Nicole Junkermann has spent her career reaching a conclusion most investors in media have yet to discover. The founder of NJF Holdings — who co-founded Infront Sports & Media and today runs Gameday by NJF Holdings, one of Europe’s most active portfolios in professional sports infrastructure — argues that generative AI has not weakened the case for owning sports rights. It has made it stronger.
The cost of making content — text, images, video, music — stopped being a constraint roughly two years ago. Generative AI can now produce more content in a day than a studio system could in a decade, and the volume keeps rising, indifferent to whether anyone wants it or not. The conventional reading is that this spells trouble for anyone who owns content. Junkermann has reached the opposite conclusion about one category. She co-founded Infront Sports & Media, the rights agency sold to Bridgepoint for €600m in 2011, and fifteen years later she is buying sports rights again — for reasons that have everything to do with the machines.
“When anything can be generated, the question changes,” Junkermann says. “It’s no longer what can be made. It’s what can’t be faked. And there’s really only one answer: live sport. Nobody can synthesize a match that hasn’t happened yet.”
The content Nicole Junkermann says no generative model can replicate
Her case rests on properties no other content shares. A live match is unscripted, so no model can produce it and no algorithm can predict it. It happens once, and its commercial value decays within hours – a result known is a product consumed. It’s communal, watched simultaneously by millions who specifically want to watch it together.
And it’s verifiably real, which is becoming a stranger and rarer quality by the month. Scripted drama holds none of these defenses. Nor does news, or music, or the endless personalized feed. Economists would call what’s emerging an authenticity premium: as synthetic material floods every channel, the value of the demonstrably real compounds rather than merely holding.
The market has been signaling this for a while, if unevenly. Sports rights values have kept climbing even as the wider media economy deflates, and streaming platforms that once dismissed sport as expensive legacy programming now bid for it aggressively. The reason is blunt. Live sport is the only content that reliably assembles mass simultaneous audiences – the thing advertisers pay for and subscription businesses keep customers with. Everything else on a platform is a library. Sport is an appointment.
Where the scarcity argument concentrates
Where Nicole Junkermann departs from the crowd is on which rights to own. The premium properties – top-flight football, the American leagues, the global tournaments – are, in her view, largely priced for perfection. The structural shift lifts something broader.
“The scarcity argument doesn’t only apply to the Champions League,” she says. “It applies to every property with a genuine live audience – women’s sport, emerging leagues, territories the big rights holders overlook. Much of that is still priced as niche programming. It’s actually scarce real-time inventory in an economy drowning in the synthetic kind. That gap is the opportunity.”
Her portfolio reads as a systematic expression of the view. Through CayoTV, NJF held clip rights in Spain for the FIFA World Cup 2026 – short-form live moments, the most shareable and most perishable form of sports content, timed to the largest live event on earth. In the Philippines, the group is building Aleph Arena, on the logic that venues and production infrastructure are as much a part of the scarcity trade as the rights themselves.
The clearest test case, though, is Italian women’s volleyball. Spike Media, a joint venture between the Lega Volley Femminile and Gameday by NJF, this month concluded a set of agreements taking the world’s most competitive women’s volleyball league to its widest audience ever: Rai free-to-air, DAZN carrying the entire top-flight regular season through the play-offs plus the domestic cups, and – a first in Italy – matches distributed directly on the social channels of the league, the clubs and the players themselves, from the 2026-27 season.
“Italian women’s volleyball is exactly what mispriced live scarcity looks like,” Junkermann says. “A genuinely world-class competition, passionate audiences, and until now a fraction of the distribution it merits. The interesting part of the new model is that the match now travels to the fan – on television, on streaming, in the scroll – rather than waiting to be found. That’s how you build the next generation of a live audience.”
The decade when AI becomes live sport’s strongest commercial argument
There’s an irony in all this that Junkermann seems to relish. The technology widely expected to hollow out content businesses may prove the best thing to happen to live sport’s economics in a generation – not despite flooding the world with synthetic media, but because of it. Every hour of generated content devalues the categories sport competes with for attention, while sport itself sits untouched. None of which makes every sports asset a good investment, and she’s careful to say so.
Rights inflation at the top end carries real risk; leagues can mismanage what they own; the unbundling of media is still being renegotiated in real time. But the direction of the underlying force is hard to argue with. Capital in an economy of infinite abundance flows towards what’s provably scarce, and few things are scarcer than an outcome that hasn’t happened yet, unfolding in front of a crowd that knows it’s real.
The next decade of media investment, on this view, won’t be won by whoever produces the most content. It will belong to whoever owns the moments that can’t be produced at all.
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