AI Turns Sports’ Dead Air Into a Selling Season

Sports commerce has always clustered around the calendar, spiking for a tournament, a championship run or a merchandise drop. Between those peaks, the commercial relationship between a team and its fans goes dormant.

FIFA is betting artificial intelligence can close that gap. The international soccer governing body chose technology and software development company Globant to rebuild its digital fan engagement around AI Pods, a system designed to recognize the same fan across FIFA’s website, tournament app and in-venue experiences, according to a Wednesday (Aug. 12) press release. From there, the platforms personalize what that fan sees based on real-time behavior instead of waiting for the next tournament to pull them back.

Early pilots with FIFA produced a 20% efficiency increase in throughput while maintaining or improving quality, the release said. That number measures how fast the project teams ship, not what fans spend.

Holding it together is FIFA ID, the unified identity meant to tie one person to every touchpoint instead of treating each channel as a separate audience. Institutional knowledge the system generates sits in what Globant called in the release “a proprietary token vault,” with FIFA retaining full ownership of its data and of the AI built on top of it.

The platforms will “continuously learn from real-time data and generate new experiences for fans all year round, growing FIFA’s influence beyond single tournaments,” the release said.

FIFA described the objective in gentler terms.

“Our goal is to ensure every fan experiences football in a personal way that deepens their emotional connection,” FIFA Secretary General Mattias Grafström said in the release.

The commercial logic sits underneath it either way.

Fanatics Wants to Predict What a Fan Does Next

Fanatics is working the same year-round problem from the data side. The company built a knowledge layer called FanGraph that compiles what its systems know about an individual fan across sports, then applies predictive modeling to anticipate what that fan does next.

“If you think through sports, traditionally, it’s always been a one-to-many vehicle,” Fanatics Vice President of Commercial Kevin Longo said at Snowflake Summit in June, SiliconANGLE reported June 8. “It’s a singular broadcast, a singular sponsor sent to a bunch of fans. Fans are not all the same. I think we’ve always known that, but now, with AI and our partnership with [data platform company] Snowflake, we can understand that in real time and sort of act on it.”

The scale is what makes that possible. Fanatics serves more than 100 million fans a year and takes in more than 2 billion signals from them daily, according to the company’s account of the system on Snowflake’s customer website. Fanatics stitches those signals together across United States and international sports, producing a single view of a fan who follows college football, Formula 1 and tennis at once, preferences that used to sit in separate, disconnected systems. Snowflake CoWork, the enterprise agent Snowflake rebranded from Snowflake Intelligence, is how Fanatics staff put questions to that view.

SuperOne Bets AI Becomes Fandom’s Operating System

SuperOne is coming at the same problem from the startup end. The Miami-based gamified fan engagement platform is building its next-generation platform around AI from the ground up rather than layering it onto an existing system.

The company partnered with BytePlus, ByteDance’s enterprise technology arm, to bring AI capabilities developed inside a consumer ecosystem of more than 2.5 billion users, including TikTok and Douyin, into sports and entertainment, according to an Aug. 6 press release.

“Artificial intelligence will become the operating system of digital experiences,” SuperOne Founder Andreas Christensen said in the release.

SuperOne Chief Communication and Media Officer David Dybman said in the release: “After more than 20 years at Eurosport, I have never seen a combination with the potential of SuperOne’s next-generation fan engagement platform and ByteDance’s AI capabilities and global reach to billions of fans worldwide.”

The three companies are different sizes with different assets, but the bet underneath them is the same. Fandom throws off a continuous stream of behavior, and most of it has gone unread between games. Whoever learns to read it in real time gets to sell into moments that used to be dead air.