Insights from Motasem El Bawab

How the sports industry invests in technology is changing. One of the notable changes since the Covid pandemic has been its shift from being predominantly stakeholder-led (whereby technology adoption used to traditionally serve an organization’s partner relations and athlete development) towards a more fundamental fan-focused enterprise. 

Whereas previously the tools that organizations invested in dictated how fans engage with a sport, fan intelligence is now informing the technologies that an organization needs to drive engagement. For this reason, the sector is becoming nuanced with its technology adoption. Understanding the fan is now an essential part to the digital transformation process and therefore requires a unique set of capabilities for assessing fans personally.

An organization’s direct-to-consumer (D2C) strategy is therefore, nowadays, helping sports properties decide on which technologies to adopt across their entire ecosystem; this includes, notably, the tools they require for consolidating larger volumes of fan data as properties diversify their D2C portfolios, and discovering smarter ways in which technologies can promote business efficiencies, to handle multiple streams of engagement, and to optimize the fan journey. 

According to industry research, the sports sector invests in the region of US$5 billion annually into transformative business technologies, which can be broken down into three key areas of investment: (1) the digitization of operations; (2) the automation of workflows and internal processes; and (3) the diversification of fan-revenue streams. This desire for digital and data ownership is encouraging sports properties to re-think their technological frameworks. In doing so, digital transformation is helping reduce their operational costs while at the same time increasing the overall value per fan. 

However, and this is an important point, the integration of new technologies isn’t guaranteed to improve operational performance or deliver commercial growth overnight. On the contrary, N3XT Sports CIO Motasem El Bawab insists that in some cases technology adoption, if implemented for the wrong reasons, can prove counterproductive. Without first establishing a clear business case for investment, he says, the temptation to buy into the latest technological solutions and market trends can cause greater disparity within a sports business, particularly when it comes to data governance. 

“The key problem that we are seeing is that, even though US$5 billion is being injected into the sports industry every year in tech, they are still having trouble finding information,” Mota discussed during a SportWorks TALKS event held in Lausanne in May. “This represents 20 percent of the industry. With the number of different applications and systems that are out there, there is a lot of data to scatter through; research shows that 59 percent of people are missing information. 

“The key metric here is that, on average, each of us uses around 11 applications every day. How this relates to the sports industry, what we are seeing is that organizations have a lot of siloed systems, including their governance and the strategy behind technology integration, and this is driving their investments.”

Strategy development is an essential first step for sports organizations when deciding on how and when to invest in technology. Whereas fan intelligence is transforming the rights holder’s ability to personalize the fan experience, thus increasing customer loyalty and fan value, the collection of first-party fan data is also evolving from a complementary customer-management metric into a bona fide tool for enhancing digital fan ecosystems – though it is not yet an industry staple.

Despite the industry’s urgency to digitalize, a significant gap remains between the digital and data capabilities of sports organizations worldwide. Our research reveals that, while most properties have fan-facing web and mobile products, fewer than 50 percent collect first-party data via a web login, and only 32.4 percent use a single sign-on (SSO) to consolidate the fan experience, highlighting the disparity in digital maturity across the sector and the disconnect between the different technological frameworks organizations play by. 

“There are different levels of maturity throughout the sports industry, but the digital transformation process is often the same,” Mota continues “You first need to begin with a vision and to decide how the technology should serve your audiences and different stakeholders. Since technology is an enabler (it’s not an “end goal”), it’s important to tailor a strategy to your business goals before deciding which technologies best serve your vision.”

By way of example, N3XT Sports has supported United World Wrestling (UWW) at every stage of its multi-phase digital transformation, including the integration of the Olympic wrestling governing body’s mobile app, customer relationship management (CRM) solution, and UWW+ over-the-top (OTT) streaming platform into its D2C portfolio, which is connected using an SSO. This included the development and delivery of a bespoke commercial strategy designed to optimize audience acquisition and fan value via its UWW+ streaming product during its major championships, while also servicing its bespoke social media strategy.

“Our role was related to developing UWW’s digital transformation strategy and implementing it,” Mota continues. “By doing this, the tools UWW now own are scalable and enable UWW to better communicate with their stakeholders, including its national federations and how they engage with their athletes. That is a journey that is never-ending. Digital transformation isn’t a closed project – it will constantly evolve. The more data you manage, that leads to more questions of the data, which leads to more answers and more activations. That’s the journey UWW embarked on three years ago.”

“The recurrent new question we’re getting from a lot of our colleagues in the sports industry is: how do I implement AI into my day-to-day operations?”
Motasem El Bawab, CIO at N3XT Sports

One of the most important things you need inside an organization, and particularly when it comes to digital transformation, is a champion internally to drive transformation. Whereas technology integration and innovation have traditionally fallen on the shoulders of a Chief Technology Officer (CTO) or Chief Information Officer (CIO), as sports organizations seize greater digital-product and data ownership throughout their organization’s digital transformation, 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 positions.

“Even with all these challenges,” Mota goes on, “the recurrent new question we’re getting from a lot of our colleagues in the sports industry is: how do I implement AI into my day-to-day operations? While AI is not new in sports and many people have likely adopted platforms like ChatGPT, there’s a lot of things behind it that need to change within an organization culturally, and technologically, before we even start to think about the role of technologies such as AI.

“Within our transformation framework at N3XT Sports, the first thing we do whenever implementing a new technology or service for a client is to test three things: (1) the workforce’s current capabilities and how they use tools; (2) how they are collecting and using data; and (3) the technologies the organization adopts to connect information. Based on these pillars, we ask everyone what takes up most of their time day-to-day. 

“Strategy development is vital for creating this vision for the company. The vision builds a plan, and the plan includes the different systems that will make the organization more efficient. When it comes to AI, we list the organization’s broader employee needs and then prioritize them, before coming to a decision on the processes which can be automated using AI and those that require keeping a closer eye on.” 

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.