This edition explores how the sports industry is facing a similar challenge to music: an over-reliance on data and platforms that measure behaviour but fail to explain motivation. As clubs and organisations search for growth, the real question is not how to engage existing fans, but how to understand and reach new ones.
If you work in cricket, rugby, football, any sport in fact, you’ve probably been sold the same promise: “We’ll help you understand your fans.”
But what you actually get is Dashboards. Segments. Click-through rates. Ticketing data. In other words…everything except understanding, because here’s the uncomfortable truth: sport is drowning in data but starving for insight.
THE ILLUSION OF “FAN ENGAGEMENT”
The sports industry has gone all-in on fan engagement platforms - Genius Sports. Monterosa. Salesforce. FanMaker. CDPs. CRMs. Loyalty apps. Social listening tools - they all look impressive and they all promise growth. But scratch beneath the surface, and they’ll share the same flaw: They measure behaviour, not motivation. Oh they can tell you:
Who bought a ticket
Who clicked an email
Who watched a game
But they cannot tell you:
Why someone fell in love with your club
Why someone drifted away
Why someone hasn’t discovered you yet
And if you don’t know why…you can’t grow.
SUGAR HITS VS. SUSTAINABLE GROWTH
Most platforms in sport are built for activity, not progress - Polls. Quizzes. Gamification. Loyalty points - Nice. Engaging. Occasionally fun. But ultimately, just sugar hits, not strategy.
They spike engagement during a match…and disappear the moment the final whistle blows.
No memory.
No learning.
No compounding value.
THE BIGGER PROBLEM: THEY DON’T CREATE FANS
Here’s where it gets dangerous, because almost every platform in sport is designed to manage existing fans, not create new ones.
CRM systems? Work once you already have the fan.
Loyalty platforms? Reward the people already in the building.
Social listening? Tracks conversations already happening.
None of them are built to answer the most important question in sport right now: “How do we reach the fans we don’t have?” And that’s the growth problem.
“TECH” SOLUTIONS TRYING TO SOLVE “HUMAN” PROBLEMS
This is the root cause, because these platforms aren’t built by people who understand fandom. Or powered by code that understands emotive nuance. They’re built by people who understand software. So, fans get reduced to:
Users
Data points
Segments
“Audiences”
But fans aren’t any of those things, rather they are:
Identity
Belonging
Emotion
Ritual
And until you understand that…you’re not building a fanbase. You’re managing a database.
WHAT SPORT CAN LEARN (BRIEFLY) FROM MUSIC
The music industry made this mistake years ago. Optimising for streams, chasing algorithms, confusing ‘reach’ with ‘relationship’. Nevertheless, the artists who broke through? Well, they didn’t just track fans, they understood them. And then they mobilised them.
THE SHIFT THAT NEEDS TO HAPPEN
If Sports wants real growth, not just better reporting, it needs to move from:
Data to Meaning
Because the future growth won’t be seized by the club with the best CRM. It will be seized by the club that understands why people care…and turns that into something worth caring about.
Since publishing this, we’ve had conversations across both music and sport that all point to the same gap:
Understanding fan motivation, not just behaviour.
If that’s something you’re exploring, happy to share how we’re approaching it.