Pete Sampras and the Williams sisters may have grabbed all the headlines at Wimbledon, but deep in the bowels of the All England Tennis Club's headquarters in leafy SW19 tennis history of a different kind was being made.

Its effects on how the sport is followed in the future are likely to be far more profound than any of the winning performances the relentless Sampras was able to muster.

Somewhere around the time Venus Williams was presented with her first ever Grand Slam singles title, the official website www.wimbledon.org registered its two billionth hit of the fortnight.

Just eight days into the two-week tournament all previous user records were broken. By the time Andre Agassi and Pat Rafter's electrifying semi-final moved into its fifth and deciding set, the Wimbledon site was registering more than 960,000 hits per minute from score-hungry fans.

Even for Wimbledon the figures were unprecedented. For some of the bigger internet service providers they would have been statistics to die for. But, as anybody who runs an online sports service will tell you, sports fans cannot get enough of their favourite team or star and the web is the perfect medium for delivering that information.

A decade after Rupert Murdoch described sport as "a battering ram" and used exclusive sports rights to build his BSkyB satellite empire, the comment is as true as ever. Internet service providers and mobile phone operators are queuing up to sign content deals with sports websites in the hope that consumers will spend just that little bit longer on their site or a few seconds more surfing their Wap phones if there is the promise of the latest soccer transfer news or England cricket score.

Screen Digest's Rachel Church, author of a recently released 450 page report entitle Sport On The Internet, says her two subject matters could not be a better fit. "The internet is considered the perfect medium for the average sports fan, who is usually passionate about one team and sport, as well as interested in big events and other sports to a lesser degree," she says. "The web allows users to drill as deeply as they like in one sport, and, at the same time, get an instant, comprehensive overview of all the others."

The Wimbledon site offered a huge range of information. Powerful technology from IBM enabled fans to have text messages of latest scores automatically sent to their mobiles and email newsletters dispatched daily to their PCs. Visitors could trawl through thousands of statistics from this and previous tournaments or use a robotic camera to zoom in and out on the live action on centre court.

Players could come off court after a match and head for the locker room knowing a personalised statistic analysis of their performance would be waiting for them.

By far the most popular service was the live scoreboard that web users could download to their desktops. It kept them up to date on scores from all courts in real-time while they worked. "Office users across Europe and the US downloaded it in their hundreds of thousands," an IBM spokeswoman said. "It was the immediacy of the scores that they seemed to love."

In November, Neilsen Media Research found that 60% of UK adult internet users regularly logged on for sports and entertainment news. The anecdotal evidence from online sports providers is that the numbers have since grown exponentially.

Research by Go2Net in May found that US sites ESPN.com, NBA.com and NFL.com are the most popular on a global basis, but British sites such as Soccernet, CricInfo and Sports.com are not far behind.

Users are predominantly male, older, up-market and decision-makers. In short, an advertiser's dream. Personalisation technology will increase the lure of the web as an advertising medium.

By 2005 advertising on sports-related websites is expected to reach $6.27bn, up from $612m in 1999. The National Basketball Association in the US is expected to receive as much as 15% of its income from online revenue streams by 2004.

For now though, the main value of sports content is in driving sales of new technology like Wap. Jupiter Research says 40% of consumers want additional content via their cellular handset or pager.

"Sports results is killer content for mobile internet devices," says Sports.com's managing director Tom Jessiman. "Events change so often during the day and sports fans want to be kept updated on changing scores wherever they are, whether they're on the train, on the bus or standing on a street corner. They can wait until they get home to watch the highlights on television but they need to know the score as soon as it changes."

During Euro 2000 and Wimbledon, Sports.com registered around 100,000 page views a day through Wap, compared with around 15,000 a day from portals like Excite and even less from many of the financial sites whose real-time share price updates were said to have been ideally suited to mobile phones.

"By the end of next year we believe more people will be accessing Sports.com through mobile devices than their fixed screens," Jessiman says.

Jessiman, an American who ran Sportsline in the US, believes Europe's superior mobile penetration will give sports fans on the continent an 18-month head start over those in the US when it comes to receiving sports news on the move.

In February, Vodafone signed a commercial alliance with the biggest sports brand of all - Manchester United. A four-year £30m deal will not only put the Vodafone logo on United shirts but will also bring a range of mobile information services to the club's global supporter base, including access to the web. Vodafone predicts that in three to four years, United fans will watch highlights of matches and goals on their phones, and call in for exclusive audio reports, betting odds and statistics.

Traditional broadcasters are picking up on the internet's sport potential and also positioning themselves for the introduction of broadband services such as ADSL and cable. BSkyB recently paid £301m for Sports Internet, owners of the Planetfootball.com brand, 11 Premiership football club websites, a statistics service and an off-shore betting arm. It also has a stake in Sportal, a south London company specialising in building official websites for teams such as AC Milan and the South African rugby team.

Sportal built the official site for Euro2000 which offered 3,000 pages in six European languages and video clips of all the goals from previous European championships. During the tournament it registered 129 million page impressions.

The web is providing huge commercial opportunities for sport's biggest stars. Yahoo and Microsoft are rumoured to have offered £10m to run davidbeckham.com. Japanese footballer Nakata recently signed a £30m internet deal and expects to make a further £20m from merchandising. His site receives 100,000 visits per week.

The most commonly searched for athlete on the web is Russian tennis star Anna Kournikova, says Lycos. Her site is built in partnership with US firm Athletes Direct. Visitors can get their latest Anna "fix", trawl picture libraries, discover her favourite things (chocolate, Austin Powers and sit-ups, apparently) and ask her questions. (What was it like living in Alaska, Anna? Her reply: "Alaska was pretty much like anywhere else!")

A large e-tailing section is devoted to her own merchandising range. But the success of kournikova.com depends largely on how long Anna remains the media's golden girl and whether a younger, more attractive version takes her place.

There are thousands and thousands of sports sites, ranging from cheaply strung together sites on park football teams and school sports days through to lavish ventures such as Manutd.com and WWF.com, official website of the World Wrestling Federation.

Experts predict that many will struggle to survive. The winners, they say, will be those that combine a mass global and local appeal with a strong following. Leading clubs will be able to build communities, exploit archives of information and, soon, show video clips of goals. From 2001, Premiership clubs will be able to show their own games on their websites after midnight on Monday.

However, Screen Digest's Rachel Church believes that niche sites, based around sports and teams whose loyal users are deprived of extensive television coverage, will also have their day.

Technology as much as any other factor is likely to define the future of many websites and the way in which sport is consumed. But despite the growing importance of new delivery platforms and the success of sites like Wimbledon, traditional coverage of the tournament from the likes of the BBC is unlikely to be dropped.

"There's no single killer application," said Sportal chief executive Rob Hersov. "The different distribution media like Wap, broadband and wireless will all be ways to distribute digital assets and consumers will be viewing the event or the information or the interactivity in different ways."

So the Saturday Wap user may use the office's ADSL line during the week before going home in the evening to watch sport on digital television, using a PC to access the web for their statistical needs at the same time. And it would be a surprise if stars like Anna Kournikova didn't have a presence on every single platform.

Most popular UK sites
Page impressions per month

1: soccernet.com 60 million
2: sports.com 31 million
3: formula1.com 27 million
4: planetfootball.com 25 million
5: sky.sports.com 25 million
6: Sportal network 25 million
7: Sports Internet 20 million
8: sporting-life.com 15 million
9: teamtalk.com 14 million
10: football365.com 12.5 million