How TikTok Is Positioning Itself as Kenya’s Football Second Screen Before AFCON 2027

TikTok has released new figures arguing that it has become the place where football is discussed, celebrated and argued over, not simply watched. The pitch is straightforward. Matches still play out on television. The conversation around them increasingly lives on TikTok.

The local headline number is striking. The company says 80% of its TikTok users in Kenya follow football, and 42% play the game themselves. Those come from a GWI study of Kenyan users aged 18 and above that TikTok commissioned, so they are self-reported figures from research the company paid for. Treat them as TikTok’s framing rather than independent fact. The direction, though, is hard to argue with. Football is one of the few things almost everyone in Kenya has an opinion on.

The idea TikTok is really selling is “second-screen” behaviour. You watch the match on one device and react, scroll and post on another. Globally, the company says 85% of sports fans use TikTok this way, and that 90% take at least one action off the app after watching sports content there, whether that means searching for a player, following a club, or tuning into a live game. It also says fans are 42% more likely to watch a match live after seeing sports clips on the platform. Those are global numbers from TikTok’s research with Ipsos and Suzy, not Kenya-specific ones.

The timing explains why this lands now. The FIFA World Cup is underway, running from 11 June to 19 July across the United States, Canada and Mexico, with ten African nations in the field. Closer to home, Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania co-host AFCON 2027 under the “Pamoja” banner, and that tournament kicks off on 19 June 2027, exactly one year from today. For a platform that runs on attention, a year-long stretch of African football is a commercial runway, not just a cultural moment.

TikTok leans on scale to back the claim. It says more than 6.5 million videos have been posted under #SportsOnTikTok, and that AFCON 2025 produced over 1.2 million posts globally under #AFCON2025, about 28.6% of them from Sub-Saharan Africa. AFCON 2025 itself, played in Morocco across December and January, ended in one of the most contested finals the tournament has seen. Senegal won on the pitch, then CAF’s appeals board later handed the title to Morocco by forfeit after a brief walk-off protest, a decision Senegal challenged at the Court of Arbitration for Sport. That kind of drama is exactly the fuel TikTok is describing. Disputed calls and underdog runs travel much further as clips than as match reports.

One figure worth pausing on is who is watching. TikTok says women accounted for 46% of sports views on the platform globally in the first half of 2025, and that 64% of women name it as their go-to destination for sports content. Sports media has long been built around a male audience. If those numbers hold, TikTok is reaching a group that traditional broadcasting has under-served.

There is a business layer beneath all of this. The fan edits, reaction clips and tactical breakdowns are made by creators, and creators want to get paid. We already broke down the four ways TikTok lets Kenyan creators earn from their content, and football is one of the richest veins for that work. A viral AFCON reaction or a goal-celebration edit is content, audience and ad inventory rolled into one.

The practical takeaway is this. TikTok is not trying to replace the broadcasters who own the rights to show matches. It wants to own the conversation that wraps around them, and it is using Kenya’s football obsession as the proof. Whether each percentage is exact matters less than the trend they point to, which is that a large share of how Kenyan fans now experience football happens on a phone, in clips, in the hours and days around the game. With the World Cup on now and AFCON arriving in Kenya next year, expect TikTok to push harder on that position, and expect more data-led releases like this one as it does.