Sports And Animation Keep Colliding, So Bleacher Report Is Launching A Dedicated Animation Channel

Bleacher Report’s animated shorts are getting a new permanent home. After more than a decade of building fandom around shows like Game of Zones, Gridiron Heights, and The Champions, the company is launching a dedicated YouTube channel called B/R Cartoons, part of a broader push to expand its animation ambitions across sports, comedy, and online culture.

For Zach McCann, Bleacher Report’s head of creative strategy, the new channel represents formalizing something that has already existed organically among sports fans online for years.

The Past and Present

“Animation has been a core part of Bleacher Report’s identity with sports fans on digital as part of our content strategy for a very long time,” McCann says. “Game of Zones’ first episode aired in 2014. That was an NBA meets Game of Thrones satirical show that became a cultural staple among basketball fans.”

That lineage matters because B/R Cartoons arrives at a moment when sports culture and animation culture increasingly overlap. Anime aesthetics show up in MLB hype videos, NBA players openly discuss their fandoms, wrestling promotions run merch tie-ins, and soccer clubs commission manga-inspired promos. Bleacher Report has spent years turning sports memes and online discourse into animated comedy, and the company only sees that crossover accelerating in the coming years.

“Animated entertainment builds a special type of fandom and community and a unique connection to fans,” McCann says. “That’s reflected in the retention of the audience. We see the return visitors, the engagement, the sentiment.”

A Home for Sports Animation

The B/R Cartoons channel officially launches today, May 19, and serves as a central hub for both new programming and Bleacher Report’s extensive animation archive. Returning series include the soccer-focused The Champions, which fans repeatedly demand in comment sections, along with Gridiron Heights and Bulletin Board Material.

Before any formal promotion or announcement, the channel had already accumulated nearly 10,000 subscribers through algorithmic discovery alone.

“We’ve created the channel, and it’s close to 10,000 subscribers without us doing anything yet except for people discovering it on their algorithm,” McCann says.

The revival of The Champions aligns with soccer’s global calendar, with four new episodes leading into this summer’s World Cup and featuring stars like Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo.

The kind of cartoons that Bleacher Report is planning for its channel is based on years of extensive audience habit research. Earlier B/R cartoons leaned heavily into short runtimes because that is how sports fans consume content across social platforms.

“We saw by far the best engagement and performance metrics tied to the short-form episodes,” McCann says. “We also saw crazy numbers pulling from our Gridiron Heights IP and creating very short form, 10, 15 seconds, almost like singular jokes that could be very shareable.”

It’s a consumptive behavior familiar to sports fans. “That’s how people consume sports, too,” McCann notes.

That said, with a standalone channel for its cartoon content, the company wants to test longer and stranger formats that would not fit neatly into previous distribution models. McCann describes one upcoming college football project as “an 8-to-15-minute almost cartoon meets talk show meets sports vodcast.”

“It’ll be fully animated. It’ll be a world that we build that will pull jokes and memes from the real world and storylines from the news,” he says. “It’s a much different format than a Gridiron Heights or a Game of Zones. It’s much more analysis meets animated comedy vibe.”

Athletes and Animation Grow Closer

Part of what makes sports animation viable in 2026 is the dramatic shift in athlete culture over the past decade. The stereotype of detached athletes uninterested in animation or fandom has largely disappeared. Today’s stars openly embrace anime, gaming, comics, and internet culture, often literally wearing it on their sleeves.

McCann says Bleacher Report sees that crossover constantly. “We know there’s more athletes than we can count that follow Bleacher Report, that follow House of Highlights, that are in our comment sections, that are sharing to their own pages,” he says.

Bleacher Report already works directly with athletes through other programming initiatives, including partnerships with NFL star Micah Parsons and MLB player Mookie Betts. Those relationships increasingly influence the animation side as well.

“Our team is so ear to the ground of what fans are talking about, what athletes are fans of animation, of ours or otherwise,” McCann says. “We know that there are certain athletes who have specific fandoms that they post about.”

That connection shapes the tone of B/R Cartoons. Bleacher Report’s animated universe pokes fun at sports culture, but McCann emphasizes, “We take a lot of pride in being celebratory. We don’t skewer or make fun of.”

“We’re just having fun. This content is funny, it’s irreverent, it’s celebratory, it’s connected to fans,” McCann goes on. “It brings fans and athletes in with us.”

That approach also matters because Bleacher Report maintains formal relationships with major leagues across professional and college sports. The company balances satire with access and long-term partnerships.

“We have league rights to almost every league,” McCann says. “Football, basketball, baseball, college, pro. We have formal and very important relationships with these leagues that garner us access and rights and footage.”

Animation Without Borders

The sports-animation crossover becomes especially visible through anime’s influence on athletes and teams worldwide. McCann points to Bleacher Report’s earlier anime-inspired series Hero Ball as evidence that the company already recognizes the potential there.

“That was really successful,” he says. “Anime has obviously broken through. It is mainstream in every culture at this point.”

He also notes that athletes increasingly bring anime fandom into interviews and collaborations. “We just did an interview with Noah Lyles separately of B/R Cartoons where he spent half the time talking about his interest in anime,” McCann says.

Future B/R Cartoons projects may continue to draw on global animation traditions, though McCann stops short of announcing anything specific.

“The different animation styles to be able to bring in new audiences, have distinct voices across different shows, is important to us,” he says. “That’s certainly something that we think about.”

For Bleacher Report, the broader goal is to create animated worlds that feel native to modern sports fandom, where memes, highlights, online discourse, and animation all blend into a single ecosystem.

“Sport itself is so global,” McCann says. “The different animation styles to be able to bring in new audiences and have distinct voices across different shows is important to us.”