CHICAGO – Chicago Cubs at Wrigley Field. (Photo by Jonathan Daniel/Getty Images)
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The Chicago Cubs TikTok account released Nine Innings to Love, a 17-episode romantic comedy, on September 4. Written by Cubs Productions, the team’s in-house creative arm, it follows two fans through a game in the Wrigley Field bleachers.
Jen Martindale, the Cubs’ executive vice president of marketing and communications, said in a press release that the format was “built for Gen Z and millennial audiences.”
Three weeks later, United Talent Agency signed Foolish Club Studios, established by the Kansas City Chiefs’ leadership, for representation across film, television and media rights.
Both are reaching audiences beyond live games, with different degrees of control over what they make and who sees it.
Chicago Cubs TikTok Microdramas Reach New Audiences
The Cubs’ TikTok series follows the social programming model of vertical drama, with short episodes produced for social feeds where audience reach counts for more than direct revenue.
Microdrama attracts a different audience mix from what might be expected of sports highlights. Digital i found that women aged 45 to 54 accounted for 15.7% of streams to five leading microdrama apps’ YouTube channels in 2025, more than double their 7.7% share of overall YouTube streams. Men aged 18 to 24 accounted for 6.0% of those streams, against 13.7% across YouTube, although the figures do not establish who watched the Cubs’ series.
The approach echoes TikTok’s World Cup creator program, which I reported on in August. Thirty creators covered supporters, stadium culture and the tournament experience without filming live play, reaching beyond audiences interested primarily in the matches.
The Cubs are applying similar thinking to fiction, using a romance aimed at #BookTok to attract viewers who might never watch baseball. Unlike the World Cup program, the team produces the series itself and publishes it through its own account.
Skydance Sports Brings NFL Stories Into Film And Streaming
Skydance Sports, a joint venture with the NFL and NFL Films since 2022, is executive producer of Holiday Touchdown: A Bears Love Story, the third Hallmark film built around an NFL team, premiering October 17.
The studio also partnered on The Kingdom, the Disney+ and ESPN docuseries that became Foolish Club’s first credited project.
On Tuesday, Paramount completed its acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery, naming the combined company Skydance. The NFL’s production partner now sits within a group containing CBS, two global streaming services and live sports rights.
That adds another dimension to the integration question I examined last week: whether team storytelling becomes programming for streaming services, marketing for sports rights, or both.
Producing Sports Entertainment Does Not Mean Controlling The Audience
The Cubs produce their TikTok series, but the platform controls distribution. Hallmark brings an established audience to NFL films, while Foolish Club is developing projects for multiple buyers with UTA representing it.
Foolish Club’s latest release, Chasing Goals, is a feature documentary made with Trevor Noah’s Day Zero Productions and Wavelength about a Kansas City youth soccer club of refugee athletes. It premiered at Kansas City’s inaugural Full Tilt Film Festival.
From the Chicago Cubs TikTok series to Skydance Sports productions for Hallmark, sports teams can reach viewers who never watch their games, but reaching them is different from controlling the relationship that follows.
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