How to Build a Unified Fan Data Strategy That Actually Drives Sponsorship Revenue
How to Build a Unified Fan Data Strategy That Actually Drives Sponsorship Revenue
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
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NEW YORK, September 30th - CazéTV, the Brazilian broadcaster that held rights to all 104 matches of the 2026 FIFA World Cup, and iFood, Brazil's largest food-delivery app, today shared results from a fan engagement experience built by LiveLike, the fan infrastructure layer that powers loyalty, community, and direct-to-fan monetization for sports leagues, teams, and media rights holders across the globe.
The prediction game ran at national scale throughout the tournament, made available on iFood's app exclusively to logged-in users. The game itself was open to everyone - both free users and Clube subscribers - but Clube subscribers unlocked additional features, including premium prizes, up to 100 private leagues, Oracle AI score recommendations, and quests.
The tiered structure, designed by LiveLike, was built with a clear commercial goal: giving football fans a reason to subscribe to Clube iFood. More than 556,000 Bolão CazéTV users signed up for Clube iFood during the campaign, representing a 17.2% conversion rate among the 3.2 million participants. Free users could create one private league; Clube subscribers could create up to 100. Together with premium prizes, Oracle AI score recommendations and quests, that gave free players several reasons to upgrade rather than a single barrier to play.
The activation recorded 129.3 million total impressions and 10.7 million unique impressions across the tournament, holding through peak traffic across all 104 matches with no loading issues.
Widgets were built directly from Opta's fixture data, and results were pulled from the same feed and published automatically to score the game, with point multipliers on the knockout rounds. The premium layer, gated behind Clube, was built around quests, Oracle AI score recommendations, and deeper prediction stats. Onboarding was simplified over the tournament to a single question: pick your favourite team.
“CazéTV’s Bolão is another experience created by CazéTV to allow fans to experience the World Cup beyond the broadcast. We want fans not only to watch the matches, but also to interact, make predictions, share and take part in the conversation around each game. Together with iFood, we have created a simple, fun and accessible initiative that expands the World Cup experience and brings fans even closer to the excitement of the tournament,” says Roberto Cabrini, Head of Business at CazéTV.
“As the official app of CazéTV’s World Cup Prediction Game, iFood is the project’s exclusive brand partner, further strengthening our connection with Brazilians during one of the country’s greatest moments of national passion. The initiative was born from our desire to make the World Cup experience even more special for our users, bringing together entertainment, competition and rewards on an unprecedented platform. Over our 15-year history, we have built a close relationship with people, becoming part of their everyday lives and moments of celebration. Now, by combining this connection with CazéTV’s strength in sports entertainment, we have created an experience that rewards both knowledge and engagement,” says Ana Gabriela Lopes, Vice President of Marketing at iFood.
"CazéTV has redefined how Brazil watches football, and iFood is part of everyday life for millions of Brazilians. To be trusted by two brands of that stature with the World Cup was a real privilege, and a responsibility we took incredibly seriously. Running a prediction game across all 104 World Cup matches for more than three million fans is a serious technical challenge, and the platform we built for CazéTV and iFood held up throughout what was the most-watched tournament ever. What matters more though is the growth it delivered for the team - more than 556,000 new Clube iFood subscribers. That's the measure broadcasters and their partners should hold fan engagement to, conversion, not vanity metrics," says Miheer Walavalkar, CEO of LiveLike.
For broadcasters and their partners, the result makes a simple case: fan engagement is worth measuring by how many fans it converts into paying subscribers, not by interaction counts alone.
DALLAS 24 September, 2026 – SIDEARM Sports, the leading digital solutions provider in college athletics, announced today an innovative new partnership with LiveLike, an industry leader in audience engagement technology platforms.
The collaboration is designed to create enhanced fan engagement by integrating LiveLike’s gamification-based platform directly into the mobile apps of SIDEARM school partners. This next generation fan engagement initiative, titled Daily Play, made its official debut on the Michigan Athletics App, Texas Longhorns App and Red Raiders Mobile App in August.
“Partnering with LiveLike is the next step in creating a more connected experience between our school partners and their fans through our enhanced mobile apps,” said George Scott, President of SIDEARM Sports. “LiveLike's gamification, which helps build a daily ritual for fans, is the first step in what will create a complete fan engagement ecosystem featuring loyalty, rewards and badging.”
Daily Play’s initial roll-out will feature a set of highly-engaging games including trivia, predictors, sweepstakes and brackets. Each game will also integrate real-time engagement widgets, leaderboards and lightweight gamification, and cross-platform compatibility. For fans of Michigan, Texas, Texas Tech and future adopters of LiveLike gamification, Daily Play also delivers a loyalty program that offers fans tiered rewards and benefits.
For athletic departments, Daily Play provides invaluable data to enhance membership strategy and audience segmentation to continually elevate the fan experience, as well as sponsor-ready formats for new ad placement inventory built around gamification to offer greater fan engagement than traditional brand placements.
“Texas Tech Athletics is proud to work alongside SIDEARM as we add opportunities to enhance the fan experience and create new value across our digital platforms,” said Robert Giovannetti, Senior Associate Athletics Director at Texas Tech. “The LiveLike integration has given us another way to engage fans through our mobile app and is providing a new sponsorship opportunity as well. We’re excited to be among the first programs helping shape what this experience can become.”
On top of the Daily Play gamification platform, LiveLike is also bringing a loyalty program integration to the table for fans, beginning with a student loyalty program offering at Florida State. The LiveLike loyalty program integration will reward students for their loyalty through points, tiered benefits and exclusive access, while giving athletic departments a scalable membership framework that treats students, alumni and donors as distinct audiences and opens a new revenue channel to support NIL and other priorities.
“Collegiate athletics represents one of the most passionate and underserved fan bases in sports,” said Miheer Walavalkar, CEO and Co-founder at LiveLike. “Our partnership with SIDEARM Sports gives us the opportunity to bring real interactivity - mini- games, loyalty, membership - to over 700 schools across the U.S. We’re already going live with our first programs, and this is just the beginning of what we think will be a significant expansion of how college sports fans engage with the teams they love.”
LiveLike’s foray into college athletics through the new collaboration with SIDEARM adds to its significant footprint in the sports industry, as its platforms are currently activating with various professional teams and leagues worldwide.
NEW YORK, 10 September 2026 – Sports broadcasters and rights holders can now build and schedule live interactive content during a match from a single written instruction, with the video and images pulled automatically from their own media library. The capability comes from a partnership between fan engagement company LiveLike and sports media infrastructure company ScorePlay, announced today ahead of IBC in Amsterdam.
Until now, an exercise such as putting a player of the match poll in front of fans mid-game was manual work under time pressure. A producer had to open the content system, build the program, write the poll options, find and upload an image for each player, then schedule the post. Across a weekend of fixtures that work repeats every time, and the moments that would have made the best content pass while it is being done.
The partnership takes that handwork out. ScorePlay tags video, audio and stills as they are uploaded, identifying the player, the sponsor, the stadium and the fixture. Genie, LiveLike's AI orchestration layer, now reaches into that library directly through ScorePlay's API.
In practice, a producer types what they want. Genie identifies the fixture, requests the relevant assets from ScorePlay, assembles the interactive unit with the correct player imagery already in place, and schedules it to whichever surfaces the broadcaster is running. The producer approves it or moves on.
“Our goal at LiveLike is to use technology to help rights holders deliver unforgettable fan experiences in the moments that matter,” said Miheer Walavalkar, Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder, LiveLike. “This partnership is the next chapter in that journey. What we have done with ScorePlay is to completely remove the friction between having the idea and getting it in front of fans.”
"Our customers have spent years getting their media properly organized and tagged," said Joshua Krakowsky, Head of Partnerships at ScorePlay. "What they want now is for that library to go to work. LiveLike is one of the first partners to build on our API in a way that puts a customer's own footage in front of fans while the game is still going."
The integration is listed on ScorePlay Connect, ScorePlay’s open platform for partner integrations that customers can access. Both companies are demonstrating it at IBC 2026 at the RAI Amsterdam, in Hall 1 on the ScorePlay booth, 11 to 14 September.
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