Redeem now - Omar Raja joined ESPN in 2020 and is the face of the "SportsCenter" Instagram account.
- About nine staffers help Raja search for viral content, sometimes generating gripes from commenters.
- ESPN averages more than 400 social posts a day and has focused more on TikTok recently.
This week, the "SportsCenter" Instagram account posted a video of the Japanese handball player and influencer Remi Anri Doi kayaking in "nose mode," a trend in which someone places a camera in his or her mouth to create a comically distorted effect.
This story is available exclusively to Business Insider subscribers. Become an Insider and start reading now. Have an account? Log in.Set to a remixed version of Earth, Wind & Fire's "September," the video is the kind of sports-adjacent viral fare that has increasingly found its way to ESPN's social channels, thanks in large part to Omar Raja, the digital virtuoso behind the "SportsCenter" account since 2020.
Raja, 28, honed his craft as a teenager compiling "Call of Duty" clips on YouTube and, more famously, by creating the basketball-focused Instagram account House of Highlights. A kind of "SportsCenter" for the modern age, House of Highlights was acquired in 2015 by Bleacher Report, where Raja worked until he joined ESPN.
"The one change for me when I came to ESPN is that the library of rights was just incredible," Raja told Insider. The "SportsCenter" account mixes clips past and present from ESPN's coverage of college football, basketball, MMA, baseball, and "Monday Night Football" with amateur trick shots gone wrong, "wholesome" interactions between strangers at the gym, and trippy bowling lanes.
"There's no mathematical science to it. You're like, 'Hey what's trending this week?'" Raja said of finding the ideal content mix.
With the NBA season starting, for instance, followers can expect more basketball. "In the summer when there's less active sports, that's maybe the time we go really crazy on UGC," he said, referring to user-generated content. "Everyone's playing in the backyard. Maybe a dad jumps over his son or a mom dunks on their kid, and we post that."
Raja is the face of the account — the bio reads, "I'm @Omar and this is SportsCenter!" — but ESPN's social-media team is a major operation. About nine staffers work with Raja to forage for user-generated content, and ESPN's overall social unit has more than 50 people. In a rapid-fire Slack channel, the team tracks the daily sports news cycle, double-checking social posts and ensuring the company owns the digital rights to post a certain clip. ESPN says it averages more than 400 posts a day across 30 brands, like the soccer-focused ESPN FC or espnW for women's sports.
Raja has helped grow the "SportsCenter" presence on Instagram to 32 million followers, from about 15.4 million when he started. He also operates a 4-million-subscriber-strong YouTube channel and looks after the ESPN TikTok account, with its 27.5 million followers.
Like many media companies and brands, the network has been putting more resources lately into TikTok, where accounts like SportsCenter Next, which focuses on high-school sports, have flourished, said ESPN's vice president of social media, Kaitee Daley.
'Someone take Omar's privileges'
One needs to look no further than the "SportsCenter" account's comments section, however, to realize that not everyone is a fan of Raja's focus on viral clips. On the "nose mode" Instagram post, for instance, the top comments are: "Omar you're just..I don't even know man"; "someone take Omar's privileges"; and, "Omar imma need the account back bruv."
One commenter on the ESPN subreddit recently decried how the memeification of the account runs counter to the kind of athletic achievement that, as sports broadcasters often exclaim after a terrific play, is "'SportsCenter'-worthy." The long-running TV program is ESPN's flagship show, aired throughout the day and known for its "Top Ten" highlights.
Raja said that he's used to the pushback and that the high level of engagement on user-generated posts proved that the audience liked them, despite the griping.
"The comments section doesn't decide what people want," Raja said. "The algorithms in a way decide, because the algorithm's job is to keep people on the platform."
Keeping people on ESPN's platform is also a top priority for the company amid a challenging time for the linear TV business. S&P Global Market Intelligence estimates that ESPN will average 73.6 million cable and satellite subscribers this year, down 5.7% from 2021 and 10.8% from 2020.
Like many networks, ESPN has placed big bets on streaming and its digital footprint as a counterbalance. Raja's hire was part of the network's larger efforts to lure in younger and more diverse audiences, Variety reported when he joined.
While he might be little-known outside the world of social-media-savvy sports fans, Raja has emerged as "talent" at ESPN, figuring into ad deals like for the Nissan Heisman House, where he asked past Heisman Trophy winners standing in front of Nissan cars whether the average person could run for 1 yard in a professional football match if they had 10 tries.
"The broader trend that we have noticed over the last three years, maybe longer, is that consumers want to have a more relatable connection," Daley said. "That is a lot easier when you have a human being representing a brand and having a voice than it is with the umbrella brand."
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