The Problem with Grid League

I know you are here to read about the problem (there are actually a few addressed here). We’re going to get to that, but I have to first lay the groundwork.

Let’s start with this:

No new TEAM sports in the past hundred years have achieved meaningful scale.

How we define “meaningful”: generally a household name and millions of people engage with it regularly. CrossFit is a good example of a new and now meaningful brand in society.
How we define TEAM: more than 12 team members. 4 person teams don’t count.

Ok, now think about that for a minute. Focusing on just the US— there is football, soccer, baseball, basketball, and hockey.

That’s it. All of them were invented over 100 years ago.

That’s kind of like the Model T still being the primary car model. Or light bulbs being the only use of electricity.

Think about all of the genres of music that have been invented since then. Think about all the new forms of media invented since then… radio, tv, the internet, social media, etc.

It’s kind of wild when you think about it. Society has created advancement in every major part of it EXCEPT team sports. Insane.

Individual sports (or very small teams of 2-4 people) are different.

UFC, Ninja Warrior, CrossFit, Pickleball… they’ve all started in just the last 30 years and achieved meaningful status as we define it.

So why have individual sports had more success? Why have all team sports invented in the last 100 years not made it? We will get into that as it’s important to the title of this article. It’s part of the flaws.

The point is… we’re trying to do something that no one has been successful at in over 100 years. Lots have tried. 100% have failed. Cool. Good plan guys.

Here is the thing, there are two characteristics of Grid League that are different from (almost) all of the previous attempts. One or two attempts that we found have one or the other of these characteristics, but none (that we know of) have both. Both are counterintuitive to how society has always done things. Both are the key to Grid League’s success. When I reference them later, I will call them Thing 1 and Thing 2. Will they be enough? You decide.

SIDE NOTE – I don’t consider Banana Ball a new sport compared to the 5 previously mentioned. It is a variation of an existing sport that is more of a show than a serious sport. Nothing wrong with that at all and I think it’s great. It’s just different from what I am talking about here.

Now that we have defined the magnitude of the challenge, it helps add context to the traction we have achieved, our mentality around that traction and the flaws that hold us back.

Our traction

Thing 1 is almost 100% the reason we’ve been able to make the progress we have.

When we started our version of Grid League in 2017, we had to start really small. Like tiny. We had no money to do anything but bootstrap. So bootstrap we did. Our first match was in a moderately sized gym and had about 30 people spectating. The goal then was to really just test this regional model. Would it work?

We grinded (ground?) for 3 years before we got any kind of visibility outside of Florida. In 2020, we had a few social media posts go viral. We cracked our first 100k followers. Thanks, Thing 1.

Then, in 2021 we took a leap and invested in our first livestream. We’d grow revenue enough to support it, but barely. Just about 100% of revenue was going back to the sport. We had about 40k livestream views in our first year. No bad.

Remember this – we had no big named players and almost no-one knew how our sport worked. What we did have: Thing 1 and a bunch of support from passionate team owners and players.

Fast forward 4 years — we’ve now got 1.8 million followers across platforms, over 2 million livestream views averaging 18 minutes, and well over half a billion views on short form social media including 340 million in 2025 alone. (Views, not impressions). While this is cool, it’s not necessarily valuable in terms of building a lasting sport. What IS valuable about it: the awareness it created. This is the thing that I am most proud of related to our growth. I’m honestly surprised at how often people know what Grid League is… or at least that it exists. I think a conservative estimate of people who recognize the brand on some level is in the millions of people. Sweet.

Now, to be clear, awareness does not equal viability. We are nowhere near a “meaningful” part of society yet.

What it is, though, is the first step to building a sport that makes it meaningful. It’s the most important step too… because without it, none of the other steps happen. We also now know the social media formula that works, so awareness growth will only continue and compound as we gain resources and develop more true fans. We also bootstrapped it.

We owe it all to Thing 1.

Ok ok… let’s define Thing 1.

Thing 1 is: the fact that this sport was designed to be fun to watch and for the modern era. This means it is perfect for social media, generates curiosity, and will engage people even when they don’t have a connection to the teams or players or know how the sport works.

All current popular team sports were designed to be fun to PLAY, not watch. The spectator wasn’t even a consideration when the sport was created. Why would it be? People just wanted to play a game. No one was picturing how it would look on TVs or TikTok 100 years ago.

This is our secret sauce to awareness growth. It gives us an advantage over other new sports that didn’t think this way…and most (if not all) still don’t.

But, it’s not all sunshine and rainbows.

Thing 1 has its drawbacks. In fact, you could even call them PROBLEMS…

We all know you came here for the problems. So let’s get into them.

The problem

Awareness is step 1… but step 2 is much more difficult for us in terms of sport growth. Step 2 is getting a significant percentage that are aware, to care about the match outcomes. This means people will plan to watch them when they are live. We’ll call them true fans.

I wrote about this in an article 2 years ago. Since then, we have achieved much more in additional awareness growth than true fan growth. Don’t get me wrong, we are making progress there too… just at a slower clip. In 2023 we had 28,379 day-of match viewers across the Season. In 2025 we had 64,395. Still growing, but we need to make faster progress. The good news is, I think we have a much clearer picture of what it will take to make that faster progress that we did 2 years ago. More on that soon.

So why the slower growth in true fans? So glad you asked.

I believe there are two primary ways to grow true fans in any sport.

1) mass participation – this means people develop an intimate awareness of how a sport works and can appreciate the nuances that lead to great performance. Mass participation is how CrossFit, Pickleball, and now emerging Hyrox have created meaningful brands and have people devoted to those sports.

2) player (or athlete) stardom — look no further than Caitlin Clark. The WNBA has exploded since she came on the scene. The WFP is able to put up significant viewership in their very first year because they have the absolute best in the world competing.

We currently have neither of these advantages.

One of the “problems” of Grid League is also what makes it so fun to watch. It’s a team sport. This makes it much harder to participate in. Organizing teams is hard enough when people know how to play a sport. The vast majority of people who know about Grid League, don’t know how to play it. This is a double whammy to impede participation.

The good news is, after years of hard trial and error, we know the strategies that work to get people to play. We just don’t currently have the staff to scale it.

So being a team sports inhibits participation = problem. But wait, there is more.

It increases complexity in rules and strategy, which adds a barrier to becoming a new fan. It also requires team leaders which are independent from the governing body. This adds a big layer of operational complexity and risk not present in individual sports. All of these reasons are big problems and make it understandable why no one has succeeded in building a team sport in 100 years.

Wow. This sounds terrible. Why don’t we just give up now.

Here is the thing.

There are some absolutely MASSIVE advantages to team sports as an entertainment property once you overcome these challenges. These advantages have led to sports teams being valued at multi billions of dollars and teams sports FAR exceeding individual sports in popularity. Team sports are one of the biggest culture builders in modern society. It is a powerful way to build a great media company and make a difference in the world.

I’ll get to these advantages and what they mean for Grid League, but first, let’s get to some other problems… shall we?

Another thing that makes the sport fun to watch (Thing 1) is incredible athletic performance that is EASY TO PERCEIVE. All sports have incredible athletic performance, but it’s hard to tell visually just how hard it is to hit a 100mph fastball, or drain a 3 pointer with a 6’9” defender in your face.

What Grid League has done is borrowed concepts behind movements from sports that have built their popularity on the back of incredible performance that is as easy as possible to perceive. The best two examples are gymnastics and strongman. Everyone can visually tell flipping through the air or lifting a car is really hard to do.

We have borrowed from this concept as much as possible and it is a key advantage to our clips that go viral on social media AND engage people in matches at the same time.

But, it has costs:

It requires the use of a lot of equipment. This increases operational difficulty and cost, but more importantly, makes it harder to participate in. With soccer or football you just need a ball and a field. To play Grid the way we present it? You need tens of thousands of dollars in equipment. This is another challenge, this time, fairly unique to us vs other attempted team sports. Problem.

We consider this a pure investment. This strategy increases difficulty in some ways, but is the primary reason we’ve built the level of awareness we have so far. It’s a give and take… and IMO, well worth it.

The good news is, our sport is scalable to a level that only requires equipment that many gyms already have. This is the key to developing a meaningful participation model.

What else we got in the way of problems? Plenty!

It’s about time we start talking about Thing 2.

Thing 2 is a huge challenge, but also the most important characteristic we have as a sport.

It is the key differentiator to existing popular team sports that gives us an advantage to eventually compete with them.

It also challenges deep rooted societal norms. There are few challenges bigger than taking on the way people “have always done things” or have belief systems built around. That said, if we can crack the challenge and effectively do something that has never been done before… The value and impact are EXTREME. Few people will ever experience that type of opportunity.

Thing 2 is the fact that men and women are competing together in a team sport.

Look no further than our comment section to find a lot of people that are strongly opposed to this idea. We’ve had many people avoid working with us in many different ways because we are too “risky” or “niche” based on the fact that we are using such a new and different concept.

Some of my best friends have told me “there is a reason it’s never been done, it doesn’t make sense”.

At one point in society, people also didn’t think it made sense to buy things without seeing them in person (Amazon), to pick up strangers in your car that will pay you for a ride (Uber) or as a more extreme example… let women vote.

Each of these concepts led to a blue ocean of opportunity that the vast majority of people didn’t believe in at one time. The real opportunity lies where most people believe there is none.

But I haven’t gotten to the best part.

We’ve proven the concept works.

Yes, it’s on a small scale now… but the players and teams in our league have experienced the power a coed team sport has. They rave about the experience and keep coming back. It leads to new types of dynamics that make sports even more valuable than they are today as single gender team sports. There are dozens of reasons this is true, and that is a whole article on its own, but I’ll give one of the most important reasons now.

Before you read it, notice how you feel when you do. The most common feeling is a weird resistance, or cognitive dissonance. The concept goes against what we are used to in society so it feels “off”. Just like the feeling of deciding to sleep in a stranger’s house before Airbnb existed, for example.

Ok here it is:

Romantic relationships are frequent in our sport. This means players can play on a team with their significant other, or AGAINST their significant other, or find new love, or a fling, or have a relationship break down while on the same team with them. We’ve had many couples develop as a result of playing in the League. This completely changes (and enhances) the dynamic of team sports. It adds to the drama of why people watch team sports in the first place.

Even for participants who don’t engage directly in those relationships they give more meaning, stories, and reasons to talk about the team and sport. Think about how this translates from a fan perspective. It’s like if Dak Prescott and Jalen Hurts started dating. It would make Taylor and Travis seem insignificant. It is the perfect blend of reality TV and team sports…. The two most popular entertainment properties in the world right now.

Whether this concept has clicked in your head or not, you now see the big differentiators Grid League has to all other team sports that have ever been attempted. A wise man once said: “different is better than better”.

So, there are massive advantages for the sport BECAUSE of the fact it’s coed, but only AFTER we overcome the challenges associated with it being coed. To us, that only means continuing to grow and finding others that believe in the proof we’ve created. If you are interested in hearing about it, let me know.

Here is a challenge to the challenge. We haven’t really even begun to tell the story of the advantages of coed sports. There are a few reasons for this, but the biggest is we don’t yet have the resources. It’s no simple task to capture, edit, and properly present the thousands of hours of footage it would take to give an effective glimpse as to what it’s like on these teams, the way the players interact, and reveal the true power of the sport. Let me tell you as someone with 15 years of experience in media – if done well, it has the power to be the most popular entertainment property in the world. The drama is real. Anyone currently in the League reading this is chuckling to themselves and knows exactly what I am talking about.

We have a nuclear bomb’s worth of potential hidden in plain sight, waiting to be exposed to the world.

In addition to better stories, coed sports:

Doubles the relatable audience
Broadens the range of personalities and roles on teams
Better mirrors society
Teaches kids better lessons with boys and girls together
And so on…

So, let’s say we do figure out a way to effectively engage a broader audience. We pull off something like a successful “reality” documentary or series telling the compelling and entertaining story of the sport and gain resulting popularity. What will sustain it? What will make it culturally “significant”?

This gets back to the advantages that team sports have. The reasons they are such a powerful force in society today.

First and foremost: it’s a proven and familiar format. All team sports follow a regular season, playoff, and championship structure… because it works. It creates all the right kinds of story arches and dramatic moments to keep continuous engagement over the long term. Also, everyone knows it. I couldn’t tell you how the season works for gymnastics, or golf, or even strongman (which I engage with regularly). I believe this is because they are all different, and in some cases, change. CrossFit is a perfect example. If I wasn’t so enveloped in it, it would be impossible to follow or know how the season works. I believe the format of the team sport is superior to other sports for long term engagement. But, that is not all.

Here is the biggest advantage of team sports over individual sports — brand regionality and continuity. AKA city based teams.

First, let’s talk about regionality. If a team represents a region, that means there is not only an inherent reason to follow a particular team that is from your region, you now share something important with it: where you are from. This means part of your identity is in that team. This gives a lot more meaning to when they compete because a small part of you is involved. Pair that with the crowd noise factor when you attend an event in person and actually use your voice and cheering to influence a game… and that is real participation that builds connection and meaning. Powerful stuff. This is also why the Olympics are so popular. Your country’s participants are representing YOU, in a way.

Not only that, team brands are there year after year after year as opposed to individual performers that have a career limit, get injured, or (in some formats) may or may not make it to the most important parts of the season. This allows the love of a team (vs an individual performer) to be guaranteed to participate year after year, last a lifetime, and be passed down from generation to generation. This is how sports teams grow into multi billion dollar entities over the long term.

These are massive advantages over individual sports that begin to compound once a sport gains a level of popularity. That said, that base level of popularity is a requirement to see those benefits play out, and achieving that is what most new sports fail to do. We think Thing 1 and Thing 2 give us the unique advantage we need to overcome that challenge.

We think of it like we’re pushing a snowball up and over a hill. As we push it up, it grows, which only makes the pushing harder. That said, once the apex is reached (in our case, the popularity tipping point) it rolls down the hill and grows exponentially.

So, we fully admit that we took the hard route in building a sport. We also admit we didn’t really understand these types of dynamics before getting into it. We do, however, feel we have a good grasp on it now and despite the major DISadvantages we still face, we are as confident as ever that we will get where we need to be because our community has experienced the power of what it looks like on the other side of the hill. We have all the proof we need.

That said, we have reached a point where the snowball is pretty freaking heavy, and we could use some help pushing to speed it up getting over the hill. We feel our main priority, at this point in time, is to share that story and experience with people that want to help push the snowball.

If you read this far, there are two topics I have more material on that you may also be interested in related to this: