When two Denver Broncos fans dressed as horse-girl characters from the anime "Umamusume: Pretty Derby" during the 2025–26 NFL playoffs, they triggered something unexpected: a viral collision between two seemingly separate fan worlds. Their homemade anime edits featuring Broncos highlights spread across TikTok and Reddit, drawing cosplayers to stadiums and sending anime-football fan art into the cultural mainstream. Neither the characters nor the team had planned it that way, yet both benefited enormously from the grassroots crossover.
This moment captures something Dr. Emilie Waggoner, a First-Year Experience seminar lecturer at the University of Colorado Denver, has been documenting through her research on anime's impact on society and culture: the business world has awakened to anime's power. For decades, anime lived in niche corners—conventions, specialty shops, devoted fan communities. Today, with millions of Americans spending real money on streaming subscriptions, conventions, gaming, and merchandise, anime has become a cultural force that mainstream businesses and sports franchises can no longer ignore.
The opportunities are everywhere. During the 2024 Summer Olympics in Japan, athletes from multiple nations struck victory poses instantly recognizable to fans of "One Piece," "Jujutsu Kaisen," and "Naruto." Japan itself leaned into the moment, designing anime-inspired Olympic jerseys for various teams. The Los Angeles Dodgers hosted a sold-out "One Piece" theme night. The NBA deepened its anime partnerships through collaborations with Crunchyroll and TOHO Animation to release merchandise inspired by "My Hero Academia." FIFA wove themes from the anime "Blue Lock" into World Cup marketing campaigns explicitly designed to reach younger audiences. Each partnership represents a deliberate business calculation: anime fans are loyal, engaged, and willing to spend.
"Businesses are very much interested in anime," Waggoner explained. "Anime has an incredibly loyal following, and this presents an opportunity for businesses, especially when anime intersects with another fan base, like sports." That intersection is where real value emerges. It's not anime alone or sports alone—it's the alchemy of reaching both audiences simultaneously, expanding reach far beyond what either could achieve in isolation.
The scale is becoming harder to ignore. Anime Expo in Los Angeles, the largest convention of its kind in the United States, typically draws about 100,000 guests. When Fan Expo Denver arrives at the Colorado Convention Center May 28–31, voice actors and artists from "Demon Slayer," "Death Note," and "My Hero Academia" will appear alongside mainstream entertainment figures, reflecting anime's expanded tent.
Yet Waggoner emphasizes that the business opportunity rests on something deeper than market share. "Anime creates a sense of belonging not a lot of fans have found elsewhere," she said. "The storytelling in anime provides a fictional world that is able to connect to the human experience. Failures, disagreements with friends, conflict, self-identity, death—anime deals with all that." That emotional resonance is what transforms casual viewers into the fiercely loyal fans who show up to stadiums in cosplay and create viral edits at midnight.
For institutions like CU Denver, which ranks in the top 40 nationally for 3D graphics and animation, the moment represents a chance to connect students with a thriving industry. The university has produced four Pixar interns, and as anime becomes increasingly intertwined with mainstream entertainment, film, gaming, and technology, the career pathways only expand. "Anime is no longer a niche community," Waggoner concluded. "It is here and there is an opportunity to learn from it on a social and cultural level as well as a business level."