Rising Ballers founders Brendon Shabani (left), Eni Shabani (centre), and Jamie Pollitt (right).
Football publisher Rising Ballers has grown to a 30-plus strong team with its focus on putting out creator-led marketing campaigns on social media.
It is part of a trend which has seen mainstream publishers such as Reach, Future, DMG Media and News UK all invest heavily in social-first content teams which blur the line between journalism and marketing.
[Read more: Future plc buys beauty and fashion brand Sheerluxe for £40m ]
The company, founded in 2017, publishes football content on Instagram, Tiktok and Youtube.
Since its founding, Rising Ballers’ portfolio has expanded to include brands: She’s A Baller, a platform for women’s football, Rising Ballers USA and an investment in fashion-focussed football platform Footballer Fits.
Although all brands exist as websites, Rising Ballers focuses on content for social media distribution, prioritising the growth of its young audience over web traffic and page views.
Across Rising Ballers’ portfolio, the company claims to have grown its audience by 15.38% this year and had a 200% increase on views across its three social platforms.
Around “30 to 50 pieces of content” are pushed out per day across Rising Ballers’ portfolio on social channels to its “15 to 20 million followers across channels”, said founder and director Eni Shabani.
“We’ve entered the most saturated space, arguably one of the hardest,” said Shabani in reference to football journalism.
Rising Ballers’ content is largely built around athletes with formats including long-form video interviews with athletes, quick-fire question-style interviews and activity-based content (e.g. challenging a footballer to draw a picture while answering questions).
She’s a Baller is the only site to publish long-form written content on the web, and even then articles are a “combination of original short-form formats” such as videos and “desk-based formats” such as opinion pieces and interviews.
“We’ve amassed a significant audience in a fairly short amount of time… we’re rooted in this mission statement of creating culture and opportunity for the next wave, which extends into all of the slightly different brand activations that we do that drive real impact.”
The company started making money during Covid, as lockdown became “a really interesting time” while “fans spend more time than ever on their phones”, said Shabani.
However, “brand partnerships got a little bit weird”, he added. “It was like remote campaigns as opposed to IRL [in real life] stuff. And we’re a very IRL brand.”
Rising Ballers gets all of its revenue from working directly with brands such as Spotify, NFL, and Major League Soccer (MLS).
Audience insights ‘within minutes’
Strategic advisor Arian Kalatari, a co-founder of Ladbible, said: “We have direct access to a young audience, right? And thousands and thousands of people. And within minutes, the [brand partner] can get real insights from that audience.”
He said: “We have the insights. We have the strategy, we can do the creative. We can do production end to end, and we have the audience that you can reach.”
Major UK newsbrands have also explored placing more focus on their social strategy to capture young audiences: in 2025, Sky News said it has embraced a ‘video-first’ model as part of its Project 2030 bid to expand its audience and become more financially sustainable .
Last year also saw Daily Mail publisher DMG Media launched two dedicated social publisher arms , “doubling down” on reaching young people and what they can offer advertisers.
It followed news that The Sun had doubled its Youtube revenues in the second half of 2024 , and became the biggest UK newspaper on Youtube with six million subscribers, with “significant” ambitions for video content creation.
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