The media precedent: sport holds the fan relationship and leaves the data to others

Follow the same person onto a media property and onto a club's website. On the media property, hundreds of tech companies that person has never heard of receive a record of the visit within milliseconds. On the club's site, almost nothing happens: the club ends the visit knowing as little about the fan as it did before. More than that. Often, sports content is published on a third-party platform, be it Instagram, YouTube, TikTok or others, growing the platform's audience, allowing it to collect yet more data, and leaving the club yet more dependent. Swap a club with a league or an athlete, and the situation is often identical.

Take a mirror, bring media companies in front of it, and you will see sports organisations appear, but with an inverted image. 

Media companies collected the data, let others monetise most of it and lost the relationship with the audience. Sports organisations hold the relationship but are already leaving the data to others.

Operating on both sides, I find it amusing and frustrating how sports organisations compare to media in monetising engagement. This is not about the shirt sponsor, but the media revenue opportunity lying next to it, the revenue that the audience and the content that a club already owns could and should be generating.

Traditional media owners have become obsessed with data, and rightly so. The problem is how and what they have been doing with it: alienating their audiences through extractive approaches to data collection for "data-driven" advertising that literally butchered the user experience and became one of the main reasons for the disaffection of those very audiences.

That wasn't just media companies' spontaneous initiative. Since the mid-2000s, advertising technology companies have persuaded those companies with a direct relationship with their audiences, "readers" and "viewers", that they could not survive without letting intermediaries bundle their assets, including data, in the name of extreme reach to satisfy advertisers' needs. They handed over two things at once. The data went out through the integrations they willingly allowed to be put in place. The relationship went with it, destroyed by the same bad data practices causing a loss of trust, intrusive advertising formats and the overall experience that those integrations produced.

So, "people", "customers", "clients" become "IDs". Interests and passions become "signals" and "data points". Data belonging to media audiences has been flying around the digital advertising ecosystem, making intermediaries rich and leaving the crumbs to those very companies with a direct relationship with an audience, creating the content, and technically owning the data.

The bill has now arrived. The growth of zero-click search is seriously affecting media revenues by removing the visits that search used to send to their digital properties, in many cases halving their traffic, if not worse. In the two years to July 2026, the fifty biggest news sites in the US lost 37% of their monthly visits, from 4.9 billion to 3.1 billion.

A loyal, engaged audience would visit them directly and not be satisfied by a short summary on Google, but it has become smaller and smaller for the reasons I listed above.

I call it the media precedent. A category once holding the relationship with the audience, giving away the data that relationship produced, then losing the relationship itself, partly because of how that data was used.

The top four or five football clubs in each country have started building their own picture of the fans and the infrastructure to interact with them. For the majority below them, and across most other disciplines, neither exists in-house. Available budget is part of the barrier between the two setups, but not the main one. Most clubs already hold more fan data than they use, through their ticketing, membership and retail contracts, but that picture of the fan is being built by the commercial, technology and data partners behind those contracts, not by the club. What is missing is the strategic decision to treat the fanbase as an audience, to see the revenue opportunity it represents besides traditional sponsorships, and a structure that makes it happen. Making it happen requires resources, in proportion to the size of the fanbase, but the resources follow the strategic choice, not the other way round.

Media set the precedent in both directions: what to build, and what not to lose control of. Sports organisations and athletes should take note and take the clear opportunity to leapfrog the mistakes, the blood and the tears.