Why haven’t sports podcasts taken off in Latin America..yet?

With the World Cup around the corner, this question keeps coming up.

If you look at the U.S., sports podcasts are everywhere. Networks like The Ringer, Blue Wire, or Locked On Podcast Network have built entire ecosystems around them. Some shows are fan-driven, others are hosted by former athletes, others by journalists, but they all have one thing in common: they work.

Open Spotify in the U.S. and you’ll immediately see it. Shows like Pardon My Take or The Bill Simmons Podcast consistently sit in the top 20. We counted more than 15 sports podcasts in the top 200.

Now compare that to Latin America.

From the top 200 podcasts in Mexico, not a single one is sports.
Colombia has three.
Brazil, the most football-obsessed country in the world, has three.
And Argentina, the home of Messi and current World Cup champions, has zero in the top 200.

That gap is not small, it’s structural.

And the size difference makes it even clearer. Brazil has an estimated 219 million people. The U.S. has 342 million. Not the same, but not orders of magnitude apart.

Yet the biggest sports podcast in Brazil, Posse de Bola, has around 94,000 followers on Spotify. Meanwhile, Pardon My Take has over 560,000 on the same platform, even though U.S. audiences are split between Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

At that scale, one U.S. show is essentially the sum of the top 20 sports podcasts in Latin America combined.

So… what’s going on?

1. One sport vs many

In the U.S., sports content is diversified. You have the NFL, NBA, MLB, college sports, I even saw hockey podcast showing up in the top charts.

In Latin America, it’s basically one sport: soccer. 

That sounds like an advantage, but it actually makes things harder. Everyone is competing for the exact same audience, talking about the exact same matches, teams, and narratives. For every country there’s basically two things to talk about: the national soccer league and international soccer. 

There’s less room to niche down, and niche is where podcasting usually wins.

2. No fantasy culture (yet)

A big driver of sports podcasting in the U.S. is fantasy sports.

Fantasy football alone fuels an entire layer of content: analysis, predictions, waivers, trades. It creates daily relevance.

That doesn’t really exist in Latin America.

Mexico is the exception because of NFL fandom (shoutout to Estadio Fantasy), but even there, most of the audience consuming fantasy content is comfortable in English and ends up listening to U.S. shows.

In soccer, fantasy formats exist, like the Fantasy Premier League, but the behavior is similar. The core users are global, English-speaking, and go straight to English-language content.

There’s no strong local loop.

3. Legacy media got there first

In the U.S., a lot of podcast growth came from new voices. Independent creators, bloggers, fans, people who didn’t come from traditional media. I remember that’s how Kevin Jones from Blue Wire started his network.

In Latin America, sports podcasts started differently.

Most of the early shows were extensions of radio or TV. Same hosts, same format, just republished as podcasts. But podcast audiences want something else. They want authenticity, personality, new perspectives. Especially younger listeners. If the content feels like recycled radio, it doesn’t travel.

And that’s slowed down the category.

So why does this matter now?

Because timing is about to change everything.

The next FIFA World Cup 2026 will be played across Mexico, the U.S., and Canada. For the first time, the biggest sporting event in the world is happening locally for a massive part of the Spanish-speaking audience.

You’ll have:

• Global attention on soccer
• Cross-border audiences
• A younger, digital-native fan base
• And new formats like live streams, fan coverage, and social-first commentary

This is where fan-driven podcasts can finally break through. Not recycled TV shows, not traditional pundits but fans actually covering the games in and out stadiums.

The opportunity

There’s also a behavioral shift coming. During the World Cup, millions of people play prediction games, quinielas, bracket-style competitions with friends. It’s the closest thing Latin America has to a fantasy ecosystem. And that creates a new habit: people want context, predictions, opinions.

If you’re a creator

This is probably the best moment to start a sports podcast in Latin America. Not after the World Cup. Before it. Build the audience now. Find your voice. Own a niche, whether that’s a local team, international soccer, or even a fan culture angle. Once the World Cup starts, attention will explode.

If you’re a brand

This is one of the most underpriced categories in the region. Sports podcasts don’t have the same demand yet, which means CPMs are still low compared to their potential. But the audience is about to grow. The World Cup won’t just be a moment, it will be a reset for how sports content is created and consumed in Latin America. And podcasts are in a position to finally catch up.