The Thesis

Sports and entertainment organizations spent a century as broadcasters — one-way, mass-audience, low-data. That model is breaking. Rights have unbundled into owned windows (training footage, academy content, women's competitions) with no broadcaster attached, and the audience relationship increasingly has to be built and measured directly. New Fandom is the belief that the tools letting organizations understand, segment, and engage their own fans — not just reach them — are infrastructure, not marketing add-ons.

The Operator lens

This isn't an outside read. During LIV Golf's launch phase, building a direct fan relationship meant giving the organization a direct line to fans with no algorithm filtering reach and no platform taking a cut — and doing that required building fan segmentation from a standing start, eventually reaching 18,000+ distinct fan segments. That's the operating experience this thesis is built on. The BrightByte

What The Days Says

The sports fan-engagement platform market was already worth $4.8B in 2025 and is forecast to reach $13.2B by 2034. The strategic shift behind that growth is measurable, not anecdotal: PwC's 2024 Sports Survey found 72% of sports industry leaders ranked direct-to-fan digital channels as their top strategic priority, up from 49% in 2020. Retention data backs the same story — clubs using predictive fan models report up to 20% improvement in season-ticket retention. Fan Engagement Platform Development 2026: Sports Team Apps +2

The Signal

FanStake, a UK fan-engagement platform, raised a $3M pre-seed round in 2024 and a further $6.25M led by Courtside Ventures — a useful market comp for what an institutional investor is willing to price in this category, though it's Courtside's portfolio company, not ours; we're citing it as a signal, not a claim of involvement. SportsPro