But 20 years from now, your TV will do far more than bring you the game. It will immerse you in the action, put you in the arena or the stadium and give you the best seat. It may even put your digital self on the field and make you part of the competition, rubbing virtual shoulders with your favorite players.

Your television itself may be obsolete, replaced by wraparound digital glasses or interactive tabletops that transform how you watch the Super Bowl, the World Cup or Wimbledon.

“Sports broadcasting is going to look very different in the future,” says Michael Goodman, director of entertainment research at Parks Associates, a market-research and consulting firm. “The core product will not change. A football game will still be a football game. But everything around it—how you watch it, how you interact with it, how you engage with it—that is being reinvented.”

Exactly how these changes will unfold, two decades from now, is uncertain. Who could have predicted, 20 years ago, that someday fans would watch entire baseball games on a mobile phone? (Apple introduced its first iPhone in 2007.)

But some trends are clear.

“Sports fans in general, but young fans in particular, are moving from lean-back viewing to lean in,” says Matt Fleckenstein, chief product and technology officer at Genius Sports, a sports data and technology company.

Sports are ideal for new video and communication technologies, as athletic performance is measured by statistics, and that data can be tabulated, synthesized and repurposed for viewers.

“Right now, the deployment of statistics in real time to produce endless analysis and visual models is all the rage,” says Nick Snow, publisher and editor in chief of Advanced Television, a business journal based in London. “How was that tennis rally won? How did that soccer attack build? It can be instantly overlaid with lavish graphics unpacking the action.”

Sports broadcasts have always been shaped by how many cameras could be put inside a venue, and this may be where the most obvious advances are occurring. Instead of 10 to 20 cameras, experts say that some broadcasters envision mounting thousands of iPhone-type cameras inside a ballpark, arena or stadium, creating unique angles that can be personalized for individual viewers. Those cameras, combined with microchips attached to the jerseys of players, coaches, and referees, will take fans where they have never been before.

The cameras will act more like computers that also extract data and create 3-D digital twins of the action, which can be used for replays and other viewing experiences. What’s emerging is a completely different reality in which the integration of AI with sensing and communications technologies “will allow any device to act as a radar to gather surrounding information of the environment,” says Valerié Allié, senior director of media services at Interdigital, a technology research and development company. She calls this “extended reality,” a computer-generated environment that blends the physical and digital worlds.

In such a world, fans will be able to watch replays from the view of their favorite athlete. What a particular jockey, for example, sees along the back stretch at the Kentucky Derby—a gap along the rail to make his move—is what you see. And you will be able to create a digital twin of yourself so that you become part of the action, accompanying Gabby Thomas as she dashes across the finish line or embracing Lionel Messi after he scores the winning goal.

“We want the sports fan to be part of the community of their favorite team and to be part of the whole life cycle of a championship, from one game to the next,” Allié says.

Turning sports viewing into something more tactile is also likely to emerge, with “haptic experiences”—vibrations to re-create the feel of virtual objects—bringing the stadium into the house. You would feel a sensation from a glove on your hand, a coat or even a seat cushion that signals something that happened on the field. These good vibrations would have obvious benefits for the visually impaired but would also allow all fans to “feel” the crack of the bat or the roar of the crowd.

Twenty years from now, sports viewing may be about fans creating their own reality, blending the real, the virtual and the astonishing for unique experiences. Some of this is already happening. Genius Sports recently created a 3-D digital highlight of a British soccer player racing down the pitch and then magically crossing over into the streets of Hanoi, where he scored a goal. Why did he end up in Vietnam? It’s a travel destination for a team sponsor, Etihad Airways of the United Arab Emirates.

By drawing on video archives and integrating holograms and agentic AI, teams or athletes from any era can be revived to compete against each other—a godsend for NFL fans when the season ends. They could watch the Steel Curtain from the 1970s against the Greatest Show on Turf from the early 2000s.

This extended reality might work even better for individual sports, where each athlete’s strength and guile would be tested in ways never seen: Imagine Muhammad Ali vs. Mike Tyson, or Martina Navratilova vs. Serena Williams. Even individual matchups in team sports—Bill Russell vs. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar—would be must-see viewing. And perhaps the ultimate marquee matchup: Babe Ruth, the pitcher, vs. Babe Ruth, the hitter.

And why play at a conventional locale from the current era? Army versus Navy at the Roman Colosseum would be a fitting site for these historic rivals, particularly if the game took place in AD 80.

But some trade-offs are inevitable. The personalization of sports viewing could undermine the connections that fans shared by watching the same iconic image from the same angle. Fans had the same view of Carlton Fisk’s waving the ball fair in the 1975 World Series; Brandi Chastain’s slide on her knees, her jersey ripped off, after kicking the winning goal in the 1999 Women’s World Cup; even UConn’s Braylon Mullins’s 3-point miracle this past March against Duke. Those types of visuals, going forward, won’t have the same unifying power in a world of customized angles and replays.

It is also possible, for some fans, that the unvarnished reality of sports, without the high-tech razzle-dazzle, will no longer be enjoyable or even watchable. The irony is that sports have always been about escaping the real world—the fierce belief that the only thing that matters, in the moment, is whether the shot goes in or the football crosses the goal line.

Twenty years from now, as sports viewing evolves into a fragmented, multisensory fantasia, that reality may not be real enough.

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