The lifeblood of every sports property exists in the strength of its fanbase, for which rights holders are investing in key milestones across the fan’s evolution – from the first moments they engage with the organization’s brand directly to the expansion of its premium digital offerings for capturing user data and assessing their behavioral trends. While the “fan journey” is oftentimes visualized as a linear path, there isn’t, however, a one-track model for building a highly engaged, loyal audience, and requires a high degree of flexibility for rights holders to optimize engagement among their individual fans.

Measuring levels of fan engagement in the organization’s owned content production has become common practice among the majority of sports clubs, leagues, and competition organizers. N3XT Sports research indicates that 88.6 percent of sports properties collect first-party fan data via one or more owned platforms. Nevertheless, how they each use fan data to nurture fan loyalty depends on the maturity of their respective data strategies and infrastructure, whereas their ability to identify fans “willing to pay to stay” involves the organization’s ability to customize their digital ecosystem to each fan’s unique interests.

According to Daniel Shichman, CEO and co-founder of the artificial intelligence-powered (AI) sports media platform WSC Sports, the sector is witnessing “a complete behavioral shift in how people discover and consume sports content”, while personalized and localized storytelling is playing “a fundamental role” in how sports organizations drive fan value. WSC Sports, which uses AI to automate the infrastructure behind how sports organizations create, distribute, and monetize content, is finding success in athlete-led stories to drive positive engagement.

By way of example, WSC’s data show a significant year-on-year growth in personalized athlete content (260 percent) and unique game highlights (319 percent), as well as dramatic spikes in viewership of athlete-led stories aligned to their home markets and fan interests (513 percent). These trends are also supporting user discovery at the earliest stages of the fan journey, with growth in average homepage watch times on mobile (353 percent) across multiple rights-holder markets indicating that stronger “audience-to-content matching” is helping to drive more meaningful audience engagement.

“Whereas sports organizations used to create and distribute one-off highlights everywhere, rights holders are now able to personalize and localize content player-by-player, game-by-game, market-by-market in high quantity and at rapid pace,” Shichman continues. “What resonates with a Lakers fan in Los Angeles from what engages a Real Madrid supporter in Mexico City requires a deep understanding of what moves each fanbase, while sports properties are building personalization infrastructure that powers their global content engines based on unique fan interests.”

According to research for N3XT Sports’ Fan Engagement & Commercialization Guide, while around 80 percent of International Federations (IF) in the Olympic Movement collect first-party fan data, for example, a higher percentage own infrastructure which encourages fans to personalize the fan experience (50 percent) compared to governing bodies represented in other major international events, including the men’s FIFA World Cup (34 percent), Rugby World Cup (35 percent), and T20 Cricket World Cup (20 percent).

Furthermore, Olympic bodies are more likely to enable users to personalize the user experience (UX) via both web and mobile, according to the data. This is also true among privately-owned sports entities. For instance, whereas European football’s highest-earning clubs collect first-party fan data via multiple platforms, the vast majority enable fans to personalize their experience using team/athlete preferences (80 percent) and commercially led communications (95 percent). In doing so, sports organizations are “better able to customize the fan journey,” Shichman adds, while those with “mobile-first capabilities are reaping greater returns on their investments”.

Mobile-supported video content is becoming the dominant consumer choice among sport fans, according to WSC’s research. Across its 550+ sports clients, the number of video impressions via mobile have grown more than 260 times throughout 2024, compared to the previous calendar year, while sports organizations which integrate video via mobile have also witnessed 43 times the number of video click-throughs during the same period.

“Mobile is now the front door to fandom,” Shichman explains. “Our job is to make sure the right content is waiting for the user on the other side.” One of the key drivers behind this surge in engagement has been the adoption of “vertical” video content, he goes on, including amongst some of the world’s most prominent sports and media entities, such as Spanish top-flight football’s LaLiga, the National Basketball Association (NBA), and US broadcaster ESPN. 

“The way fans consume sports has fundamentally shifted,” Shichman says. “What used to be a highlight watched at home is now a 15-second vertical clip discovered through scrolling. Fans today expect content to be fast, full-screen, and frictionless. WSC Sports’ catalogue of automated content-creation solutions has made it easier for our clients to automatically format videos vertically in-app, while helping drive user engagement by automatically redirecting traffic to their mobile product.

“With homepage watch times increasing three-fold as a result, an organization’s ability to effortlessly create and upload more engaging, user-friendly video content is helping build connections with more fans. Considering that 54 percent of all sports-related video content distributed in 2024 was vertical, customizing the way fans watch sports content is proving just as important for audience growth as the highlights and content they share with their fanbase.”

Although mobile-video content is proven to drive engagement, large swathes of the sports industry do not fully embrace mobile-friendly content, with as many as 38.2 percent of organizations yet to integrate their very own mobile app into their direct-to-consumer (D2C) portfolios. Notably, 55.1 percent of the industry, according to N3XT Sports research, provide their digital fanbase with a video-streaming offering, highlighting both the sector’s opportunity to introduce mobile infrastructure for driving audience growth and capitalizing on fan demand for tailored video content.

Although sports organizations and rights holders are investing heavily in digital attributes in their push for first-party data ownership, very few are maximizing their fan-data collection. For example, while 88.6 percent of properties collect first-party fan data via a website, as few as 54.4 percent collect fan data via a mobile app. Meanwhile, video-streaming (38.2 percent) and fantasy-gaming (19.1 percent) products are vastly underutilized for fan-data collection, limiting their ability to personalize the fan experience and drive cross-platform engagement at every stage of the fan journey.

Writing in the company’s 2025 Digital Trends in the Sports Industry report, N3XT Sports CEO and co-founder Mounir Zok underlines the “disparity in digital and data maturity” which exists throughout the sector, which he says is leading many to introduce streaming products into fragmented ecosystems and means that sports properties which do not consolidate their fan-data infrastructure are therefore unable to fully optimize the fan journey, or maximize their ROI. 

“While expanding digital touchpoints is a step in the right direction, building a loyal subscriber base and unlocking new commercial revenue streams requires a more nuanced approach,” Mounir says. “A flexible and well-oiled data management system is crucial for understanding fan preferences, identifying key engagement points, and optimizing customer relations and internal decision-making processes. This level of efficiency demands a digital strategy that integrates technologies connecting the UX, business-unit interactions, and operational efficiency.”

While decision-makers inside sports organizations have traditionally taken a linear approach to fan engagement, which invariably involves a strategy for driving audience acquisitions, user retention, and customer conversions, this approach has become outdated as sports properties invest more in data-informed, mobile-centric, and hyper-personalized fan experiences. The Fan-Monetization Data Feedback Loop, presented by N3XT Sports, highlights how data learnings from the customization and monetization of the UX can be used to inform decision-making at every stage of the fan journey, helping to turn once static user information into truly dynamic and transformative insights for creating new, highly engaging fan experiences.

WSC Sports’ automated-video infrastructure provides a clear case for the Feedback Loop’s methodology. For example, by analyzing how, what, and when individual fans prefer to watch video content, sports organizations not only leverage freemium video content to drive customer conversions in the latter stages of the fan journey but also utilize fan-data feedback to inform their audience-acquisition strategy via social media, as well as the types of content which serve audience growth and retention within their digital-marketing communications.

“The significant growth we’re seeing in athlete-story watch times, for example, demonstrates N3XT Sports’ Feedback Loop in action,” Shichman expands. “As our systems learn what specific player content resonates with each fan, they surface more of that content, driving deeper engagement across the fan journey. The evolution from moment-based content to story-driven experiences shows this optimization in real-time and how automated platforms learn from audience preferences to adjust and personalize the UX – in turn, uncovering behavioral trends used to scale its D2C offering, accordingly.”

The significant growth we’re seeing in athlete-story watch times, for example, demonstrates N3XT Sports’ Feedback Loop in action. As our systems learn what specific player content resonates with each fan, they surface more of that content, driving deeper engagement across the fan journey.

Daniel Shichman, WSC Sports CEO

As organizations consolidate data to optimize their digital portfolios, several properties have gone a step further by fully integrating their entire D2C product-line within a mobile app. By utilizing an omnichannel experience in this way, organizations are making it easier to personalize the UX and streamline the influx of large quantities of fan information and user feedback. For example, during the 2022/23 season, LaLiga collaborated with WSC Sports to enhance its digital content strategy, including the creation of automated, vertical content videos within the Spanish league’s mobile app as part of its push to personalize the UX and engage Gen Z audiences.

“Being able to produce content in such a fast way is really important to us and also the possibility to adapt that content to many different platforms,” explains LaLiga’s Digital Strategy Director Alfredo Bermejo. “The increase in content creation helped LaLiga to reach 200 million followers on social media, which means we became the most followed football league in the world. Looking ahead, we are excited to use [WSC’s] platform to grow in different markets and unlock new business opportunities.”

Touching on the sports sector’s future, Shichman says that, to truly maximize ROI on personalized content, “an organization’s framework should be designed in a way to optimize and learn from fan behaviors and inform new ideas”. With more clubs, leagues, and federations investing in owned digital products, such as video-streaming and fantasy-gaming products, among other mobile-centric and gameday features, organizations are gaining a better understanding of their users’ preferences, including which fans are more likely to engage in paid activations, commercial partnerships, and opportunities to grow audiences in new markets.

“You need more content to drive fandom,” Shichman leaves off. “As sports improve their data-collection and data-processing capabilities, they are discovering innovative ways to capture user data and use it to inform their digital strategy for creating tailored content, which leads to stronger engagement, fan-by-fan and market-by-market.”

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N3XT Sports develops and implements data and digital transformation strategies within sports properties at federation level, competition level, and club level. To find out more about how N3XT Sports can serve your organization, fill out the form below, and we’ll be in touch. Our goal is to drive the digitalization of the sports industry and our clients.