Every few years someone declares sports radio dead. Podcasts were going to kill it. Then YouTube. Then TikTok highlights and the second-screen scroll. And yet, in 2026, the medium that supposedly cannot survive the smartphone is still the single largest way Americans consume sports audio.

That is the surprise buried in the data. Sports radio is not collapsing. It is being recomposed—losing the discovery battle to video while quietly holding the one piece of real estate no app has taken: the car, live, in real time.

So the honest answer to “is sports radio still relevant” is yes, but with a shrinking moat and a clear deadline to adapt. Here’s the full picture.

What the 2026 data actually says

Start with the headline numbers, because they cut against the obituary narrative.

A format adding stations and growing ad revenue is not a dying format. Compare that to print sports sections or regional sports networks, which are genuinely shrinking. Radio’s problem isn’t disappearance—it’s aging and a narrowing role.

What radio still does better than anyone

The reason sports radio persists comes down to four jobs it does unusually well, and three of them are structural advantages that podcasts and video cannot easily copy.

The car is radio’s fortress. In-car listening accounts for 57% of over-the-air sports-radio time spent (Westwood One, 2026). Drive time is a captive, hands-and-eyes-busy window where a live audio feed beats any video format by default. As long as commuting exists, this moat holds—and even as dashboards go digital, AM/FM remains the path of least resistance for a driver who just wants the game on.

Live and local is the product. A national podcast can break down the league. It cannot tell you that your team’s left tackle is questionable, take a furious call from a fan in your area code, and react to a blown call in the same breath. Local sports radio is the connective tissue of a fan base—part information, part group therapy, part town square. That immediacy and locality is exactly what on-demand audio trades away.

Call-ins create belonging. The call-in show is participatory media that predates the comment section by decades. It gives fans a stake and a voice, and it generates the kind of unscripted, emotional moments that clip well and travel. Radio’s most durable asset isn’t information delivery—it’s community.

It paints the picture. A broadcaster’s voice still does work no scoreboard can. The classic example endures: longtime Cleveland announcer Jimmy Dudley once recounted a letter from a blind fan written in Braille—“Jimmy, you are my eyes. Don’t ever let me down.” That’s a use case streaming video simply cannot serve. The same logic applies to anyone whose hands and eyes are occupied—runners, cooks, parents, anyone at work—where audio is the only option and video is dead weight.

There’s also a cost angle worth naming. A single television or cable package rarely carries every game at once, and pay-per-view for a marquee boxing or combat event runs into real money. A free broadcast that lets you follow a game you can’t see—or can’t afford to watch—is a feature, not a fallback. For a lot of fans, radio is still the most accessible live feed there is.

Where radio is losing—and it’s the part that matters most

Here’s the uncomfortable half. The four strengths above describe retention. They say nothing about growth, and growth is where sports radio is quietly bleeding.

The audience is aging into radio’s core, not out of it. Westwood One’s own breakdown shows the generational split plainly: among adults 35+, sports radio’s 5.4% total audience share roughly doubles to 11.4% in streaming, while among 18–34s the format posts just a 3.7 overall share—but a 13.9% streaming share. Translation: younger fans who do engage with sports audio are nearly four times more likely to do it via a stream or app than via a tuner. The next generation isn’t tuning the dial; it’s tapping an icon.

Discovery has moved to video, and it’s not close. The under-35 sports fan now meets their content on YouTube, in clips, and increasingly in video podcasts. Deloitte’s 2026 prediction pegs global podcast and “vodcast” ad revenue at roughly US$5 billion this year, up nearly 20% year over year, and notes that 27% of U.S. consumers now watch video podcasts weekly (Deloitte Digital Media Trends, Fall 2025), with Gen Z and millennials leading. YouTube alone crossed one billion monthly video-podcast viewers in early 2025. Sports is among the most popular podcast genres for men—and the new front door to it has a screen.

Weekly podcast listening is climbing fast. Industry trackers put weekly podcast listening at 39% in 2026, up from roughly 24–25% in the prior two years. Importantly, several analyses note this growth has added to total audio time rather than purely cannibalizing radio. The pie is bigger. But the new slices are going to formats radio doesn’t natively own.

Put together: radio keeps the existing listener in the car, but the discovery layer—where the next fan forms a habit—has shifted to video-first, on-demand platforms. A format can hold a majority of time spent while still losing the future if it owns none of the acquisition.

The dashboard is the real battleground

If you want to know whether sports radio survives the next decade, watch the dashboard, not the audience charts. In-car listening is the single biggest reason AM/FM holds its lead, and the car is being rebuilt around screens, voice assistants, and streaming apps. Every new vehicle that surfaces Spotify, YouTube, or a podcast app as prominently as the FM tuner chips away at radio’s default-button advantage.

So far, radio has mostly held that ground—AM/FM remains the easiest thing to summon in a moving car, and broadcasters have pushed their live streams into the same apps drivers already use. But this is a slow-motion contest, and it’s the one that matters. The format’s fate is less about whether podcasts are “better” and more about whether the live AM/FM feed stays one tap away once the dashboard becomes just another app store on wheels.

What this means for media companies

The winners in 2026 aren’t choosing radio or podcasts or YouTube. They’re running the same live show across all three.

What this means for brands and advertisers

For marketers, the practical takeaway is that sports audio is now a portfolio buy, not a single channel.

One note specific to sports media: a meaningful share of sports-audio content now orbits betting. Plenty of fans tune in for analysis and play-by-play, full stop—brands should weigh whether a given show’s audience and tone actually fit before associating with it.

If you want to go deeper on how attention has fragmented across audio and video, Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows remains a sharp lens on what on-demand, screen-first media does to how we consume anything—including the game.

The bottom line

Sports radio is still relevant in 2026—more than the doom takes suggest, and for concrete reasons. It owns the car, it owns live and local, it owns the call-in, and it still captures the majority of U.S. sports-audio time. The format is adding stations and growing revenue, which is not what death looks like.

But relevance and dominance are different things. The discovery layer has moved to YouTube and video podcasts, the under-35 audience listens through a screen, and a station that publishes audio-only is recruiting no one. Radio’s future isn’t radio versus podcasts. It’s the live show, distributed everywhere—on the dial for the commute, on YouTube for the next fan, and in clips for everyone in between.

Bet against sports radio and you’ll probably lose. Bet against sports radio that refuses to put a camera in the studio, and you’ll probably win.