The next competitive advantage in sports won’t come from a better sponsorship deal, a renovated premium club or a new ticket package. It will come from organizations that think and operate like software companies.
For years, teams have invested heavily in improving the fan experience through venues, technology partners, and marketing campaigns. Yet many still struggle with a fundamental problem: They don’t actually know their fans.
At one Division I athletic department, thousands of one-time ticket buyers had never been approached for a donation — not because the development office chose to ignore them, but because it didn’t know they existed. Their purchase history lived in the ticketing platform while donor records sat in an entirely separate system. The two never connected.
This isn’t unusual. Across sports, ticketing, sponsorship, loyalty, merchandise and donor information often live in different databases that don’t talk to one another. The same fan exists as several different records across several systems, which leaves an organization without a complete picture of who that person is or how they engage.
The teams that solve this will build a real competitive advantage. For decades, though, building custom software to unify these systems was unrealistic for most organizations. It took years of development, serious investment, and ongoing maintenance that only the largest franchises could justify. So sophistication tracked market size: the biggest organizations built, and everyone else rented disconnected tools.
That equation has changed. Advances in AI have dramatically cut the cost and time it takes to build and maintain custom internal software. Capabilities that once required years of work and massive budgets are now within reach of much smaller organizations.
So software stops being something teams buy and becomes something they have to own. Not ticketing, not the CRM; the layer above all of it, the one that pulls every interaction into a single view of the fan. That layer is now a core capability, not an IT project, and everything that follows depends on having it.
Because the real opportunity isn’t simply connecting data. It’s the ability to learn from it and improve continuously. Too often, organizations go hunting for one great marketing campaign or one brilliant idea. In reality, the biggest gains come from iteration and that’s the one thing software is built for. Everything else a team invests in is a bet you place once: the building, the signing, the deal. Software is a bet you get to revise every day, against real data. At that same athletic department, we tested more than 10 outreach approaches across different channels (voice the main one), refining and redeploying as we went. Most underperformed. We adjusted, relaunched, and adjusted again, and it was the last cohort, the most personalized one, that converted at 95%.
That number wasn’t the product of a single clever campaign. It came from fast feedback loops built on owned data. You cannot iterate like that when your information is fragmented across platforms, and your results arrive months later as a report. You need to test, learn and improve in real time.
This is also why so many AI initiatives fall short. AI is only as good as the information it can see. Fragmented systems produce fragmented insight, and incomplete data produces generic output. Every organization will soon have access to the same models. What separates the winners won’t be the model, it will be the quality of the data underneath it and the ability to keep improving.
The greatest opportunity, ironically, is where budgets are smallest. A Double-A baseball club, an MLS or NWSL side, a mid-major athletic department — most run with lean business staffs that simply don’t have the people to constantly segment audiences, sharpen donor outreach, or personalize communications. For these organizations, software doesn’t just make existing work better. It makes work happen that otherwise wouldn’t.
For two decades, sports have run an analytics arms race on the competitive side, player evaluation, scouting, performance. The business side has barely started, which is exactly why the opportunity is so large and so few are chasing it.
Fans will feel the difference. They already expect personalization from nearly every business they touch. Streaming platforms recommend what to watch next. Retailers anticipate what they’ll buy. The sportsbook on their phone reads their behavior down to the dollar. Yet a fan who has bought tickets a dozen times still gets the same marketing email as someone attending a first game. That gap exists because the team can’t see the whole picture of who that fan is. Once it can, personalization becomes possible for everyone, not just the premium client.
None of this means teams should build everything themselves. Best-in-class ticketing, CRM, commerce and marketing platforms are essential, and good vendors are real partners. The mistake is believing any one of them can unify your business. Every vendor optimizes its own product. Only the organization itself can connect every interaction into a complete understanding of the fan, enrich it over time, and use it to improve.
That is the difference between buying technology and owning a capability. A bought tool is a cost that ends. A capability you own compounds season after season, the data deepens, the loops get faster and the advantage grows. Organizations that invest in it now will pull steadily ahead. The ones that don’t won’t fall behind overnight; they’ll just slowly become indistinguishable from everyone else running the same stack.
The question facing every team president and athletic director is no longer whether sports organizations will become software companies. It’s whether they’ll lead that shift while the advantage is still there to take or spend the next decade chasing the ones that did.
Jack Phifer is the co-founder and head of engineering at FanFeed, where he leads the development of its AI-powered platform that helps sports organizations identify and engage previously invisible fans.
