3.9 billion and merchandise at $1.5 billion.
Rights fees rose 58% over five years to $5.7 billion. The wider sports economy is projected to expand by around 5% annually, reaching roughly $19.5 billion by 2030, with sponsorship and ticket sales doing most of the lifting.
Streaming services paid 50% of rights fees this year, up from 36% in 2021. MPA said streamers now determine pricing in most markets. Yet just 3% of lapsed fans who returned to a sport did so because it appeared on a platform they already used, according to MPA.
“This is not the end of sport’s boom in Asia Pacific. It is the end of the easy part,” said Vivek Couto, CEO and executive director of MPA.
Couto said the region generates about $4 in commercial sports revenue per person, compared with upward of $200 in North America. “That gap is not a ceiling. It is headroom. The next dollar will come from the seat, the sponsor, the local star and the women’s game, and it will go to the rights-holders who know their fans by name,” he said.
MPA estimates that sponsorship priced on audience data could grow 6%–7% a year to 2030. In China, India, Korea and Southeast Asia, sponsorship spending as a share of GDP trails the worldwide benchmark. If those markets made up half of that shortfall, the region would gain about $5.4 billion a year, the company said.
The report singles out Japan, women’s competitions and homegrown stars as the areas most likely to draw competing bids. Japan’s subscription streaming market, worth $6.4 billion, is six times the size of its sports rights fees. In India, the final of the 2025 Women’s Cricket World Cup drew 185 million digital viewers, and MPA expects contested bidding for women’s properties, beginning with the WPL’s 2028 rights cycle.
Home-grown properties are already pulling crowds. KBO attendance reached 12.3 million in 2025, a record, up from 7.3 million in 2019, while more than 25 million viewers in Japan watched the opening game of Major League Baseball’s 2025 Tokyo Series. The Nippon-Ham Fighters posted revenue 59% above 2019 levels in their first year as owners of Es Con Field.
MPA tallied roughly $14 billion of investment and ownership changes in APAC sport since 2021, the bulk of it in IPL franchises and venues. The company argued that the spending has so far secured scarce assets without generating cash flow.
The ampd fan research, conducted online in Indonesia, Japan, Korea, the Philippines, Thailand and Australia and supplemented by 1,029 video interviews, found that personal connections are the most common route into a sport for new fans. Some 35% of respondents who picked up a sport for the first time were introduced by someone they knew, against 14% who came in through a major event. And 63% of fans who spent money on sport over the past year bought no subscription.
Creators also hold fans’ attention. Independent creators capture 42%–43% of sports viewing hours on YouTube in Korea and Thailand, while league and club channels take 10%–19%. And 84% of fans who track players, pundits or creators spent on sport last year, compared with 43% of those who track none.
“Fans follow their country, their club and the player from home, and global leagues win fans here through a local star,” said Dhivya T, head of insights at ampd and MPA, who is presenting the fan research at the forum.
More than 30 speakers are taking part in the full-day event, including Liberty Media president and CEO Derek Chang, LaLiga president Javier Tebas, JioStar vice chair Uday Shankar, Prime Video Sport International managing director Alex Green, Tving CEO Julie Choi and Visa Cash App Racing Bulls F1 Team CEO Peter Bayer, along with executives from the Bundesliga, the J.League, Netflix and YouTube.
