Digital-product owners sit at the intersection of a company’s digital and commercial strategies, playing the important role of developing and delivering a technology stack that serves both customer (CX) and employee experiences (EX). Within the sports industry, these span – though are not limited to – the breadth of a rights holder’s direct-to-consumer (D2C) capabilities, including how they leverage fan data across the organization’s entire digital portfolio.

Although sports organizations and rights holders are investing heavily in their digital attributes, and tailoring them to first-party data ownership, very few are however maximizing their fan-data collection, according to N3XT Sports research. For example, while 88.6 percent of properties collect their own fan data via a website, as few as 54.4 percent collect fan data via a mobile app, 65.1 percent via ecommerce, and 69.9 percent via ticketing. 

Meanwhile, OTT-streaming (38.2 percent) and fantasy-gaming (19.1 percent) products are vastly underutilized for fan-data collection, whereas only 32.4 percent of the organizations assessed collect fan data via a single sign-on (SSO). This indicates a high level of siloed data across the sports ecosystem, as well as opportunities for rights holders to augment their respective fan funnels and invest in their digital and data personnel to better understand the fan journey.

As sports properties diversify their D2C functions, the front office will continue to evolve to the changing fan demands and decipher behavioral trends within their fan database. 

Furthermore, as the industry seeks to diversify its digital-product range and strengthen the overall fan funnel, they will also seek to augment their workforce to include dedicated product owners to manage new solutions. This extends to data-focused personnel to ingest and analyze increased levels of user information generated within a diverse digital portfolio and integrating interactive artificial intelligence (AI) tools for carrying out customer engagements and delivering hyper-personalization to the digital fan.

Technology integration and innovation have traditionally fallen on the shoulders of a Chief Technology Officer (CTO) or Chief Information Officer (CIO) throughout an organization’s digital transformation. As sports organizations seize greater digital-product and data ownership, more are augmenting their workforce to include dedicated product owners and bona fide data scientists. 

According to N3XT Sports research for our recently published 2025 Digital Trends in the Sports Industry report, the vast majority of professional clubs and franchises in Europe’s and North America’s most popular leagues employ one or more digital/technology leads, as well as a dedicated data scientist or data engineer. Nevertheless, as the industry evolves, and more properties adopt innovative tools and AI solutions to enhance the UX, there are still very few sports clubs and franchises which employ dedicated innovation leads, whereas even fewer are hiring specialists in AI and machine learning positions, despite the industry investing US$7.6 billion in AI and machine learning technology in 2025.

Among the industry’s benchmarks, the National Basketball Association (NBA) is home to the highest percentage of franchises with in-house innovation leads (63.3 percent) and AI specialists (16.7 percent) and are more likely to hire digital and data leads compared to their European and Olympic counterparts. Just as organizations have diversified their workforce to include digital and data leads, more properties will see value in hiring dedicated innovation and AI specialists as the sector continues to embrace automation to improve their customer relationship management (CRM), data management, and operational efficiencies. 

By comparison, the Olympic Movement’s summer International Federations (IF) are at earlier stages of their own organizational restructuring, with 62.9 percent of Summer Olympic IFs employing a dedicated digital/ technology lead and 31.4 per cent employing a lead data scientist or engineer. Meanwhile, only 5.7 percent hire an innovation lead, according to research conducted via LinkedIn Sales Navigator. Summer Olympic IFs have yet to hire an AI/machine learning specialist.

Leadership roles within sport’s digital transformation are no longer confined to CTOs and CIOs. The success of implementing a clearly defined data and digital transformation strategy requires a collective effort inside sports organizations and equipping personnel with the tools and know-how for operating the latest CRM and software solutions.

At N3XT Sports, our team guides our clients’ entire workforce along their digital transformation journey, including regular workshops and seminars to ensure that the technologies embedded within the client’s ecosystem are operated efficiently and tailored to the team’s needs. 

In 2025, this will include the integration of AI and machine learning tools within their decision-making processes. As sports organizations lean more heavily on fan and user data to inform their digital strategy, advances in AI-driven automation will enable personnel to drive efficiencies in the management of high quantities of data, unlock personalization features to enhance the fan experience, and allow employees to focus on high-value strategic initiatives by reducing repetitive tasks. 

“As we look to the future, sports clubs, leagues, and federations will be futureproofing their operations in numerous ways,” explains Lara Ammar, N3XT Sports’ VP of Project Excellence (pictured). “They are doing this by: (1) diversifying their digital portfolios to augment their data-integration touchpoints and data-processing infrastructure; (2) optimizing their data-management and decision-making processes with the use of AI; (3) upskilling departmental teams to become experts across the present technologies and trends; and (4) hiring digital, data, AI, and innovation-specific personnel that specialize within these criteria.

“Project management is an essential piece within sport’s digital transformation; from the strategic personalization and implementation of technology solutions inside organizations to training its workforce and personnel. Our expert project managers serve every employee within N3XT Sports’ client base, helping them to manage their portfolio of digital transformation initiatives at every milestone.”

Our team at N3XT Sports works tirelessly to develop and implement data and digital transformation strategies across a multitude of 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.