Sportradar Connect: Soccer Edition Marketing Messaging and Engagement
If football provides reach and emotional context, then data provides the precision. Across the panel, hyper-personalised fan engagement was described as both the ambition and the inevitable direction of travel. Naubert highlighted how advanced some clubs have become.
Using Eintracht Frankfurt as an example, he described databases that allow segmentation not only by age and geography but by attendance patterns and even future purchase intent. “You can target fans aged 18–25, who attend regularly, live within a certain radius, and are likely to buy a car in the next six months,” he said. “Tat’s where football marketing is heading.”
Beier explained how Sportradar’s FanID concept is designed to help rights-holders make sense of the flood of information. By ingesting and unifying data into a privacy-compliant environment, then allowing sponsors to activate against it, shared data ecosystems become the backbone of more intelligent sponsorship. “Shared data ecosystems are going to become the backbone of football sponsorship,” he argued. “It’s how you turn raw fan data into real commercial outcomes without losing trust.”
Jamie Fox described how FDJ uses a similar philosophy in practice. With every customer interaction feeding into its models, the company can tailor almost every element of the experience - from the club crest and stadium imagery a customer sees, to the sequence of offers and messages they receive. “We want to reach fans with the right message at the right moment - even if that moment only lasts a few seconds during a live match,” he said.
When data is thin or missing, algorithms step in to infer likely preferences or, at the very least, serve the most relevant content at a market level until a clearer picture emerges. Even in a very different industry, Utilita has embraced that same thinking. Maidment pointed out that, as a smart prepay energy provider, Utilita has more frequent customer touchpoints than many larger competitors.
“Pound for pound, we’re probably one of the most data-rich energy companies in the UK,” he suggested. Customers top up
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more often, interact digitally and generate behavioural signals that can be overlaid with football data. Sometimes, that combination yields brilliant results. Sometimes, as the Rangers story shows, it delivers hard lessons. Either way, the direction is clear: data plus football plus emotion is where the magic happens.
Real-time engagement emerged as another defining theme. If sponsorship is about being present in the emotion, then live games are the ultimate stage. “In-play engagement is everything,” said Fox. “If a customer has already invested emotionally in a match, that’s exactly when we want to serve relevant content - not generic messaging.”
Te goal, he suggested, is to move from blunt, manual campaigns to automated, event-driven communications that react to what a fan has just seen: a goal, a missed penalty, a red card.
Beier pointed to U.S. sports, where sponsor offers are routinely triggered by on-field events. Buy one, get one free win when the home team scores above a certain number, or a free drink if a player hits a particular stat line. “Why shouldn’t that happen in football too?” he asked. “If you can tie your brand to something happening on the pitch at that exact second, you tap directly into fan emotion.”
Naubert added that football gives sponsors something many other platforms can’t: the chance to become part of indelible history. “If you’re on the LED boards during a title-winning moment, you’re part of that memory forever,” he said. Virtual advertising and localised feeds now mean brands can choose which memories they want to be part of and in which markets, rather than paying for every eyeball everywhere.
Maidment, meanwhile, offered a glimpse of how this type of thinking translates outside gambling and pure sports brands. He referenced virtual advertising in England games, as well as simple but effective pre-match prompts such as food delivery ads. “I’m a sucker for those ‘order now and get your pizza before kick-off’ messages,” he admitted.
He also recalled his time at William Hill, watching an in-play
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