Enhancing Match-Day Experiences with LiveLike: A Game-Changer for Fans
Enhancing Match-Day Experiences with LiveLike: A Game-Changer for Fans
In today’s sports landscape, the match-day experience holds distinct dimensions–within the stadium and at home. The in-venue match-day experience is essential to clubs for obvious game-day revenues. For broadcasters, it is the key moment to leverage the millions of dollars of investment they put into acquiring rights. And with the internationalization strategy of clubs and leagues, the at-home experience is now becoming a key element of focus for the whole sports industry where everyone needs to improve.
Taking a few shortcuts in our analysis, social media platforms drive most of the audience (and therefore first-party data) to their platforms while leagues rely on Fantasy Leagues, clubs have low-impact game centers, and broadcasters focus on the content versus the experience. Despite their distinct priorities, all share a common goal: to enhance the match-day experience.
LiveLike offers a comprehensive toolkit tailored to each entity’s needs, empowering clubs, leagues, and broadcasters to elevate fan engagement and enrich their sports offerings. In this blog, we explore how LiveLike’s solution empowers clubs to enrich their in-venue experiences, leagues to harness the potential of gamified match-center experiences, and broadcasters to elevate their interactive streaming capabilities.
Benefits of LiveLike Tools for Sports Organizations
Let’s start by looking at the overarching benefits of integrating LiveLike:
Empowering Fan Engagement Simply put: empowered fans are more engaged fans. LiveLike’s features, such as live polls, cheer-meters, comment boards, and other narrative-shaping tools, give fans a greater sense of agency and ownership in the game. This deepens their emotional attachment to the players, teams, and the sport itself, resulting in increased attendance, viewership, and fan interactions. Engaged fans are more likely to renew memberships, purchase season tickets, engage with interactive tools, spend on exclusive content, and contribute to the organization’s overall revenue.
Building a Global Fanbase LiveLike’s suite of social and community-building tools—live chats, social graphs, activity feeds—enable sports organizations to expand their reach and connect with fans worldwide. By fostering a vibrant global community, organizations can increase their fan base, leading to higher ticket sales, merchandise purchases, and international viewership. This increased reach can also attract potential sponsors looking for broader exposure.
Enhancing Sponsorship Opportunities An engaged and growing fan base is an attractive proposition for sponsors. LiveLike tools offer different monetization opportunities, going from creating real estate on top of simple activations like “Man of the match brought to you by…”, to increasing retention and reducing the churn on platforms, to opt-in strategy, first-party data capture and segmentation.
In essence, integrating LiveLike tools not only enriches the fan experience by making it more fun and sticky, but also delivers tangible benefits to sports organizations by boosting loyalty, engagement, revenue, sponsorship opportunities, and overall success in the competitive sports industry.
But let’s get more specific—how can LiveLike tools be used to enhance the match-day experience for clubs, leagues, and broadcasters?
Revolutionizing the Match-Day Experience
1. For Clubs: Elevating In-Venue and International Fan Experiences
For clubs, the match-day experience is not just about what happens on the field but also about creating a vibrant atmosphere in the stadium. It’s about making sure that local fans, the lifeblood of the team, have an unforgettable time at the venue. LiveLike’s suite of audience engagement tools, including polls, quizzes, and sliders, can turn the stadium into an interactive hub.
From answering quizzes about team history to predicting the next goal scorer in real-time, these standalone engagements can deepen the connection between fans and the sport, and immerse the audience in the live action. They can also trigger exciting benefits on-site (ex: “Take this 10-question quiz and skip the drinks line if you achieve a perfect score of 100%!”)
However, clubs must also consider their international fanbase, who may never have the chance to attend matches in person. LiveLike’s solution extends beyond these borders, enabling clubs to engage their global supporters with AMAs (Ask Me Anything) sessions featuring players or coaches, live chats to connect fans worldwide, and timelines to showcase behind-the-scenes content. These tools ensure that every fan, regardless of their location, feels deeply connected to the club’s match-day experience, and gets an experience adapted to his region.
However, clubs must also consider their international fanbase, who may never have the chance to attend matches in person. LiveLike’s solution extends beyond these borders, enabling clubs to engage their global supporters with AMAs (Ask Me Anything) sessions featuring players or coaches, live chats to connect fans worldwide, and timelines to showcase behind-the-scenes content. These tools ensure that every fan, regardless of their location, feels deeply connected to the club’s match-day experience, and gets an experience adapted to his region.
2. For Leagues: Leveraging the Power of Match Center Experiences
Leagues face a unique challenge when it comes to fan engagement, as they’re often constrained by having sold their live content media rights to broadcasters. This is where LiveLike’s match center experiences come to the forefront.
League platforms usually offer real-time statistics and play-by-play updates which typically result in low traffic retention. They also have fantasy leagues for regular consumption that ideally serve hardcore fans but also usually have a huge drop-off during the season.
With LiveLike, you can combine interactive mini-games (polls, quizzes, emoji sliders) that enable easy participation and engagement throughout a match, and allow fans to participate and feel part of the narrative. Leaderboards can similarly help engage fans by triggering competitive behaviors while quests can help to keep fans active during slower moments in the game.
By adding interactive layers and rewards mechanics, you keep users excited and engaged for longer on your platform. As well, leagues, even after selling their video rights, gain a powerful tool to maintain a strong position in the industry.
An example of our tools being used to successfully power an engaging league match center is our partnership with Jupiler Pro League. By seamlessly integrating our Man of the Match widget, JPL is able to showcase the top five rated players of each game and invite fans to cast their votes within their Match Center experience.
Since its introduction in September 2022, the widget has generated an impressive level of fan engagement, due to the fact that users are required to register in order to vote. As a result, we have witnessed a remarkable 360% increase in opt-ins and over 60,000 unique interactions.
3. For Broadcasters: Elevating Interactive Streaming and Engagement
Finally, broadcasters, with their exclusive access to live sports content, hold the keys to the live game experience and have a responsibility to transform viewers into active participants. Interactive streaming is the key, and LiveLike offers a range of tools to achieve this—with LiveLike’s innovative solution seamlessly integrated into the live stream, viewers are no longer mere spectators and instead become active participants in the unfolding drama. This interactive streaming experience enhances engagement, allowing fans to play, connect, share opinions, and experience the thrill collectively.
Viewers can use cheer meters to express support for their team. Live chats and alerts keep viewers engaged by providing a direct line of communication with the broadcast team, fostering a sense of community.
Points, badges, and leaderboards can be used to reward loyal viewers and incentivize participation. By leveraging these tools, broadcasters can maximize the value of their content and ensure that the at-home match-day experience is just as thrilling as being in the stadium.
Notable broadcasters like Canal+ and MSG GO have embraced this evolution with the use of our tools, forging an immersive and participatory connection with their audiences.
In a rapidly evolving sports landscape, LiveLike has become the catalyst for redefining the match-day experience bringing social and interactivity off social media and to your proprietary platforms. By fostering fan engagement, expanding reach, and opening doors to new sponsorship opportunities, LiveLike not only enriches the fan experience but also delivers tangible benefits to sports organizations, positioning them for success in the competitive sports industry.
The future of sports engagement has arrived, and LiveLike stands at its forefront, transforming spectators into active participants, ensuring the excitement of the match-day experience knows no bounds.
Get in touch to learn more about LiveLike’s ability to enhance the match-day experience for sports club, league and broadcaster fans and platform users.
The LiveLike Audience Engagement Suite is a finalist in the region's leading broadcast technology awards, recognising the fan engagement platform's work with sports broadcasters and rights holders
New York, July 31 - LiveLike, the fan engagement platform used by sports broadcasters, streaming services and rights holders worldwide, has been shortlisted for Best in Sports at the BroadcastPro ME Manufacturer Awards 2026 for the LiveLike Audience Engagement Suite.
The awards recognise product innovation, engineering excellence and technology development across the broadcast ecosystem. Finalists were selected across 21 broadcast and satellite categories following industry-wide voting and review by an independent panel of experts. Winners will be announced on Tuesday 6 October 2026 at The Westin Dubai Mina Seyahi Beach Resort & Marina in Dubai, UAE.
The Audience Engagement Suite gives broadcasters and rights holders a way to build interactive experiences directly into their streams and owned platforms - predictions, quizzes, live chat, rewards, loyalty programmes and community hubs - without assembling separate point solutions for each one. Every interaction feeds a single evolving profile of the fan, which the platform then uses to personalise what that fan is offered next.
That combination is the argument LiveLike has been making across the industry this year. Fan engagement has been mischaracterised as a set of features layered onto a broadcast, when the durable value sits underneath: the behavioural graph that every interaction contributes to, and the AI layer operating on top of it. LiveLike's AI layer, Genie, now runs a growing share of the programmes the company operates on behalf of clients, moving the work from manual content management toward automated orchestration.
The Middle East and North Africa is one of the most active regions in the world for this shift. Major tournament rights, rapid growth in sports streaming and rising expectations around second-screen and in-stream interaction have made direct-to-fan engagement a commercial priority for broadcasters across the region rather than an experiment.
"Fan engagement gets treated as a set of features bolted onto a broadcast, and we've never seen it that way," said Miheer Walavalkar, co-founder and CEO of LiveLike. "What we build sits underneath the experience. There are the surfaces fans actually touch, and then there is the profile of that fan which gets sharper every time they touch one. The second part is the part that compounds, and it's the reason a broadcaster can keep getting more out of the platform in year three than they did in year one."
"Being shortlisted in a category assessed by the people who operate live sport in this region carries weight," he added. "They know the difference between something that demos well and something that holds up on a match night."
Sports organisations have spent decades refining three core revenue streams: direct fan spend, media rights, and sponsorship. The playbook is well understood. What is less understood, and far less developed, is the data infrastructure that connects those streams to each other and to the fans who power all of them.
Most organisations know they are sitting on significant amounts of fan data. Ticketing systems, CRM platforms, social channels, digital content interactions: the signals are there. But in the vast majority of cases, that data sits in disconnected silos, producing consulting reports rather than actionable intelligence. The result is a fragmented picture of the fan - one that limits commercial potential across every revenue line.
On a recent episode of Future of Fandom, LiveLike CEO and co-founder Miheer Walavalkar sat down with Aidan Cooney, CEO of Envision Sport Group and co-founder of Opta, to unpack this problem in detail. Cooney has spent 25 years building data and fan intelligence businesses across football, cricket, tennis, and rugby. His perspective on unified fan data, the shift from B2B to B2C thinking, and the convergence of sponsorship and performance marketing offers a practical framework for any organisation trying to move beyond fragmented data toward genuine sports intelligence.
From performance data to fan data: the Opta origin story
Cooney's career started with a simple hypothesis. In the late 1990s, football's status as the world's biggest sport came with surprisingly thin storytelling. Broadcasts offered a scoreline, occasional possession graphics, and goalscorer information. American sports, by contrast, had long used statistics to bring audiences closer to the action.
"If you give fans a higher-resolution understanding of what's happening on the pitch, you bring them closer to the sport they love," Cooney explained. That principle drove the creation of Opta, which transformed how football was analysed, discussed, and consumed. The OptaJoe account became a case study in sports data storytelling, building a following of hundreds of thousands across media, journalism, and the broader sports industry.
But Opta was fundamentally about what happened on the pitch. The return path - how fans reacted to that information and what their behaviour revealed - became the foundation for everything Cooney built next: Ellipse Data, InCrowd, and ultimately Cortex.
The difference between a customer data platform and a fan data platform
One of the most important distinctions Cooney drew in the conversation is the gap between conventional customer data platforms and what a fan data platform actually needs to do. Standard CDPs are designed for rational, price-sensitive purchasers. A fan is something else entirely.
"A fan wants to belong. They're passionate about the player or the team they support. The data that matters to you is very different from a purely rational, transactional data proposition," Cooney said.
The implication is that transactional data - which most sports organisations have invested in through ticketing CRM - is necessary but insufficient. Behavioural data is where the real value sits: how a fan reacts to a particular piece of content, when they react, whether content about a specific player activates more engagement than content about the team as a whole. This is the layer that informs personalisation, shapes content strategy, and ultimately creates trackable, monetizable assets for brand partnerships.
Cooney's platform, Cortex, is designed specifically for this purpose: unifying transactional and behavioural data into a single fan data platform that can activate across channels. LiveLike's engagement and gamification tools then sit on top of that foundation, turning data into community and interaction into measurable value.
The silo problem and why unification comes first
When asked about the most common mistakes sports organisations make with their data, Cooney's answer was immediate: silos.
"Very few organisations have a true single view of their fan base. That is the starting point for everything." Some silos are functional, built by design for specific use cases like ticket sales. Others are structural, created by the relationship between leagues and clubs or by the patchwork of technology vendors an organisation has accumulated over time.
The cost of these silos is not abstract. Without a unified single view, organisations cannot connect their content strategy to their commercial strategy. They cannot attribute sponsorship value to specific fan interactions. They cannot retarget fans who engaged with a poll, a vote, or a piece of branded content. Every disconnected system represents lost compounding value.
Cooney's prescription is direct: "You can't activate until you unify." And the use cases for doing so - from personalised content delivery to integrated brand campaigns - are available now in ways they were not five or even three years ago.
Sponsorship, media, and the hybrid model
One of the most commercially significant ideas in the conversation was Cooney's framing of the convergence between sponsorship and performance marketing. Sponsorship, in its traditional form, has not fundamentally changed since Mark McCormack and Arnold Palmer in the 1960s. It remains an awareness play, hard to attribute, and increasingly constrained as a share of total brand marketing spend.
Performance marketing budgets, by contrast, are growing rapidly. Social media ads, YouTube pre-rolls, programmatic buying: brands are spending heavily on audience acquisition through channels that offer clear attribution. The problem for sports properties is that these two budget pools rarely connect.
"If you create a more diverse set of assets and present them as an integrated media plan, you open up new budget areas within brands," Cooney argued. The opportunity for rights holders is to bridge that gap by combining the premium, trust-based qualities of sponsorship with the attribution model of performance marketing.
In practice, this looks like branded content paired with interactive fan experiences - polls, votes, and predictions that generate first-party data - which can then be used for retargeting and attribution. LiveLike's interactive tools are designed to create exactly these kinds of measurable, brand-integrated fan touchpoints that produce both engagement data and commercial inventory.
AI, personalisation, and the crawl-walk-run path
Both Cooney and Walavalkar addressed the promise and the practical limits of AI-driven fan personalisation. The long-term vision is clear: AI that can serve individual fans with content, offers, and experiences tailored to their specific behaviours and preferences. The economics and infrastructure to do this at true 1-to-1 scale, Walavalkar noted, are still being worked out across every industry.
The pragmatic starting point is cohort-based personalisation. Group fans by location, by behavioural patterns captured in your fan data platform, by engagement tendencies during comebacks or winning streaks. Let cohorts emerge dynamically from the data rather than relying on predefined segments.
"By putting the fan at the centre and serving them at the cohort level, you improve the fan experience, which drives up engagement levels, which drives up the value of the inventory you create on the back of it," Cooney said. "If you then take it to the next level and use AI to super-serve the individual, you drive that engagement and value further."
The compounding logic here is critical. Organisations that delay building cohort-based personalisation while waiting for perfect 1-to-1 capabilities lose years of compounding value - both in fan engagement and in commercial inventory quality.
The B2C shift and why it matters now
Cooney's overarching thesis is that sports organisations are fundamentally B2B businesses today, structured around selling rights to broadcasters and sponsorship packages to brands. The future is B2C: direct, data-informed relationships with fans that create value for both the organisation and its brand partners.
This does not necessarily mean streaming video direct to fans - a path Cooney sees as extremely difficult given the sophistication of existing broadcasters. It means building digital properties that offer genuine value to fans, capturing the behavioural data those interactions generate, and using that data to create a fan balance sheet that reflects the true economic potential of the audience.
"The whole original idea, that the fan base becomes a real balance sheet item, becomes a reality," Cooney said. "And that balance sheet isn't just about the lifetime value of the fan to the sports organisation directly. It's about lifetime value, plus the opportunity for brands to invest in that person over the duration of their fandom."
Listen to the full episode
Hear the full conversation between Aidan Cooney and Miheer Walavalkar on Future of Fandom:
A unified single view of the fan is the prerequisite for every commercial use case in sport, yet most organisations still operate with fragmented data silos.
Fan data platforms differ from standard CDPs because fan behaviour is emotional, making behavioural signals more commercially valuable than transactional data alone.
The convergence of sponsorship and performance marketing opens access to larger brand budgets, but only if rights holders can offer integrated media plans with measurable, interactive assets.
Cohort-based personalisation is the practical starting point for AI-driven fan engagement - delaying it sacrifices years of compounding value in engagement and revenue.
Organisations that treat their fan base as a balance sheet asset - and build the data infrastructure to
LiveLike, the digital fan engagement platform, is powering eight confirmed World Cup activations spanning North America, Latin America, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia-Pacific, marking the company's largest simultaneous global deployment to date. The activations cover a cross-section of the sports media ecosystem, from major broadcasters and OTT platforms to payment providers and national football associations.
The deployments demonstrate LiveLike's capacity to operate at tournament scale, handling concurrent traffic spikes across time zones as billions of fans follow the world's most-watched sporting event. Activations range from prediction games (Play Predictor+) and loyalty leaderboards to trivia, squad selectors, community features, and gamified rewards programs - reflecting a broader industry shift toward interactive, data-driven engagement as rights holders look to convert passive audiences into identifiable, loyal fans.
Clients include CazeTV in Brazil, where a prediction game with their sponsor iFood is expected to generate record platform traffic, and Minute Media's Sports Illustrated, which is running a full-tournament match predictor covering every stage of the competition on its global digital platform. Additional activations are live with a leading European broadcaster operating a multi-event FanZone with gamification and a rewards shop, and a global payments company deploying wallet-based loyalty and leaderboard campaigns across Latin America.
The FA (Football Association) is using LiveLike to support its World Cup engagement strategy, while one of the largest North American and European sports media groups is using LiveLike’s whole tech stack in various ways across the world (Community, Mini-games, engagement etc…). SBS, Australia's public broadcast service has launched a complete match center experience, combining official World Cup Statistics & engagement widgets.
The scale of deployment reflects a deliberate infrastructure approach. LiveLike's platform is built to absorb the kind of unpredictable, high-volume engagement spikes that define knockout tournament football, where a single goal can trigger millions of simultaneous interactions across dozens of markets.
"The World Cup is the one event where everything has to work everywhere at once. There is no quiet period, no soft launch, no second chance," said Miheer Walavalkar, CEO and Co-Founder of LiveLike. "What we are seeing across these eight activations is proof that our platform does exactly what we built it to do: give every broadcaster, every rights holder, and every platform the tools to turn passive viewers into active fans, at whatever scale the moment demands."
.png)
%20(1).png)
.svg)
.png){kind=small}
