The Evolution of Sports: Adapting to the Attention Economy

I was watching a cricket match the other day, or trying to.

Five minutes in, I found myself scrolling through my phone, checking emails, and somehow ending up on TikTok watching 30-second highlights of the very match I was supposed to be watching live.

That’s when it hit me, we’ve officially broken our own attention spans.

As someone who’s spent 30 years watching digital transformation reshape entire industries, I’m fascinated by how sports are scrambling to keep up with our goldfish-level focus. And honestly? It’s about time.

The Great Attention Collapse

Remember when we could sit through a five-day cricket Test match? When a three-hour baseball game felt normal? Those days are toast. We’ve become impatient consumers in an instant-gratification world, and sports are finally catching on.

Cricket already made the leap, from multi-day Tests to one-day matches, then to the frenetic T20 format that wraps up in three hours. Golf introduced speed golf. Even virtual sports exploded because fans often skip the action entirely, just wanting instant results for their bets.

But this is just the beginning. The real revolution is coming, driven by two forces: our vanishing patience and the gambling industry’s need for speed.

Sports I’d Love to See Evolve

Tennis: Speed Sets Forget five-set marathons. Picture “Speed Sets”, first to 10 points, no deuces, no breaks. Pure adrenaline tennis that wraps up in 20 minutes.

Basketball: Half-Court Havoc 3-on-3 on a single hoop, 12-second shot clock, race to 21 points. No timeouts, no quarters, just relentless streetball energy.

Baseball: The 90-Minute Game Strict time limits with a “three-pitch rule”, every player batting is limited to three pitches. Ties settled by home-run derby shootouts. Transform America’s pastime into a high-pressure sprint that keeps everyone, especially bettors, glued to their screens.

What’s really driving this transformation is the gambling boom. Players don’t always care about the sport itself, they want results, fast. It’s why virtual sports took off like rockets. Simulated matches finish in minutes, delivering bet outcomes without the wait.

Even lottery players are abandoning slow jackpots for instant scratch-offs and rapid-draw games. Everyone wants that “flutter moment”, the rush of anticipation and payoff in seconds, not hours.

Sports are responding with micro-betting: wager on the next tennis point, the next basket, the winner of a 15-minute race. Betting platforms are integrating real-time odds into broadcasts, turning every moment into a potential payout.

Beyond Traditional Sports: The Wild Frontier

But why stop at tweaking existing games? In my opinion, the future belongs to entirely new concepts:

Drone Racing 2.0 where Pilots in VR headsets control drones through obstacle courses in 5-minute heats.

Urban Obstacle Dash where Parkour meets sprinting across city rooftops, all captured by drone cameras.

VR Combat League where Team-based digital warfare in 10-minute matches with live betting on every skirmish.

The bottom line is thatthis isn’t just about shorter attention spans, it’s about survival in the gambling industry.

Sports that don’t adapt will lose viewers to those that do. The winners will be formats that deliver maximum excitement in minimum time, enhanced by technology and turbocharged by gambling.

As someone who’s watched entire industries transform overnight, I can tell you: this evolution isn’t coming, it’s here. Our impatience is driving it, our bets are funding it, and our clicks are shaping it.

The future of sports won’t be measured in hours or even minutes. It’ll be measured in moments, intense, shareable, bettable moments that fit perfectly into our fractured attention economy.

And honestly, I can’t wait to see what we create next in our industry. The odds are definitely in our favor.

“The Power Play by Moshe Adir” is released weekly on the Vegas Kings website and LinkedIn. Drawing from nearly 30 years of experience in design and development for online gaming, Moshe shares exclusive industry insights, lessons learned, and behind-the-scenes stories from the evolution of iGaming. Stay tuned for fresh perspectives from one of the industry’s OG!