Summary

• The Anonymous Fan Crisis: The average sports organisation can only identify 24% of its fanbase. One in five can’t identify more than 10%. Yet sponsorship renewals, revenue growth and fan engagement all depend on knowing who those people are. How can you build a relationship with someone you’ve never met?
• The Squeezed Middle: Nearly 90% of sports organisations sit in tier two or tier three, caught between rising costs and flatlining revenue. Most are spending third-party investment on athletes rather than the data infrastructure that could actually save them. The model isn’t just under pressure. For many, it’s already broken.
• The Sponsorship Squeeze: 87% of sports organisations face pressure from sponsors to deliver measurable fan engagement data. But 60% say sponsorship renewals are now tied to digital engagement metrics they can’t yet provide. The briefs have changed. The propositions haven’t.
• The Technology Leadership Vacuum: 57% of sports organisations don’t have a tech expert at director level or above. 15% have no dedicated tech expertise at all. Ben and Ed ask whether this is really a technology problem or a leadership one.
• The 30 Day Business Problem: Most sports organisations generate the vast majority of their revenue across 30 event days a year and nothing on the remaining 335. The tools to change that exist. The mindset to use them largely doesn’t.
• How to Actually Fix It: Ben outlines the practical shifts that don’t require a massive budget. Make known fan growth a board level metric. Tie fan data to sponsor stories. Treat every big moment as a data capture opportunity. The organisations that move first won’t just survive. They’ll have a commercial advantage that compounds.

Show Notes

• Download the PTI Sports Leadership Benchmark
• Download the Anonymous Fan Index

Transcription

Ed Abis (00:01.25)
Hello and welcome to the Attention Shift podcast. I’m Ed Abis and today I’ve got a very special guest with me. Ben, would you like to introduce yourself?

Ben (00:07.519)
you

Hi Ed, firstly, thanks for having me on the show. My name is Ben Wells. run.

a strategy and technology consultancy called PTI, which some of your listeners may have come across before we work exclusively in the sports entertainment space. We work with a number of clients across different sports, football, rugby, cricket, racing, and in the entertainment space. And we pride ourselves on being the only vendor agnostic, genuinely vendor agnostic advisory in this space in the UK and Ireland. So, yeah, it’s delightful.

delighted to be on the show and really looking forward to discussing some of things that we’ve been talking about off camera.

Ed Abis (00:52.098)
Yeah, thanks, Ben. Yeah, we caught up recently a few weeks ago and we got chatting about a report that we just done around the anonymous fan index. But then obviously we chatted about the sports leadership benchmark report, if I can get my words out, the second edition of that that you’ve recently produced as well. So could you give us a bit of information, sort of set the scene really what that is and ultimately what you are, I guess the learnings that you’re giving to the industry from it.

Ben (01:18.193)
Yeah, so we decided to launch the sports leadership benchmark in 2024 because we can see a lot of challenges in the industry and more challenges and opportunities in the industry due to a lack of sophistication around data and technology. And it’s always very difficult when you’re creating these kind of reports and it sort of sits in line with a lot of the content that we produce, which…

may look to be critical, but actually is coming from a place of love in that things could be so much better. mean, Ed, were so once before you and I have both worked rights hold aside. We know the realities of why certain things are not prioritized in terms of understanding or action. But what we wanted to try and do is to put some data points against, you know, what was our experience of working in this industry. And apart from anything else, you know, some of the information

is, you know, it comes out, I a lot of people react to it, god, this is quite scary, you know, how behind we are. But equally, a lot of the time when we’ve audited clients, you know, the first reaction is like, how bad are we? And, you know, you can actually then say, well, look, it’s not great, but as you can see, it’s not like you’re down here and everyone else is miles ahead because everyone is sort of…

hanging around the mid to bottom half of the scale in terms of sophistication. But we see that as an opportunity. And I think particularly when some things we’re talking around, around the changing dynamics around revenue models in sports and changing profiles around risk, I think this creates a great opportunity for those. And what we were very keen to do was to…

was to try and split our findings out between different tiers. So we’ve categorized rights holders based on assumed turnover. So tier one is a hundred mil plus turnover. As you can imagine, there’s not many of those. We calculated about 12 and a half percent. Tier two is 10 to a hundred million. And then tier three is below 10. But the majority of the work that we do, the majority of our focus is on tiers two and three. And those, the organizations we’ve referred to over the last three or four years is the Squeeze Middle.

Ben (03:37.489)
organizations for whom, you know,

Cost bases remain high, whether that’s just the cost of operating the business or athlete costs or whatever that may be. But there is an ambition at the other end to try and strive to do bigger things for which they need more revenue. And actually they’re getting hit on both sides because the revenue generation is harder than it’s ever been, I think, in certain 30 years I’ve been in this industry. I know I don’t look old enough. And cost bases are increasing.

are growing massively, whatever the inflationary figures are of the day, operational costs are increasing and athlete costs, particularly in sports like football, are showing no signs of abating. So something has to give and we’re trying to provide some stark data points to help people realize that, wow, we need to start thinking about this whole space differently.

without this turning into gigantic monologue. It’s 30 years since Amazon launched. It’s not like digital technology and data are new things. These are now part of our daily lives and our kids are growing up knowing no other way of operating. And yet you look at many, many sports organizations and it feels like they’re still stuck very much in an analog model with some of these things sort of bolted on on the side almost as like nice to

And the context for this is the world’s moving quickly around us and particularly digital led other digital led platforms and activities which are being adopted by people because they’re easy, they’re easy to buy from, you can do them on the move. We’re in a race with these guys for share of time and wallets and frankly, most people are gonna lose unless they transform.

Ed Abis (05:32.643)
Yeah.

Ed Abis (05:36.61)
Yeah, I was reading through your report as well and just to give a sense of obviously the scale of tier two and tier three, it’s close to 90 % of sports organisations sitting that tier two, tier three. So it’s not like we’re talking about a very small minority. Yes, on a monetary basis, the big ones are big, but ultimately all these sports exist for lots of lovers of those sports and they’re all in that tier that ultimately are not.

Ben (05:46.078)
It’s used.

Ben (05:56.254)
100%.

Ben (06:00.177)
100%.

Ed Abis (06:00.641)
having the impact they would like to have. I think, like you said, when you give that context of 30 years of Amazon, it just goes to show that whilst it feels like innovation is fast, actually these things don’t always happen that fast. Even though everyone’s getting caught up now in the world of AI and everything that’s going on with it, things still do move relatively slowly. So it’s never too late. think as the saying goes, if you address the problem, you can fix the problem.

Ben (06:17.004)
yeah.

Ed Abis (06:27.787)
And for us, look, there was a strange coincidence, right, when we spoke a few weeks ago, where we said we’d both done these reports and there was lots of similarities that we found, even though we’d come at it in a slightly different way. you know, I we were both saying that we were seeing sports organisations are ultimately need to take alternative routes to bring cash into their businesses, that tech infrastructure and hires need to be a bigger priority than perhaps backfilling as has gone on. And we’ve seen a few organisations that done that. had…

Joe Dakin’s on from Burnley Football Club recently as well that was talking about his role as CTO within the club and it’s the first time they’d had one. And I think particularly for tier two and tier three sporting organisations, the metrics that are impacting the value of sponsorships are shifting more towards engagement and community led data points, though they’re not necessarily keeping pace with that. How did you find that within your findings?

Ben (07:12.99)
100%.

Ben (07:17.117)
No.

Ben (07:20.754)
Well, the context for the way we look at this is we can come out with the stats around the lack of integrated data strategies or whatever else, but it’s very easy to shrug your shoulders and say, so what, what does that mean? And…

The way that we see it, think looking at, if you look at the revenue streams coming into sports, the traditional sports model, the media industry is a challenge, let’s be honest. There are fewer and fewer and fewer premium rights for which broadcasters are prepared to pay. And the risk is that lot of the rest of the content just becomes filler content. It’s filling up the schedules until the main event of whatever that may be.

And so people are getting less and less. being very honest with you, think sports being pretty slow to understand that that,

dynamic is changing and we need to create a better value proposition for the broadcaster and for the viewer. Some have been good, others not so good. some, you if you look at the PSA, Professional Squash Association, you know, they recognized us a long time ago and went direct to customer and they’ve done a fantastic job and they should be applauded for that. most people have sat around sort of thinking the next check is gonna come and it’s gonna be an increase because everything always goes up. mean, the reality is on a per game basis, even the Premier League has been going backwards domestically.

Ed Abis (08:37.677)
Absolutely.

Ben (08:47.968)
since 2016-19. So we’re seeing now lot of rights holders are selling off more more inventory just to keep the gross number higher, because it sounds good, but the reality is that there is so much content now that on a unit basis we’re actually devaluing what we’re selling. So media is a challenge. Sponsorship, again, outside of the very, very elite is a challenge. Most propositions are

undifferentiated, are just variations on the same theme.

rights holders by and large haven’t invested too much in creating a story around why they are different. And that for me is all around that their brand proposition and around their customer base. And when you look at the fact that 72 % now of global advertising spend, which obviously includes sponsorship, goes into digital platforms, that means that 28 % of global spend now is being shared between what was traditionally, you know, the marketing mix that you and I grew up with, out of home, print, TV, radio.

Ed Abis (09:50.314)
Yeah.

Ben (09:52.241)
and all that kind of stuff. And the reality I think is that, and I think this goes back to 2008, there’s been a lack of liquidity in the economy since then, since the financial crisis. And at the same time, we’ve had the growth of social media platforms. And what we’ve done is we just outsourced our engagement strategy to those platforms because it’s easy, it’s ready made, but these guys haven’t shared any data, they haven’t shared any revenue. And from

brand perspective, know, the marketeers are there. And I’ve said this before, when was the last great integrated brand campaign you ever saw? I can’t remember, you know, where you’d be hit by something on the way to work, during work, on the way home, you know, these things just don’t happen now because all this money is going to paid search and paid social. And I’m sure there are tons of brand marketeers out there saying we want to use sport or music or whatever things people care about to engage with the human, the human side of things, which, know, is obviously what they’re trying to do.

Ed Abis (10:29.975)
Yeah.

Ben (10:52.064)
but they’ve got to keep the CFO happy because he’ll say, well, I get all that, that sounds great, but I can get a one and a half times return by putting the money into paid search and we’ve got the flex, so all that kind of stuff I think has impacted. And we haven’t done the work, for us, as we said in our report, the battle for brand spend is on who has the best data. And I believe fundamentally that if you can ally all the great things about sport in terms of its ability to connect with people,

ability to build communities around it with world-class data, you have a much, much better proposition for brands than who has the best algorithm, which is sterile and boring and undifferentiated. But we haven’t done the work. And the data in our report and in yours shows that that is the case.

Ed Abis (11:40.983)
can’t remember who said it to me one, but they said the businesses of the future will be judged on how much data they hold and not what the turnover is. Now look, turnover is important, right? But that race to actually own that data and have a depth of data is, yeah, absolutely. I think that’s the point they trying to get at, When they said it. And I cannot remember who said it to me.

Ben (11:56.019)
Well, the data will drive the turnover ultimately. For years, people wouldn’t…

100%.

I mean, people for years said, you know, why is Amazon’s share price so high when they’ve not actually turned over a profit? And the reality was is that those losses were incurred in building the tech that they needed to drive the future income. And their share price effectively was predicated on being five or six years in the future. Once they amortize that investment in their technology, they’re driving very, very high margin revenue. you know, we show a chart in

in many of our decks, which shows the markup of the top 10 companies globally 2004 and 2024. you know, 2004, you know, it’s a mixture of FMCG, FS, know, energy, pharmaceutical, all kinds of mix that you’d have expected 20 years ago. And 2024, seven of the top 10 are tech companies because they’ve all basically invested into becoming data led and digital first.

And the markup of the companies in 2024 is two and a half times that on average of those 20 years beforehand. But often I sometimes feel like I’m talking through these things and people feel like this doesn’t really apply to us. We’re a sports organization. Of course you are, of course this applies to you. Because you’ve got this ability to generate data in quantities and at a cost that other sectors would kill for.

Ben (13:32.189)
unless they’re buying tickets or shirts, they’re just sitting as a hosting cost on the database.

as our report shows, think 50 % of our respondents are commercializing 10 % or less of their database. So when we’re thinking about how do we use this data to diversify our sponsorship proposition, how do we use it to generate a new business product development line or business diversification, that kind of thinking just isn’t generally going on because it’s how do we use this data to try and sell those few seats that we can’t sell on a Saturday? And this for me is the critical thing.

It’s not a technology thing. It’s more thinking around as a sports organization. Are we a 30 day a year event business or are we a 365 day a year media business? And yes, those match days are big days. That’s where we were in the public eye. We get a disproportionate amount of our income. But why are we generating zero on the remaining 335? We can start creating. I remember having this conversation with a Premier League club that we were doing some work with and we were looking at their ticketing.

And we started looking then at the people they weren’t commercializing. And I sort of said to them, if you could commercialize, if you could take a pound a month off everyone in here who you’re not currently generating income from, you could actually defray your ticket costs, which were a big bug bear.

of their match day supporters and get a massive win with us. There’s a significant amount. It was something like 15 quid a ticket or something that they could put down. And I knew as I was talking to my client, I knew exactly, well actually why can’t I take a pound from these guys and keep ticket prices high. But that’s the short-termism of, and particularly in football with PSR, and I get it, I’m not being critical, I understand it, but we’ve got to wean ourselves off this short-term thinking because everything else is moving around us a lot quicker.

Ed Abis (15:14.678)
Yeah

Ben (15:28.96)
And we’re just basically trying to leak another two or three percent out of what for me is a dying model.

Ed Abis (15:34.86)
Yeah, so a few things from me on the back of that as well. like we’d seen the similar kind of thing in our report as well, where I think over half said that they believed they were going to lose at least $100,000 a year by not reaching fans directly, which I mean, and the rest, right? I mean, it’s going to be a way bigger figure than that. But 33 % estimated those losses could be anywhere between one and five million. I’m using dollars a year because we’re people from different parts of the world doing this. And I think it…

Ben (15:37.31)
Cough

Ben (15:47.902)
Mm.

Ed Abis (16:02.762)
backs up your point. think just coming back to what you said there, this idea of being always on outside of those event days per year. Look, some are starting to do it now, whether they’re thinking about doing concerts at their stadiums, things like that. But I’ve often thought about this from a content perspective as well. You see creators popping up across multiple sports now who are creating content multiple times a day to large audiences.

saying it how it is, speaking to the fans. mean, often I say that they’re eating the lunch, the breakfast and the dinner of the actual rights holder. They’re doing like, and I think a lot of these rights holders, if they think about football clubs, tried to do TV channels back in the day, got burned by the huge costs that came with it, and have never then gone back to the idea that now with the infrastructure that exists, they could be creating content on some of these channels that they don’t own, but working out how they create that content.

Ben (16:37.214)
Yeah, of course.

Ben (16:49.052)
Yeah.

Ed Abis (16:57.216)
to convert back to their own wants and needs and channels. Because often you’ll find when you go into these organizations that the production team sits separate from the social team and the social team sits separate from the digital team and they sit separate from the commercial team. And I’ve been into plenty of these organizations where I’ll sit in a room and I’ll bring everyone together and these people barely know each other and you feel like you’re introducing them.

Ben (17:18.236)
Yes, we see that an awful lot and the organizations tend to be siloed and we see that as being a big challenge from a technology perspective because…

And a data perspective, we see it with multiple organizations where these guys are collecting this kind of data and those guys are collecting that and there’s no unique identifier. And we had this again, this was a premier league club that we audited where they had a guy, think internally, they had seven and a half million individual pieces of data, which they…

they tried to piece together. I think I said to you when we were of talking, that’s been previously on the naked gun movies where they’re sort of trying look for an arm with a tattoo and well, that’s created a whole person here. But that’s because no one had defined what data was useful.

Ed Abis (18:02.345)
Yeah, yeah.

Ben (18:12.478)
to the business and why that was. So when we talk about the lack of integrated data strategies in business, this is what we’re talking about. And because that doesn’t exist for the most part, this isn’t me just saying it, the data in our report backs it up. You’ve got people doing what they think is right and it becomes massively inefficient. I before you even get into sort of data protection and all that kind of stuff is because there is an absence of directions to what we need to collect

and how we’re going to use it. Everyone just collects everything. And so you end up with these enormous, know, enormous hosting costs. We had it with one client. They were sitting on 700,000 data records and 200,000 of them were opted in records.

But they kept the 700,000 because it sounded good to sponsors. And we said, with all due respect, most brands have moved beyond, how many have you got? They want to know who’s engaged, what do you know about them, where do these guys go on holiday, what car do they drive, et cetera, et cetera, because that’s how they’re gonna commercialize that data. And we said the reality here is you’ve got an extra 500,000 records which you’re paying to host. And by the way, if you get breached,

Ed Abis (19:06.347)
Yeah, absolutely.

Ben (19:31.549)
by, you know…

whichever bad actor is trying this week, you’ve got two and a half times your exposure, or three and a half times your exposure, excuse my maths, with no commercial upside. So we told them to repermission them and then delete those that didn’t come back in. And they went from 200 to 300,000 records. So what they’d effectively done was improve their buying audience by 50 % overnight at virtually no cost and de-risk the business. But because people hadn’t understood, within this, hadn’t understood how all this worked,

data store, well more is better, isn’t it? More has gotta be better, because more is always better. And actually, it’s around the quality of data rather than the quantity. But unless you’re actually laser focused on how you’re gonna use that data, you end up with that massively inefficient, and when I say inefficient, I mean expensive, expensive data that you’ve got no commercial upside for. And going back to the silos, you see in the dynamic as well, you might have the marketing guys spending, I don’t know, 10 quid,

record to bring new data in on one side. And on the other hand, you’ve got the sponsorship guy selling a deal for however many thousand pounds to a industrial boiler company. And part of that is he gets four emails a year to the database. He quite honestly don’t care about industrial boilers. And it’s the number one cause of churn. And so you’ve got the marketing guy then going, well, hang on a second. This boss is going, how come our database is getting smaller despite all this money I’m giving you? Well, sponsorship guy

Ed Abis (20:51.776)
Yeah.

Ben (21:03.04)
over here is killing us because he’s doing all these terrible deals, but he’s getting his bonus because he’s, you know, we’re being incentivized on gross revenue rather than net position on these things. And these things just clash. if data was genuinely important to the business, the CEO going, hang on a second, hang on a second, that 50 grand or whatever we’ve got for this crap boiler deal.

We’re not doing that deal because actually protecting our data, protecting capital value in our business is what’s the priority. Because we know what the, back to your point, if this guy unsubscribes and he spends 10,000 pounds with us a year, that’s an extreme example, it’s gonna take five years for that one person to cover the cost of this boiler deal.

Ed Abis (21:36.715)
So it feels like…

Ben (21:50.743)
effectively. So, but left hand, right hand, you know, they don’t they don’t talk and it comes back to sports organisations being primarily short term sales led businesses when they actually need to be longer term marketing led. And that is changing slowly, but but not quickly enough in my view.

Ed Abis (22:10.827)
It does feel like it’s a, well I’m not going use word problem, a challenge of leadership, right, that ultimately I think the identica of people in general that probably sat at the top of some of these organisations, certainly from my time, often were financial led or law degree led rather than necessarily marketing business growth led and it’s not like I’m saying they should all be marketeers suddenly running all of these businesses because I’m a marketeer by long time ago training.

Ben (22:30.077)
Ahem.

Yeah.

Ed Abis (22:39.775)
But ultimately that idea of how do we bring all these things together? Because the reality is that’s what these businesses have become, right? And again, you know this like I do. There’s a disproportionate amount of investment that goes into the playing side, right? For obvious reasons, because that’s where all the money goes out of the business. But at one end, there’ll be 50 million being spent on this player at the same time. They’re beg stealing and borrowing to try and do some of the things that you talked about.

Ben (22:51.856)
Yep. Yep.

Ben (22:59.358)
Cheers.

Ben (23:05.63)
Yeah, exactly. you know, we, in our report, we ask what, you know, what the obstacles are towards, you know, to addressing some of the things that identify and, you know, the usual things come up, lack of time, lack of budget, lack of resource, lack of expertise. And for me, I think in a lot of organizations, the reality is it’s a lack of prioritization because I’m not sure

everyone has realised just, you know, how different the world is. So we identify a number of trends in our first report, which these were going on pre-COVID, but the pandemic changed so many things in terms of the way that people behave and what they see as being valuable, but it’s accelerated them. you know, we’ve obviously had financial pressure since 2008 and those were exacerbated by COVID. And whereas, you know, many agencies in our place were sort of going on as we got the 19-20

post Spanish flu, everything’s going to be brilliant. We were saying, hang on a second, there is a long tail here of the economic fallout and we have to be prepared to cut our cloth accordingly. And I’m not sure everyone has. You’re economic, you’ve got the ongoing technological revolution, which, know, AI was being talked about, you know, pre-COVID, but it’s become so ubiquitous since. we think there are big opportunities for AI within our industry, but not until foundational technologies and

processes have been put in place. So you’ve got economic, you’ve got technological, you’ve got behavioral. So even adults.

we changed huge amounts, so many different ways post pandemic. How many times do you go to the pub these days? People realize it’s just so expensive and people don’t get home, but markedly you’ve got generational rather. So I look at how my son consume, he’s football mad like me, but he consumes football in a totally different way. But yet we are still packaging things up by and large for that pre-COVID.

Ed Abis (24:53.748)
Yeah.

Ben (25:13.216)
almost, know, previous generation the way they did it.

Ed Abis (25:15.21)
And I think, yeah, and I think from a rights, and from a rights holder perspective, you often see this as well, that that focus tends to be for the big bang around that sort of event itself. And the reality is I always think about the live event itself as live moment. This actually is more like a window of 72 hours and where you’re going from 72 hours to 72 hours and actually you could maximise that way more, which is something that you do see these independent creators doing a much better job of doing.

Ben (25:27.25)
Yeah.

Ben (25:34.386)
Yep.

Ben (25:41.821)
Yep.

Yeah.

Ed Abis (25:44.254)
then perhaps you see those rights holders doing themselves.

Ben (25:47.369)
Yeah, look, they’ve got the benefit of being agile and not having to go through multiple internal committees and…

or and the baggage of this is how we’ve always done it and we don’t want to do that because we might upset so and so. So they have got those benefits and those advantages. But I do think that we should be able to behave in a much better way. And it’s interesting, we see this at the moment as well, that the number of clients that we work with whose data is managed by a third party agency and they can’t access their data.

It takes days, it costs them more money, and by that time the moment has gone. And the reality is, again, back to my point, is if internally the role of data had been prioritized in terms of this is a key driver for us both in terms of driving efficiencies and driving revenue growth, then the cost of bringing that in-house and probably hiring a couple of analysts.

far, know, far is outweighed by the commercial upside. But because it’s just cheaper and easier to outsource it to an agency who, you know, probably isn’t adding a huge amount of value. You know, it’s just easy, isn’t it? And, but we’re missing out.

because we haven’t, know, what great data’s done, we’ve got this agency and they’re doing all this stuff for us, brilliant data, tick, what’s next? And actually, that’s really, you’re scratching the surface with it because you haven’t understood it. And so again, as I say, when I hear people talk to you about AI, and I’ve got guys that, with all due respect, you’re working off spreadsheets. So what do you think AI is gonna do for your business? Because you need…

Ben (27:35.018)
good data, structured data and good technology for the AI engine to sit on top of to capitalize upon it. It’s not gonna work off of, you know, the disjointed spreadsheets that you’ve got dotted all over your business. But I get it, everyone’s time short, we’re all looking for silver bullet, but it completely misunderstands how any of this stuff works.

Back to our, you know, our report shows the lack of senior technology expertise within these organizations. You know, 15 % don’t have any, don’t have any technology representation at all. I think from memory, I think 57 % didn’t have a director level or above technology lead. So,

guess what, you’re not gonna get particularly great advice from people in telly, with all the best will in the world. We see it where you’ve got people who are, and their technology is the guy that basically fixes your laptop, and then you’re asking him to write a wifi strategy. I’m not exaggerating, that was a conversation I had last week. So.

Ed Abis (28:35.89)
No, no, no, I know, I know I’ve heard it as well. Yeah.

Ben (28:41.097)
The reality is these things, you pay peanuts, you get monkeys and there’s lots of guys doing great jobs in that space, but it’s just not their area of expertise. And it’s unfair to expect them to be solving what should be front and center of your business strategy in 2026. As I say, 32 years since Amazon launched and we’re still having these conversations about, I don’t really think this is an area of priority for us. And I can’t really understand it. I can’t believe it. And it’s not so long.

ago I had a CEO of a Premier League club tell me he didn’t understand digital because he wasn’t on Facebook and I thought I just don’t even know where to start I don’t know where to start with that

Ed Abis (29:18.761)
Everyone’s moved on.

Ed Abis (29:24.386)
It’s interesting, right? And I was going to say to you, and when you were talking about that, you were talking about having the right people in place. And it’s not a fault of the people, right? They’re part of a structure that’s been created way above them. But I know for a fact that one of the major UK Olympic sports governing bodies, of the people that works with their business who’s very capable, that role is head of IT and digital. It’s kind of like, it’s not like, how are you head of IT and digital?

Ben (29:47.779)
No, two different things. It’s… yeah.

Ed Abis (29:50.928)
Ultimately, that’s because that person has an interest in both, right? But it doesn’t necessarily mean that it fits the structure that you need in the organisation.

Ben (29:55.974)
No. No, and look, thing is, say, you know, that CEO that I referenced, smart guy, really, really smart guy, but this isn’t an area that he’s expert in, but it’s the lack of curiosity and going, hang on a second, I need to get someone in that really understands this, it’s help guide me on that journey, but for whatever reasons, I say, maybe it’s people don’t have the time or, you know.

there is so many fires that people are putting out, particularly looking in the NGB space, the national governing body space, the amount of time that CEOs have to spend on governance, they’re being asked to do their jobs, a lot of them, with not just one, but sometimes two hands tied behind their back. It’s exceptionally difficult for them. As I say, we’re not sitting here taking pot shots. We understand the reasons behind it. The argument is for us is that this stuff

Ed Abis (30:37.108)
Yeah, yeah,

Ed Abis (30:47.252)
No, no.

Ben (30:50.337)
just needs to go up the priority list, up to the agenda of the way that people are thinking about it. So we’re always asked who’s doing this well and…

This sounds such a lazy response, but the answer is not many people. I mentioned PSA earlier on and I really like what they’re doing there and they’ve approached this with a dose of reality and I think they’re thriving off the back of understanding the world had changed, they needed to change their model.

Ed Abis (31:20.65)
But I was gonna…

And just to add to that as well, because obviously I do know them very well and obviously we’ve worked with them for a couple of years now, but I’ve worked with them in a formal life as well when they did this back in my perform day. So 15 years ago, they went down this path of we are going to do as much as we can in house and be masters of our own destiny and giving themselves the framework, the infrastructure to be able to build on that. And that’s hard, right? And Alex and Lee who run that day to day who…

Ben (31:37.99)
Yeah.

Ben (31:42.43)
Yeah.

Ed Abis (31:53.672)
both ex-players themselves, right? So not necessarily coming from a background that you would say is obvious to then go in and run a global sports federation and the challenges that they went through with ownership as well, know, they have come out the other side of it and they potentially are set out, set up to be able to scale moving forward in a way that there’s not many sports, I mean, look, I know that the commercial rights part of the federation, but ultimately they function like they’re the federation. There’s not many set up to do that.

Ben (31:57.054)
No.

Ben (32:19.583)
Yeah.

No, and you know, it is difficult. We did a lot of work two or three years ago, British Cycling, which is another organization that I think has been led very, very well in recent years. you know, we sat down with those guys and their needs for digital transformation came from a very real point of looking at long term cash flow and the future of the business to say what we are doing isn’t going to, it’s not working. Okay. And at some point we’re to run out of

Ed Abis (32:28.201)
Yeah, yeah.

Ben (32:50.657)
And, you know, but you need a leader who’s got the, you know, the vision to see that, the ability to say that.

I know we need to go down this route, but I don’t know very much about it. I need to get people in that understand this can help translate business strategy into technology, design and deployment, which is sort of what we do. And then have the strength to see that program through and finding leaders who’ve got all those qualities and are able to ride out the, excuse the pun, ride out the slings and arrows of what goes on. It’s a very difficult.

And as I say, you know, we’re not.

being critical, we recognize that there are challenges there, but I think this needs to go up the agenda. And I think it’s not always easy for a CEO to say, I just don’t understand this space, I need help. I think there’s a real pressure, particularly in sports like football, for the CEO to be omnipotent and all-knowing. And it’s just the reality, what no one is. And so you build a team of good people around it, but unless you’re

We’re actually gonna start saying that data and technology are basically gonna be front and center of how we are gonna grow this business. This isn’t a fad. I think some people thought it was 10 years ago. This is the biggest disruption to industry since the spinning Jenny. And know coming from where you do, there’s a cultural resonation there, but this is enormous. And for many organizations, as I say, I think rather than saying like,

Ed Abis (34:15.049)
Yeah.

Ben (34:32.769)
We need to now build our

business around this new way of working, around digital technology, around the ability to move quickly and be everywhere and provide personalized experiences, think about lifetime value, all that kind of stuff. Most organizations, you know, that sounds like too much work and we’ve got too much on, let’s carry on doing what we’re doing, which is selling what we want, rather than what people want to buy, 30 days a year and we’ll just rinse that as hard as we can. Yeah, we’ll do a bit of that data stuff.

use data to sell tickets and data to sell shirts. And meanwhile, people are going, well, this is lip service. And this is the crazy thing. We talk a lot about engagement in our industry and it’s become a buzzword. And I’m pretty sure that you asked most CEOs, is engagement important? yeah, engagement’s really important. Yeah, exactly. And you say, why is it important?

Ed Abis (35:25.234)
yeah, I’ve got a fan engagement strategy. I’m buttoned up, that’s fine. Cool.

Ben (35:33.545)
they can’t really explain it, they can’t really quantify it. And for us…

Ed Abis (35:37.393)
It always concerns, yeah, I was gonna say sorry, it always concerns me whenever I see a sports organisation come out and publish their fan engagement strategy. Because ultimately, you are literally built to engage fans, why do you need a separate strategy to be able to do it? Your whole existence should be about engaging fans. You shouldn’t need a separate strategy.

Ben (35:45.895)
Yeah.

Ben (35:52.318)
Well.

Of course, of course, you know, it’s all part of the business plan, the marketing strategy, but you know, it’s, you know, for us, the engagement is around.

providing a value proposition in return for data. So we can learn, A, we can capture new people, but also we can learn more about existing customers. And we use that data to improve the experience. And if we improve the experience, they stay loyal, they spend more, they advocate. And by the way, we can package all that up now. And in the right way, we can now start integrating sponsors into that experience. And that’s the way that we think it should be working. But as far as I can tell, and the data again in our report maps, you know, bears this out.

because 20 % I think both on both metrics are measuring cost per acquisition and then measuring customer lifetime value. So the reality is that 80 % of people are basically engaging with no idea about what they’re doing. Does it work? We don’t know. Does it work for this segment? Well, that’s we haven’t got a clue, but they’re just busy being busy and they’re busy spending money with no upside. And again, it all comes back to this sport mindset. We’ve just got to do stuff.

at 100 miles an hour, everyone’s so flat out. And we say this many, many times when we audit clients, you’ve got way too many people in your organization because you haven’t ever taken any time to understand how you can use technology to automate your business, to build integrations between systems. They backfill them with people. And we ask this a lot, what’s the single biggest thing that would improve your life working here? More people. All you would do is bring more people in and make them inefficient.

Ben (37:35.122)
increasing your headcount costs and not necessarily improving your revenues. But no one stops us, hang on a second, let’s just take a couple of steps back and look at this and go, wow, we’ve actually got this bloated organization here, which is, I’m not questioning for one second people’s work ethic or their commitment, but they’re not given the structure, the framework or the tools to work in an effective and efficient way. And if you could harness that, your business would rather be a lot more productive, or you could actually save some costs here on headcount.

Ed Abis (37:38.419)
Yeah, yeah.

Ed Abis (37:52.595)
Yeah, yeah.

Ben (38:05.025)
and you know businesses have got they can choose which is the right path but it’s extraordinary in these straitened times how flabby so many these organizations are because they’re not giving themselves the time to think about it.

Ed Abis (38:21.992)
So as we to the end of this discussion, and we could literally do this for hours, right? Let’s try and think about some, we have, yeah, yeah, we have. Let’s think about some practical ways that ultimately, no, probably not, no. We’ll look at the metrics later. We can see where the drop-off was. So it feels like there needs to be some changes at board level in terms of how these things are at the very least measured so people can start to quantify. So for instance,

Ben (38:26.793)
We have, haven’t we?

Ben (38:32.031)
Is anyone still listening?

Ben (38:37.799)
Yeah, when I started talking, yeah.

Ed Abis (38:51.6)
It feels like the very least that they need to be tracking the percentage of fans they can actually identify and understand. Because coming back to your point earlier, where you said that 700,000 and actually it was only 200,000 that were physically GDB are compliant and things like that. Ultimately, if that started to be a metric that was tracked at board level along with turnover and attendance and rights revenue, then it’d have to be taken more seriously, Surely that’s going to help.

Ben (39:04.958)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Ben (39:21.023)
Yeah, I think so. I think again, you know, there’s often in organisations, there’s a massive disconnect every level, look, people measure what they can measure because it’s easy. So you end up, we end up seeing all manner of reports where, oh, look at Instagram followers are up or our number of likes on Facebook is up. And you’re like, so what? I mean, it’s great they’re up. don’t know how many of those are bots. Do you count that? No, probably not. But.

The big question ultimately is for us, in all this space, it’s a business, you’re doing things either to save money or to make money. And that’s how you create a single business. So everything has to flow backwards from that. So you then need to start building your KPI framework around those two North stars. And then you drill down into that. And as Einstein said, not everything that counts can be counted. Not everything that can be counted counts. So you have to try and find a way to measure that.

had one client recently, because their strategy was a bit fuzzy, they had a KPI dashboard with about 200 metrics on it. So guess what? Everyone in the business thought everything was a priority. And so you can actually identify the two or three levers that you needed to pull. And we’ve done this for clients where we built KPI frameworks, working backwards from their business plan, looking at B2B and B2C revenues. And the B2C revenues ultimately is a function of how many people you’ve got in your data.

and the spend per head. Obviously those are segmented quite granular levels, but you’ve to understand how you are going to grow those segments and how you’re to generate more money from those segments if you want to try and hit, and it becomes really quite mechanical, but it’s also when you break it down like that it becomes really quite clear. okay, at the bottom of that you might have some engagement stats and stuff on social media, which becomes interesting. It’s anecdotal and you might be able to tie a correlation between Facebook lights going up and a particular segment increasing.

in size or revenue, whatever, of course, that’s interesting.

Ben (41:21.887)
As a business, you need to be really, really clear about what the key drivers are for change. And I think the big challenges in recent years, too many haven’t realized the dynamic has changed, both in terms of those traditional revenue streams and the fact that they’re all under pressure. But also, I think the risk profile has changed. I think this has been changing since 2008. I look back, to the World Cup 1998, when foot

football was probably at its apogee in terms of, you know, everyone wants to do stuff and you’d see adverts around the World Cup and every different product was using football to sell it. As we get now to 2026.

the number of people that can afford to buy in the top level is tiny because the top guys charge so much and then there’s an enormous drop off after that threshold finishes. But the guys at the bottom, with all due respect, I can afford to sponsor you but you’re not gonna drive very much for me.

The guys below that have got to say, okay, I get it. We’re not going to sell in the same way as the big guys. We need to start selling on the uniqueness of our proposition. We need to start and sell how we’re different, what story we’re trying to tell, know all about our customers. And by the way, not just know all about them, but because we know all about them, we’ve given them a great time. They are super engaged with what we’re doing. They’re big, big advocates for us. And brands go, you know what, I like that. A, I can afford to buy in, but actually, you know, this is a good platform for us.

What you’ve ended up with is committed partners who are trying to grow the size of that audience for mutual benefit. That whole, we sell rights and you buy rights and you have budget and we want your budget, that transactional thing I think is dead for 90 % of rights holders. Anyone below tier one should be looking at how do we work together almost in a cashless way to drive benefit from building a much bigger, more engaged audience. So we’re talking here about

Ed Abis (43:24.23)
And I think these are, sorry.

Ben (43:25.735)
Genuine partnerships. mean 20 years ago. We also all sponsorship department sounds quite transactional and And not very friendly So everyone rebranded to be partnerships and they carried on doing what they were doing which was selling stuff Whereas I’m talking here about genuine partnerships where a plus b equals more than the sum of a plus b

Ed Abis (43:46.376)
there’s a reality as well that when you do get away from the tier ones now to tier twos and tier threes that the professional sportsmen and women that are part of it are accessible. You can do things with them. They actually want to be activated, do things like ultimately meet the fans. I think that thing that used to exist in football a long, time ago that’s not there anymore now because it’s become so big and so vast.

I think can still go on. Like I said, I’ve attended some of the smaller sports, I think that’s a massive opportunity for them to be able to do that activation.

Ben (44:24.081)
Yeah, look again, it’s people realizing that what they’re doing isn’t working, that all their numbers are probably going backwards, the world is spinning faster around us and if we want to remain relevant, we have to adapt and that’s not a case of copying others, it’s a case of understanding what makes you unique and being proud of that. And okay, you might not have the massive numbers that a Man United have got or whomever,

But that’s fine. There’s no there’s no problem. Don’t try and compete with Manny and I to you’re gonna die ultimately Be proud of what what you’ve got and and as I said before, you know, it’s a fantastic book You know small data, you know for years people have been sort of trying to scare Organizations about the need to have big data. Well, you need big data if you are, know If you are Google or whomever, but it’s all about the small data. It’s about quality over quantity, but

but to know what’s important, you’ve got to work backwards from.

data strategy and how data strategy supports your wider business goals. And that will then create the framework for what is it we are trying to collect here. And actually, you know, are we happy spending this to acquire this data? Well, we are because we can see what comes out the other side and great, the more I invest here, the more comes out the other side. It becomes a, you know, self generating revenue model. But yeah, it sounds a lot easier than it is. It takes time, it’s gonna cost money. But for me, it’s the only way in 2026, the sports organization

in tier 2 and tier 3 are going to be able to compete.

Ed Abis (46:02.427)
This has been fascinating. Really, really enjoyed it. So what we will do is for anyone who’s watching or listening to this on the display website where the podcast sits, there’ll be a summary of what we’ve discussed today. There’ll be links to Ben’s report and also to our report as well from display. I’m sure Ben will happily get back to anyone on LinkedIn who wants to know more about what he’s been discussing today. But just from my perspective, look, I found this really, really interesting, really insightful.

Thank you so much for giving an hour. No, no, my pleasure.

Ben (46:32.127)
Likewise, thank you. No, thanks. Have me on. No, it’s been great. The time has flown. The listeners may disagree, but I’ve enjoyed it.

Ed Abis (46:41.671)
As always, if you enjoyed this episode of the Attention Shift, drop a link, smash the subscribe button, share it to anyone you know. I’m sure Ben would love the ability to get this show far and wide so more people can hear about his report. If you’d like to contact me on LinkedIn, you can DM me, also Joe Redfern as well, Ben himself, or you can email the show at helloattentionshift.media. Thanks again and catch you next time.