June 2024 represented a watershed moment for the sport.
In the space of a week, X Games and Shaun White announced new action sports leagues, the X Games League (XGL) and the Snow League, respectively, which are structured but rooted in a non-unusual principle: action sports athletes deserve to make a solid source of income thanks to competition.
The Snow League plans to launch in 2025 with five halfpipe events: ski-only, initially, and then freestyle, which will debut midway through the first season. White said the league, which will use an individual format, plans to move up more disciplines. in the future. The combined bag for the first season will cost $1. 5 million.
XGL, which will launch in 2026, will feature a mixed-gender and multidisciplinary team format, with athletes competing in four winter and four summer events consistent with the year. The team format will offer salaries to athletes, as well as sponsorship deals and, ideally, it will also offer benefits.
June also saw the conclusion of the Olympic Qualifier Series (OQS), a two-stage festival, the first of its kind in this Olympic cycle, which largely decided which BMX freestyle, break, skate and sport climbing athletes would participate. qualifying for Paris 2024, as well as the announcement of a new skate festival, the Rockstar Energy Open, which will begin in August.
Action sports, or excessive sports, saw an explosion of interest after the pandemic restrictions of 2020. According to a report via Gitnux, the global action sports industry is expected to earn $648. 79 billion through 2027, with an expansion of 4. 6%. it represents more than 35% of the total market share; The U. S. extreme sports market is expected to be in the U. S. The U. S. economy will grow at a CAGR of 3. 8% between 2020 and 2025.
As other people turned to new things like cycling, skateboarding, skiing, and snowboarding, their interest in following professional athletes in those sports grew.
Over the past 12 months, X Games has noticed significant audience growth, adding a 113% increase in streaming audiences and 1. 6 million new followers on social media. The brand’s progression has been key for MSP Sports Capital, which took ownership of X Games in 2022. .
“We’re seeing a lot of attractive advancements in sports houses, for example, TGL’s new field trip, Tiger [Woods] and Rory [McIlroy’s],” snowboarder and nine-time X Games medalist Scotty James, who joined the X Games as a member, investor and advisor in the summer of 2023, told me. Athletes are starting to get a feel for competitions. They increase fan engagement, put enthusiasts first, and ask, “How can we get more people interested in our sport?”That’s all I’d like to do for the X. Games.
Shaun White founded the Snow League on a similar principle. He also cited the World Surf League (WSL) as a style for a consistent competitive circuit, with scenarios that enthusiasts can follow for a season.
Of course, those leagues aren’t absolutely new. Skateboarding has the Street League (SLS), which allows athletes to accumulate points in each of them to avoid a championship tour. The SLS was expanded in 2024 to an eight-stage schedule, adding four foreign major leagues. and 3 new APEX Challenge Events, all of which contributed to the season’s issue rankings to determine invitations to the Super Crown Championship.
Snowboarding has the FIS Snowboard World Cup, in which athletes compete on occasions of parallel slalom, parallel slalom, snowboard cross, halfpipe, slicestyle and big air over the course of a season, and skiing in the FIS Freestyle Ski World Cup, with tycoons and jumps. , skiing, cross, halfpipe, slicestyle and big air. Both sports also host annual Grand Prix competitions.
“The Grand Prix and the FIS are the closest thing to each other, which is wonderful because they come in both seasons and they do skiing and snowboarding events,” White said, stressing that he has no plans for the Snow League to “fight against” the FIS.
“We need to pass out and make things happen,” White said, “but we need to work with other people in and around the game. We need to do something exclusive and create this first league for [snowboarding and freeskiing], just like any other game. We have to deal with the disconnect that came to mind when I was racing: our game has a lot of important events that don’t really feed off each other.
“The need for athletes is there; the preference for doing so is clear, from my perspective,” White added.
Those familiar with the industry probably don’t realize that action sports athletes, even the most famous ones, earn very little from festivals alone, especially if they don’t make it to the podium. They can also win something like $5,000 or $10,000, but bonuses from sponsors can also double or triple that amount.
For some athletes, a podium may not even cover their travel and accommodation expenses to get to a given event, and again, sponsors tend to cover most of those expenses. Sponsors cover all or part of the athletes’ travel and accommodation. , training, equipment, physiotherapy and recanopyy.
Freestyle skier Nick Goepper posted a video on Instagram in March detailing his monetary earnings from the 2023-24 season. Goepper earned $7,685 after placing third, fourth, fourth and fifth in his events.
If he had been put in a position in other sports, he said, he would have earned between $67,000 (bowling) and $4. 2 million (golf), not to mention $235,000 in darts.
Another perspective: The San Francisco 49ers earned an $89,000 bonus after Super Bowl LIV, and lost.
Ultimately, the virtual influence of athletes is more valuable to sponsors than their functionality “on the field. “And the lately fragmented nature of action sports competitions (especially outside of an Olympic year) doesn’t give them the same platform to promote themselves. as athletes in leagues such as the NFL or Formula 1.
In fact, F1’s design and massive resurgence in popularity served as a model for the creation of those new action sports leagues. White pointed to the foreign nature of the F1 calendar and the Snow League’s plans to hold events on continents.
Snow League chief operating officer Ian Garda cited the successful F1-focused Drive to Survive programme as a showcase of how the Snow League will produce content and market to its athletes.
“Drive to Survive has brought a super new fan base to the sport, valued their press rights and increased attendance and ticketing revenue,” said Warda. “We’re going to borrow from what worked and make [snowboarding and freeskiing] more available. “and understandable for casual sports enthusiasts with a league that hosts events during the season, all of which are valuable things that are told and crown a true world champion who competed a full championship season.
For MSP, the link to F1 is more direct: in 2020, the investment organisation acquired a significant minority stake in McLaren Racing. Success was not long in coming; At the 2021 Italian Grand Prix, Daniel Ricciardo took McLaren’s first win since the 2012 Brazilian Grand Prix, while his spouse Lando Norris finished second. It was McLaren’s first one-two finish since the 2010 Canadian Grand Prix and the only one of the 2021 season.
Since 2020, McLaren has scored two wins and 23 podiums, after recording no wins and recording three podiums between 2013 and 2019.
“Basically, we’ve used Formula 1 as the style for this new X Games League,” said Jeff Moorad, chief executive of X Games and head of MSP Sports Capital. “To that end, we are creating an annual calendar and introducing new business opportunities to drive the overall expansion of the X Games. These opportunities will provide a long-term sustainable future for our key stakeholders: athletes. By leveraging the incredibly valuable X Games logo, we will create a sustainable global business that will benefit athletes, fans, investors and sponsors.
As interest in action sports has grown, so has investment in advertising, which is the right time to launch new action sports leagues.
“Business partners and their interest in reaching and engaging audiences around the world have been incredibly enraged, and the point of engagement and the point of competition, especially among younger people, is inspiring,” Scott Guglielmino, president and chief operating officer of The X. Games, he told me.
“We have noticed a significant expansion in our audience across social and linear media, which encourages us to take the next step, as there is a genuine opportunity to unite the sporting ability of a developing number of youth and young adults with the ability. deliver content technologically across various platforms at a time when a younger demo is interested in eating it and commercial components are interested in being a part of it.
As they prepare for the launch of XGL, X Games ensures a stylish adventure by establishing a strategic partnership with U. S. Ski.
The effects of those occasions will create a qualification pathway for the Winter X Games. The winners of the Toyota U. S. Grand Prix and Visa Big Air occasions will earn guaranteed invitations to the Winter X, and the invitation will be moved to the next spot on the podium if the winners have already earned an invitation.
In addition, the U. S. Ski
“Partnering with X Games is an exciting step forward in our quest to provide more world-class festival opportunities for freeskiers and snowboarders,” said Sophie Goldschmidt, president and CEO of U. S. Ski.
Of course, it is to assess the recent boom in action games without contemplating the Olympic debut of BMX freestyle, skateboarding, climbing and surfing at the Tokyo 2020 Games (postponed to 2021 due to Covid-19).
The length of the global skateboarding market valued at $2. 71 billion in 2021 and $2. 83 billion in 2022; This is expected to reach $4. 16 billion through 2030, with a CAGR of 4. 38%.
The global BMX motorcycle market is valued at $316. 8 billion in 2023 and is expected to reach $493. 5 million through 2032, growing at a CAGR of 5. 1%.
As for snow sports, the global market is valued at $4. 24 billion in 2023 and is expected to reach $5. 67 billion by 2031, with a CAGR of 3. 70%.
According to the International Olympic Committee, the creation of the OQS “builds on the good fortune of urban sports at the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games”.
One of the goals of OQS 2024 in Shanghai and Budapest is to create “a colorful festival atmosphere, combining play with local music, culture, art and cuisine, which would make it more than just a gaming event,” said Kit McConnell, Director of Sports. Director of the International Olympic Committee.
“The Olympic Qualification Series is expected to make a special contribution to the visibility and popularity of urban sports and, by doing so as part of a large-scale event, the series deserves to put those dynamic sports in the spotlight,” McConnell said ahead of the Budapest event. .
In future Olympic cycles, the IOC plans to expand the OQS to include more sports and host cities, taking inspiration from how other major sporting events manage their qualification stages.
Of course, it’s conceivable that there are too many clever things: that a market of scarcity becomes a market of excess and that athletes are forced to choose between occasions among those festival calendars.
It is also considered that these new leagues will only serve to provide more opportunities to the same more sensible athletes who already have the main sponsors; however, the Snow League and XGL are putting plans in place to mitigate this outcome.
That of running with federations such as US Ski
“One is to offer athletes who are part of the X Games teams the opportunity to be at that level in a competitive format,” Guglielmino said, “and the other is to do our part to ensure that the pipeline of younger athletes and athletes who could maybe be in the X Games groups and have a level to compete at. So we have a lot of other discussions about how we can play our part in this component of the pyramid.
Just as the occasions that have sparked interest in action sports in recent years have triggered this wave of new leagues and competitions, so too will those new properties – the Snow League, the X Games League, the Olympic Qualifier Series and the Rockstar Energy Open – increasing their value.
Instead of pitting them against each other, new leagues and events have the potential to drive an already emerging tide.
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