One panel hosted a deep-dive into the way soccer clubs are using AI to better the relationship with their fans. Wyndham Richardson, Executive Director of sports marketing agency, Two Circles, moderated the conversation that included Javier Gil from La Liga, Timm Jäger from EintrachtTech, Mike Armstrong from Juventus FC, and Barak Jacob from WSC Sports.
Kicking off the conversation, Jäger, spoke about Eintracht Frankfurt’s need to better understand its fans—which led to the creation of EintrachtTech, a software spinoff which Jäger heads as CEO. He and his team of developers have taken all of the club’s digital platforms in-house, including a ticketing solution, e-commerce store, fan app, team credit card, and analytical tools that provide data for every fan touchpoint. Having everything under one roof gives them exclusive access to fan data. When applied, they can use AI to ask interesting questions in real-time. For example, during a live game they can identify who’s in the stadium, who’s recently purchased merch, or who’s bought a beer at a local pub, and then follow-up with appropriate, targeted marketing offers.
Javier Gil, Head of AI Implementation and Development at La Liga, started an entirely new department dedicated to adopting and applying new tools to the league’s working processes in order to streamline workflows. Specifically, he mentioned that they’ve made it a point to work with the most preeminent AI companies, naming Microsoft and WSC Sports—which they use to create content for their social accounts, website, and app, in addition to using WSC Sports’ generative AI tools to create and translate broadcasts into multiple languages. Gil and WSC Sports’ Head of Business Development, Barak Jacob, briefly touched on ways that gen-AI has helped the league personalize content not only for their fans, but also for its clubs and partners.
La Liga is an example of an organization that’s using WSC Sports across the board. Today they’re sending customized video packages to clubs and broadcast partners by automatically identifying the relevant players and broadcast languages.”
When asked how his club is using AI, Mike Armstrong, CMO for Juventus FC, said that they’ve employed solutions around sports performance, namely in the areas of scouting, tactics, and athlete recovery. On the marketing side, he talked about using AI to scale-up the team’s content creation, which comes with an array of interesting challenges, like reaching millions of followers, 90% of whom live outside of the club’s home country of Italy.
How do we serve these very different types of groups? It can be complicated…do we have the right frequency? Is it the right content per platform?”
Wrapping up the session Richardson asked the panelists how AI can be utilized to maximize teams’ rights. Tim Jäger spoke about the need for team’s to have a north star when it comes to a digital strategy. You don’t need to understand every AI model that’s out there, but rather the goals that you want to achieve in order to select products that can yield results. Armstrong spoke on Juventus’ desire to be able to deliver personalized content to fans at the right moment; while on the athlete performance side, discussing an AI solution that aids in mental recuperation for injured players.
After such a rigorous discussion around innovation, it will be interesting to see how these executives employ some of the things they spoke about during the session. To learn more about how La Liga is using AI to transform their content check out this case study; and to follow-up Gen-AI’s impact on the greater sports industry you can read more here.