You’ve heard of NBA Twitter. Now, get ready for NFL Reddit.
Like on many social media platforms, sports communities tend to gather on Reddit to discuss everything from memes to stats. The platform is home to more than 1,000 active sports communities generating 249 million monthly engagements, according to data Reddit shared last year.
“Reddit has always been a home for the leagues and the fans,” Jonathan Flesher, Reddit’s VP of business development and partnerships, told Marketing Brew at Cannes Lions. Even so, there wasn’t historically “much of a holistic push behind” partnering with teams and leagues, he said.
But last summer, Reddit “took a page out of Twitter’s book,” Fletcher told us—in part thanks to Reddit’s head of content partnerships, Sarah Rosen, who previously worked at the company now known as X. At that point, Reddit started working more deliberately with sports organizations through a partnership program that’s designed to create additional sports content for users and advertisers alike.
A year later, Reddit is continuing to grow the program, he said, especially among sports communities outside the US.
Revving up: The first group of organizations involved in the program are all based in the US but have fans around the world, including the NFL, NBA, MLB, PGA Tour, and Nascar.
The NFL has had a presence on Reddit since 2019, and has been testing out the channel for a few years. During its 2023 season, the league opened video content to advertisers, and last year, it hosted a live AMA with Pro Bowl players, which it followed up with a schedule release AMA ahead of the 2024 season.
With Nascar, Reddit teamed up with JD Motorsports and driver Ryan Vargas in 2022 to wrap his car in a design that featured the usernames of hundreds of members of the r/Nascar community as a nod to the fans. It was a hit. “They went nuts,” Flesher said.
No days off: Sports fans—and advertisers, for that matter—have an appetite for all kinds of content on social, and Reddit is no exception. Highlights almost always perform well for teams and leagues across social platforms, and Flesher said they’ve proven a popular product among Reddit advertisers, too. During one test campaign that ran against video content from the NFL as part of the partnership program, an alcoholic beverage brand saw an 11-point increase in purchase intent, a 9-point increase in favorability, and almost a 6-point bump in awareness, according to the platform.
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Reddit could eventually offer advertisers sponsored sports AMAs, Flesher told us. That kind of content could be particularly useful during offseasons, when leagues lack new highlight clips to share but are eager to continue engaging with their fan bases.
“Fans don’t have an offseason,” Flesher said. “In many ways, you’ll see the activity that happens within a subreddit around a sport can be as engaged or even more engaged in the offseason.”
Supercharge: As Reddit leans further into sports, Flesher said he sees opportunities with more global sports, like cricket. Last week, Reddit announced cricket icon and former captain of the Indian national team Sachin Tendulkar as a brand ambassador. Other international sports already have a presence: Last year, Reddit partnered with Serie A to establish the Italian soccer league on the platform.
While Reddit might sometimes be considered a place for die-hard sports fans, who might gather on the platform to get in the weeds about topics like the mechanics of Formula 1 cars in r/F1Technical, there’s also space for more casual fans; the r/formuladank subreddit, for instance, is filled with memes as opposed to talk of different types of tires.
Going forward, Reddit wants to foster it all, Flesher said.
“What we’re trying to do with all the leagues is help bring the casual fans into becoming more superfans, and then the uninitiated into the casual fan,” he said. “It’s that entire pyramid of fandom.”
Correction 6/24/2025: This piece has been edited to update Jonathan Flesher’s title.
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