At the Milken Institute Global Conference in May, Larry Fink and Bruce Flatt described a $10 trillion rebuild of the global economy around AI infrastructure: cloud computing, chips, power generation, fiber and data centers the size of cities.
The sports industry was conspicuously absent.
The reason is simple: Most sports organizations still do not know who their customers are.
You cannot run AI on a fan you cannot identify.
The average professional sports team can rarely identify even 25% of the people inside its own building by name. Tickets are transferred. Seats are resold. Merchandise is purchased through third parties. Media consumption occurs anonymously across disconnected platforms. Sports may be the most emotionally valuable consumer category in American life, yet it remains one of the least structurally informed about its own customers.
Other industries solved this problem decades ago.
Harrah’s Entertainment launched Total Rewards and rapidly became better at understanding gambler behavior than many banks were at understanding depositors. Tesco transformed itself through Clubcard. American Airlines did it with AAdvantage. American Express built an empire around a simple proposition: Membership has its privileges, and those privileges depend on the company knowing exactly who you are.
The real innovation was not software. It was incentives.
Customers will gladly identify themselves when identification produces value in return. Loyalty systems transform anonymous transactions into enduring relationships.
Sports has historically operated differently. Teams sell inventory rather than relationships: tickets, suites, sponsorships, local media rights. The model works because scarcity conceals inefficiency. Stadiums fill. Television money rises. Sponsors accept broad demographic assumptions because there are no alternatives.
But AI changes the economics of ambiguity.
Modern AI systems improve through memory and repetition. Netflix is not fundamentally a streaming company. It is an identity company that streams movies. Every interaction strengthens the model. Every recommendation improves future engagement. The system compounds because the customer is known.
Sports, meanwhile, still behaves as though the game itself is the product.
The game is not the product. The relationship is the product.
A fan may maintain a 40- or 50-year attachment to a team. Few industries possess customer duration remotely comparable to sports. Yet most clubs focus on attendance over identity and transactions over attachment.
Outside companies increasingly understand the fan better than the teams themselves do. Fanatics and DraftKings have built sophisticated loyalty and identity layers that now sit between teams and their most engaged fans. If leagues fail to build comparable systems themselves, they risk becoming suppliers to platforms that own the customer relationship instead.
Other fragmented industries solved this problem years ago by centralizing loyalty at the franchiser level. Hospitality, airlines and fast food all learned the same lesson: Customer memory becomes more valuable at network scale.
The danger is subtle but profound. Teams will still own stadiums and play games. But the year-round relationship — wagering, merchandise, collectibles, personalization, and younger, digital-native audiences — may increasingly reside inside someone else’s loyalty ecosystem.
An NFL team physically interacts with even its best customers for only about 40 hours per year: 10 home games, four hours at a time. The rest of the relationship increasingly lives elsewhere. The team risks becoming content inside another company’s customer graph.
For decades, loyalty was treated as a marketing function. Increasingly, it is becoming a financial one.
That distinction matters. Marketing campaigns expire. Assets compound.
A season-ticket holder who attends games for 40 years, brings children and grandchildren into the same allegiance, watches through losing seasons, buys merchandise across decades, and reorganizes family life around a schedule is not merely a recurring customer. He is a long-duration economic asset hiding in plain sight.
Other industries already learned how to value relationships like these. In 2020, American Airlines borrowed $7.5 billion against its AAdvantage loyalty program. Casinos, retailers and airlines now treat customer relationships as durable economic infrastructure.
Sports still largely carries these relationships on the balance sheet at zero.
Call it ghost equity: the vast unrecognized asset value embedded in generational fan relationships. The average franchise may possess hundreds of millions of dollars of it. Large-market teams likely possess far more.
Bruce Flatt made an observation at Milken that applies as cleanly to fandom as it does to capital: “If one can compound those things over long periods of time, it’s a miracle.”
Sports possesses perhaps the greatest compounding asset in consumer business: generational emotional loyalty.
The next era of sports economics will belong to the organizations that treat fans as appreciating long-duration assets rather than seasonal ticket buyers.
Leagues still think they sell tickets.
The companies circling them understand they are stewarding memory — and the data, relationships and recurring revenue that memory produces. Sports has the best raw material in consumer business. It no longer has the excuse of not knowing who holds it.
Eric Spitz co-founded Trakus at MIT Sloan in 1997 and is a co-founder and CEO of FanUp.ai. Len Lodish is the Samuel R Harrell Professor Emeritus in the marketing department of the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.
