By: Trevor Dsouza, Investment Director, Radix Media MENA

In a region built by diaspora, sport became the most human asset on the table. Most brands are still buying it like inventory.

It’s a Tuesday night in Karama. The cafe at the end of the road has rearranged its chairs to face one screen. There is a Sri Lankan family in the corner, two Egyptian engineers near the door, a group of Filipino nurses ordering karak, and somebody’s uncle who has been there since the warm-up. Liverpool are playing Arsenal. None of them are from England. All of them are emotionally present in a way the rest of the week’s media will never get them to be.

That room is the most valuable attention in marketing right now. And almost no brand brief in this region has been written to understand why.

The last room AI can’t enter

For five years, the industry has been arguing about attention. Who’s got it. Where it’s gone. What it costs to buy back. AI has made the question worse, not better. Content is infinite now. Copy writes itself. Generative tools can produce a campaign before the brief is even signed off. The supply side has collapsed, and the only thing scarcer than attention is honest attention.

DataReportal’s Digital 2026: UAE report puts internet penetration here at 99 percent. There are 12.5 million social media identities in a country of roughly 11.4 million people. Mobile connections sit at 202 percent of the population. Reach hasn’t been the problem in this region for a decade. The problem we keep avoiding is presence — whether anyone is actually inside the impression they’re being counted for.

Live sport is one of the very few environments where the answer is yes. A 30-second placement during a Champions League knockout, an India-Pakistan group stage, a UFC fight night in Abu Dhabi — those don’t behave like normal digital impressions. The viewer is emotionally locked in. They are not multitasking through it. They are not muting it. They remember it.

That’s the asset. Not the eyeballs. The presence.

Fandom here travels with the passport

Western fan-journey models start with geography. You inherit a team because you were born near it. You become a fan because your father was a fan. You stay loyal because your local stadium tells you to.

That model doesn’t survive contact with this region.

A huge proportion of the population in the UAE, KSA, Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain and Oman are expatriates, transient professionals, or first-generation residents building lives away from where they grew up. For many of them, watching sport is one of the few recurring rituals that keeps them anchored to home, language, family, memory. A Liverpool match isn’t content. It’s familiarity in a city where everything else moves fast. An India-Pakistan game in a tower flat in Business Bay isn’t a broadcast — it’s a phone call with a grandfather, in screen form. An Al Ahly fixture, an NBA playoff series, a Pakistan cricket game in a cafe off Sheikh Zayed Road — these aren’t audiences. They are people performing an emotional homing ritual that the rest of the working week doesn’t allow them.

Fandom here is portable. People carry it across borders, jobs and life stages. That makes the relationship more intentional, more emotionally preserved, more commercially valuable than the inherited version most fan-journey diagrams are still mapping for.

Marketers planning against a “single sport, single audience” assumption are leaving the most distinct attention market in the world un-planned-for. A fan in Dubai can wake up supporting Arsenal, follow an NBA player on Instagram between meetings, watch UFC on a Saturday night, and spend Sunday in a WhatsApp group debating cricket. That fluidity isn’t a deviation from the market. It is the market.

The phone is the second venue

The other thing the diagrams miss is where the consumption actually happens.

The platform stack here is an unholy mix. Linear TV is still huge — beIN Sports remains the anchor of the live experience for football, F1, tennis. Shahid and Starzplay layer regional content access on top of it. Then the second screen lights up. TikTok highlights, YouTube Shorts clips, Instagram Stories rolling, WhatsApp forwards of the actual goal moment landing in seven group chats before the replay even runs.

This is not the additive layer to the broadcast. It is the broadcast.

The match is the trigger. The conversation is the consumption. The phone in the hand of the fan in the majlis is not distracting them from the game. The phone is where the game gets metabolised into identity. Group chats. Voice notes. Memes within ninety seconds of the goal. Snaps tagging the cousin in Cairo who picked the wrong team.

The audience here also has a much higher tolerance for time-shifted fandom than Western markets. People don’t always consume the sport live in the traditional sense. They consume the emotional peak moments socially — via clips, group chats, reaction videos, voice notes, hours after the whistle. The value isn’t only in the live broadcast. It’s in the velocity of shared emotion after the moment happens.

This collapses things Western markets gave up a decade ago. Multigenerational viewing is still normal here. A grandfather, a father and a son on the same sofa, watching the same screen. The marketing implication is huge — you are not addressing a demographic. You are addressing a household. And in a region where social circles can otherwise fragment by nationality, profession, or income, sport temporarily collapses the hierarchy. A CEO, a delivery rider, an entire family of expats, and a group of students can all be reacting to the same moment, at the same time, with the same intensity. There is no other moment in the marketing year that does that.

Brands keep treating this as a broadcast opportunity. It is a community opportunity with a broadcast nailed to the front of it.

Athlete, creator, convener — the model in between

The athlete conversation is the next place the regional brief gets it wrong.

For thirty years, the endorsement model was built on proximity. A local athlete represented a local audience. That worked in markets where fandom was geographically concentrated. It doesn’t work here. The fan in Dubai isn’t waiting for the next Emirati F1 driver to feel represented. They’ve already chosen Hamilton, or Verstappen, or whoever they grew up watching. The local-vs-global debate is a false choice.

The more interesting model sits in between. The athlete-creator hybrid. The personality who competes, makes content, speaks to multiple communities at once, collaborates with creators outside their own sport, and builds a direct relationship with fans that doesn’t depend on the next result.

In a region this culturally layered, the future sports property may not be a team or a league. It may be a single person who can perform, entertain, and convene a community across borders. The brief shifts. The question stops being “which athlete should we sponsor?” and starts being “which communities are we trying to participate in?” The athlete becomes the access point. The community is the asset.

That changes who matters. The athlete with the smaller competitive record but the stronger cultural orchestration will, in many cases, be the more commercially valuable signing. That’s already true outside this region. It will be more true here than anywhere else, because of how the fandom travels.

Access is cheap. Relevance is the asset.

Here is what I would not want a CMO to do after reading this piece.

Mistake access for relevance.

A lot of brands see the power of sports fandom and immediately conclude that they need a bigger sponsorship, a bigger athlete, a bigger rights package, a more famous club. They assume proximity to fandom transfers affinity to the brand. It rarely does.

The failure mode is treating sports audiences as inventory rather than communities. Just because millions of people are watching the match doesn’t mean they’re waiting for a brand to enter the conversation. Sports fans here are extraordinarily good at filtering out commercial noise. The more passionate the fan, the more sensitive they are to brands that arrive opportunistically.

I’d also caution against treating athlete partnerships as influencer marketing with a different logo attached. Influencer campaigns are built around reach and content output. A real athlete partnership is built around credibility, identity and long-term association. Those are not the same objective.

The brands that win in sport don’t ask, “how do we get seen?” They ask, “what role do we earn within this community?” That is a much harder question. It forces you past impressions and into utility, story, ritual, access. It forces you to think about whether you are actually enhancing the fan experience or just standing next to it with a logo.

Reduce it to a sentence. Brands here still think they are sponsoring sport. Increasingly, they are sponsoring emotional infrastructure. The match is the trigger point. The real value sits in ritual, belonging, memory, conversation, identity reinforcement. That is a far deeper role than visibility — and a far more expensive one to fake.

Sports fandom cannot be bought. It has to be earned. That is the distinction between sponsorship and participation. One purchases exposure. The other builds relevance.

The next decade of sports marketing in MENA will be defined by which brands understand that difference first. The room in Karama is already there. It has been there. The question is whether the brief on your desk reflects it yet.