The Intelligent Club: Why better audience understanding will reshape the business of sport

Sport has never had a bigger audience, but the next commercial battleground will not be won by audience size alone. 

Football remains the world’s most followed sport, with Nielsen reporting that 51% of people globally are fans of football. However the wider sports market tells a broader story. Formula 1 reported 6.5 million race attendees in 2024, up 9% year on year, alongside 1.6 billion cumulative TV viewers and 97 million social media followers. Major League Baseball reported its highest attendance in seven years in 2024, alongside increases in viewership, streaming and fan engagement. Across sport, audiences are growing, fragmenting and engaging in more ways than traditional models were designed to serve. 

The more important question is becoming: how well do sports organizations actually understand the people they serve? 

That means understanding more than ‘fans’ in the traditional sense. It means understanding the match-going supporter, the local resident, the international follower, the family looking for weekend experiences, the business using premium hospitality, the tourist visiting the city, the brand partner trying to reach a specific audience. It also means understanding the casual digital viewer whose relationship with a team, club, league or event may be shaped entirely through social, video, creators or AI-enabled channels. 

For sports organizations, this is not about extracting more from supporters. The opportunity is to create more relevant propositions, better experiences and stronger commercial models by understanding how different groups engage, what they value and how their relationship with sport may evolve over time. 

This matters because the economics of sport are changing. In football, the European football market grew by 8% in 2023/24 to a record €38bn, with the ‘big five’ European leagues contributing more than €20bn for the first time. But beneath the growth, the revenue mix is shifting. Across those ‘big five’ leagues, commercial revenue was the primary driver of growth in 2023/24, while broadcast revenue grew by only 1%, the slowest growth across the three major revenue streams for the second consecutive year. 

That football trend reflects a wider sports challenge. PwC’s 2026 Global Sports Survey forecasts growth across the global sports industry, but expects higher growth across all revenue streams except media rights. It also notes that while two-thirds of fans consume live sports broadcasts, younger fans increasingly prioritize ancillary content. Live sport remains highly valuable, but relying on traditional broadcast growth alone is becoming a less complete strategy. 

Sports organizations need to become smarter – an insight-led and data driven approach is the first step to achieving that competitive advantage. 

In other consumer markets, leading organizations have long used customer insight to shape products, pricing, propositions, channels and partnerships. Sport has often been slower to make that shift, partly because emotional loyalty has historically masked the need for sharper segmentation. But loyalty alone is no longer enough, the organizations that thrive over the next decade will be those that understand not only who their audiences are, but what role sport plays in their lives. 

That role is becoming more complex. A fan may be a season ticket holder, a retail customer, a social follower, a parent bringing children to an event, a local resident using venue facilities, a tourist visiting a city, or a corporate buyer looking for premium experiences. For many people, the relationship with a sports organization may sit alongside wider behaviors in entertainment, lifestyle, travel, community, work and culture. 

This is where better segmentation becomes commercially powerful. Not segmentation as a static marketing exercise, but as a way of designing more relevant propositions around real behaviors and needs. Flexible memberships, differentiated hospitality products, local community offers, family experiences, tourism partnerships, retail propositions and non-matchday venue use all become more valuable when designed around specific audience groups rather than generic fan assumptions. 

The biggest sports organizations are already moving in this direction. The NFL has described data-driven optimization, audience activation and journey orchestration as central to meeting fans wherever they are, using a unified view of behaviors, preferences and engagement to personalize journeys across email, push, in-app and web channels. The NBA has launched app personalization features powered by AI, including team and player tabs and a social-media-style moments feed. Wimbledon and IBM introduced AI-powered digital experiences for 2025, including a match chat assistant designed to provide real-time insights and analysis during singles matches. 

These examples matter because they show that the future of engagement is not confined to one sport, one channel or one asset. The battleground is increasingly about relevance: the ability to understand a fan, anticipate what they value, and serve them in a way that feels timely, useful and distinctive. 

The same shift applies to physical assets. In football, Deloitte links Premier League commercial growth to new and expanded offerings anchored by stadium and surrounding real estate redevelopment. In the EFL, Deloitte highlights clubs using stadia as multi-purpose venues beyond matchdays, with enhanced commercial operations contributing to growth. But this is not only a football issue. Across sport, venues are becoming broader experience platforms: places for entertainment, hospitality, retail, community activity, tourism and business engagement. 

Digital engagement is changing just as quickly. Deloitte’s analysis shows that the global value of sports media rights grew at a compound annual growth rate of 7.1% between 2014 and 2019, but is expected to slow to 2.7% between 2021 and 2027. At the same time, YouTube sports content viewing grew by 45% in 2024, totaling 35 billion hours watched, most of which was on-demand content. MLB’s 2024 season also points to this shift, with MLB TV setting a new record for streaming minutes watched. 

This does not mean live sport loses its power. It means the engagement model around sport is broadening. Fans may still value the match, race, fixture or tournament, but they are also engaging through highlights, creators, podcasts, short-form video, social platforms, documentaries, fantasy products, gaming environments and personalized digital experiences. 

That raises a more provocative question. Is the next frontier really about owning the best app or website, or is it about being able to engage audiences wherever they choose to spend their time? 

The answer is unlikely to be binary. Sports organizations will still need strong owned channels. But they will also need the ability to integrate with third-party platforms, understand shifting behaviors, use content more intelligently and remain relevant in environments they do not fully control. 

This is the central argument behind this series. 

We believe the next competitive advantage in sport will come from better audience understanding, translated into sharper commercial models, more adaptive engagement strategies and more valuable experiences across physical and digital ecosystems. 

Article 1 – Beyond the fanbase: will challenge the idea that audience scale is enough. We explore why clubs, leagues and rights holders must move beyond broad fan definitions and understand how different groups behave, what they value and how sport fits into their lives. 

Article 2 – The new commercial battleground: will look at how better audience understanding can reshape the commercial model. As media rights growth becomes harder to rely on, sports organizations need more sophisticated propositions across sponsorship, hospitality, retail, membership, content and venue use. 

Article 3 – After the app: will explore the next frontier of fan engagement. Many organizations are still catching up on digital, but the battleground is already moving. The question is not only how to improve owned channels, but how to build the capability to integrate, adapt and engage wherever audiences choose to spend their time. 

Article 4 – The intelligent club: will bring the series together by looking at what the future sports organization could become. The intelligent club, league or rightsholder is not just a team, venue or content business. It is an organization that continuously learns from audience behavior and uses that understanding to shape strategy, partnerships, operations and experience design. 

At Elixirr, we are having more conversations with sports organizations about exactly these challenges: how to better understand audiences, define sharper propositions, modernize commercial models and build the capabilities to deliver them. This is becoming a clear strategic agenda for organizations that want to get ahead in the years to come. 

The organizations that lead this shift will not simply know more about their fans, they will use that understanding to build better businesses: more relevant to audiences, more valuable to partners, more embedded in communities and more resilient in a changing market.