NWSL club San Diego Wave FC has signed a multiyear deal with sponsorship management platform PlayMaker Software. It’s the first NWSL client for the startup and the second major North American soccer club to bring on the company: PlayMaker announced a similar deal with Austin FC in November.
PlayMaker attempts to streamline some of the tedious points of sponsorship deals. The platform uses AI to pull out contract details and track the progress of those activations, as well as build deal proposals. The company works with both sports rights holders and brands (like the popular soda brand Poppi).
“Soccer has been a great proving ground because these teams are building modern, data-driven partnership operations from the ground up -- they’ve prioritized efficiency and innovation,” PlayMaker Software CEO Hannah Sorkin told SBJ. “But the same challenges exist across sports. We’re not a soccer platform; we’re a sponsorship platform that soccer happened to discover first.”
