A few months ago I discovered a new genre of YouTube video. It’s called the ‘extended highlight’ and usually takes the form of a video of between eight and eighteen minutes, with lightning fast jump cuts between all the main parts of a game.
Since embracing the glory of the extended highlight, I feel like I’ve watched more sports than ever. I’ve seen every Arsenal goal and near goal, every cool shot by Steph Curry for the Warriors, every Daniel Jones run for the Giants, every Aaron Judge strikeout or home run for the Yankees. But I rarely, if ever, watch a game. I used to! But why should I now? All the good parts are on YouTube a few hours later.
Much has been written over the last decade about how the culture of highlights is changing the sport. (Ruining it, some might say.) For a while there was a moral panic Sports Center‘s bite-sized renditions of sports. Then it was House of Highlights on Instagram that threatened to become the biggest thing on sports TV as viewers started to care more about sick dunks than final scores. And indeed, the whole sports fan experience has shifted! Young viewers follow individual players rather than teams; they care about the stories and personalities off the pitch as much as they care about the results on the pitch; they really like scrolling through highlights on TikTok. Leagues, teams and broadcasters have caught up and are embracing these platforms and angles more than ever. Now everyone is also talking about gambling and fantasy and how they are changing the way we talk about sports.
This is just… the game. Minus all the boring parts.
But extended highlights feel like something else entirely. This isn’t “the only piece you needed to see from the game”; it’s… the game. Only shorter. It’s like the radio edit of a song or the TV shoot of a movie: it just cuts out the boring bits, and most people will like it more because of it. Eighteen minutes of a 90-minute football game is enough to show the starting line-ups, the kick-off, every meaningful goal-scoring opportunity, every yellow and red card, every corner and every cool dribbling move that ultimately went nowhere. No, you don’t get to see the three-minute build-up leading up to the goal, which is what purists will tell you is the whole point of the game. But you Doing get a sense of the flow, the momentum, the atmosphere of the game. It’s a remarkably complete retelling in a small fraction of time.
Almost every major sport and league offers these comprehensive highlights, and I can’t believe they all do. Live sports are the most expensive, most coveted thing in the media world right now, and you’re just offering an almost free approximation on YouTube? (To be clear, I love it. Please don’t stop, even if it seems like a terrible business decision.) Embracing the internet as a sports distribution tool was the right thing to do – I’m not sure making supercuts of every game was .
Pitch clocks made baseball faster. Extended highlights make baseball way faster.
I also think extended highlights could be a clue to the future of sports. The internetification of sports has long been happening in subtle ways – sports tweaking their rules to be just a little more exciting and action-packed, more easily packaged into a TikTok or Reel. This year alone, Major League Baseball has widened the bases and banned some very effective defenses, meaning steals as well as runs. More Highlights!
The internetification of sports has long been happening in subtle ways
But the MLB also instituted a pitch clock, which made games more than 25 minutes shorter. And there are even more extreme examples to come. Take the Kings League, a new football league formed in part by football superstar Gerard Piqué. It’s seven-on-seven football on teams owned by well-known streamers, with all sorts of tweaks designed to make the games faster and more chaotic. There is no pretty game here; there is instead the “gold card” that teams draw before the game that says things like “every goal scored in the next minute counts double” or “immediate penalty”. And the whole game only takes 40 minutes.
Or there’s LIV Golf, the new (and wildly controversial) competitor to the PGA Tour turned tournament of four rounds in three. It has fewer competitors and starts more at once, meaning the day round goes much faster. The aim, as with the Kings League, is to make sure there’s always something exciting happening and to make it all happen faster.
It makes sense, right? As viewers, there are so many things vying for our attention that hardly anyone wants to see a pitcher scratch his nose or two defenders kick a ball back and forth for 38 seconds. In 2023, even an 18 minute video is a lot to ask viewers to focus on. Sports, like other types of entertainment, have no choice but to run at breakneck speed or risk losing viewers to the TikTok app on their phones. Naturally, as sports get harder and faster, there is room for new and different types of content around the games. That means even more competition. It’s hard to see how any of it ever slows down.
It’s amazing how much of a basketball game you can pack in nine minutes and twelve seconds.
For a long time, the sports world has looked at YouTube with a sort of sideways confusion. Some saw it as an encroaching force that threatened the primacy of their live games – the NFL, in particular, made a habit of seeking copyright battles with anyone who even tweeted a game highlight. Others saw YouTube as a valuable way to introduce more people to their best content. “We are incredibly protective of our live game rights,” NBA Commissioner Adam Silver said said in 2016. “But for the most part, the highlights are marketing.”
That’s probably still true, especially in the “look at this cool target” context. That can turn non-fans into casual fans and make people want to watch more. But on to the in-depth highlights of Arsenal vs. Watching Liverpool made me want to stop watching – it made me feel like I’d seen it all. And it only took 16 minutes.
Janice has been with businesskinda for 5 years, writing copy for client websites, blog posts, EDMs and other mediums to engage readers and encourage action. By collaborating with clients, our SEO manager and the wider businesskinda team, Janice seeks to understand an audience before creating memorable, persuasive copy.