A football match stops for a VAR check. The replay runs twice, the referee is standing by the monitor, and suddenly there is a minute in which the viewer doesn’t have much to watch.
The television is still on, but the phone also comes out.
That small gap has become valuable.
Live sport contains far more waiting than we sometimes remember. Tennis has its changeovers. Cricket stops between overs and sometimes for much longer. In basketball, a timeout can cut straight through a fast stretch of play. Football has its own interruptions, from substitutions to those increasingly familiar waits for a video decision.
None of this is new. What has changed is what sits within arm’s reach while we wait.
Research into sports viewing shows that watching the match is often only part of what fans are doing. Deloitte found that 77% of sports fans surveyed had carried out at least one additional game-related activity while watching sport at home. That might mean checking something about the match or drifting onto another screen for a moment.
There is a lot competing for those spare minutes.
The phone doesn’t need a long break
Halftime is the obvious window, but it probably isn’t the most interesting one.
A viewer doesn’t need fifteen minutes to mentally leave the broadcast. Thirty seconds can be enough to check another score or open a message that appeared during play.
YouGov’s research into sports statistics gives a useful glimpse of this behaviour. Among fans who look up stats during games, 62% said they use a mobile phone. Laptops and tablets were well behind.
Switching attention on a phone takes almost no effort. There often isn’t a conscious decision to start doing something else. A notification appears, you check it, and play is still stopped.
Sometimes you’re back before the whistle. Sometimes you’ve already opened something else.
Sport has built-in attention gaps
The pauses don’t look the same in every sport.
Tennis produces lots of short ones. Cricket moves between brief gaps and longer stoppages. Basketball is usually fast, then a timeout suddenly gives everyone a minute.
Football is even stranger. It can run uninterrupted for quite a while, then stop around an injury or a video review when nobody watching knows exactly how long the delay will last.
Those uncertain pauses are particularly easy to fill. There is enough time to reach for a phone, but usually not enough to settle into anything substantial.
A replay clip fits. So does checking another score. Maybe you open the group chat to see what everyone thought of the decision.
The match is still the main event. It just doesn’t own every second around it.
Everyone wants the same spare minute
Sports media companies have noticed how fragmented that attention has become.
The NBA is a good example. Open its app during a game and there is quite a bit happening around the broadcast itself. Catch-up features let you see what you missed, while Tap to Watch sends viewers toward the live stream when one is available.
People appear to be using those extras. NBA data published in early 2026 showed more visits to individual game pages than a year earlier, while Tap to Watch had already sent viewers to millions of live streams.
Social platforms are waiting for that moment too. Fantasy apps and sports news sites are there as well. Sometimes a message from a friend is enough to pull someone away for a minute.
Platforms such as YYY Sports sit in that same mix of things a fan might open while the main event is still running. The second screen doesn’t have to replace the match. It only has to fill the gap before play starts again.
Nielsen saw a version of this around college sport in 2026. While 78% of college-sports fans watched major events live, 31% used another screen or device to engage on social media.
The broadcast now has to compete with its own audience
There is a small contradiction here.
Live sport is still unusually good at getting large groups of people to pay attention to the same thing at the same time. Those viewers are also surrounded by ways to drift away from it.
Even finding the match has become part of the friction. A Nielsen study conducted recently showed that around a quarter of fans find it hard to work out which service has a specific event – even more of them among the 18 to 34 year olds.
Once someone finally gets the match on, another contest starts.
Usually not for the whole game. Just for that odd minute when the referee is standing by a monitor or everyone is waiting for play to restart.
The phone is already there.
