Paid media: the fastest way for sports organizations to recruit new fans

Great content is the foundation of every sports account. But on today’s platforms, great content alone doesn’t guarantee reach. Algorithms reward what’s already performing, and new markets rarely discover a club by chance. That is where paid media changes the game.

At Samba Digital, we don’t see paid media as a separate discipline. We see it as an accelerator for the content we already produce: the right video, shown to the right fans, in the right country, at the right moment.

Always-on plus reactive: the Ligue 1 model

For the past two seasons, we have run paid media strategy and execution for the LFP, with a focus on Meta and TikTok in priority markets. Our approach combines two layers:

• Always-on campaigns that build steady audience growth all season long.
• Reactive, highly targeted campaigns built around key moments: results, transfer windows and standout player or team performances.

In 2025–26, this model reached 1 billion fans and recruited 5M new fans on TikTok and Meta.

Opening new countries

Paid media is especially powerful when a club wants to grow in a specific market.

• DFB in the USA. Ahead of the 2026 World Cup, the German Football Association asked us to grow its reach in the US. From September to November 2025, 59 boost campaigns on Facebook and Instagram, focused on video and Gen Z and Millennial audiences, generated 12M impressions and 78K new followers.
• Bayer 04 Leverkusen in Brazil. To accelerate growth on the club’s Brazilian Instagram channel, we targeted Brazil with dedicated content and local legends, reaching a cost per engagement of €0.003.
• Nottingham Forest on TikTok. We ran two parallel acquisition tracks: dedicated campaigns for Brazil and “worldwide” campaigns prioritizing countries where the club’s players come from. Result: 298K new followers over the season.

A growth lever for every budget

Paid media also accelerates growth for clubs with lighter budgets. Alongside our short-form production, a paid acquisition layer helped RC Lens gain 500K new TikTok followers between July 2025 and March 2026. Cercle Brugge added 70K on a light budget, and Olympique de Marseille’s Arabic-language content, geotargeted on the Maghreb, gained 63K.

In tennis and cycling, the logic is the same. On the brand-new Rolex Paris Masters TikTok account, paid media helped reach 60K followers in a month and a half, making it the third most-followed Masters 1000 tournament on the platform. For Team Cofidis, paid campaigns targeted key regions and boosted top content during the Tour de France, helping the TikTok account reach 17.9M video views between January and September 2025.

Paid media also fills stadiums and venues

Paid media is not only about followers. For a Ligue 1 watch party in Rio de Janeiro around PSG vs Lyon, one of the two objectives was to drive attendance through paid campaigns, with a dedicated team including a paid media manager and local community managers.

Three rules we follow

• Boost what already works. Paid amplifies the best organic content; it doesn’t replace it.
• Target with intent. Country, language and audience age come first, before budget.
• Follow the calendar. Transfers, derbies and tournaments are when fans are most ready to follow.

Want to turn your content into fan growth? Talk to Samba Digital.