Challenge
For a top global sports league, understanding its fans was becoming increasingly important to growing its marketable fan base and creating more relevant direct-to-consumer (D2C) engagement. The league had substantial volumes of fan and commercial data, but that information was distributed across functions, systems, and sources. Different clubs could calculate the same KPI differently, leaving leadership without a single trusted view of fan behavior or business performance.
The challenge extended beyond fragmented data. KPI definitions, data ownership, and sports data governance standards varied across the organization. Business and analytics teams spent significant time reconciling numbers and determining which information they could trust before they could use it.
The league recognized that trusted data was the prerequisite for what came next. Common definitions, clear governance, and shared business objectives would provide the foundation for more effective data analytics, personalization, and emerging AI capabilities.
A top global sports league partnered with EXL to create a common data foundation that could strengthen fan insights, accelerate decision-making, and advance its D2C strategy.
Solution
Building on a longstanding relationship with the league, EXL combined sports domain knowledge with data engineering, analytics, and end-to-end technology capabilities to advance the league’s data modernization strategy. EXL also brought a cross-functional perspective to the engagement, connecting business priorities with data and technology decisions across multiple client teams.
The work began by establishing shared KPI definitions, clarifying ownership, and creating standardized governance. This alignment helped ensure that the technology architecture would support the league’s business objectives and provided a trusted foundation for decision-making.
EXL then helped establish a centralized data and reporting environment built on Snowflake, integrating disparate sources and standardizing reporting across the organization. Automated data pipelines, consolidated data models, and interactive BI dashboards provided more reliable visibility into digital and fan engagement KPIs while creating a scalable platform for additional sports fan analytics use cases.
With consistent, governed data available across functions, the league could build richer fan segments, accelerate development of a holistic fan view, and apply fan segmentation analytics to support increasingly personalized engagement.
Outcomes
The transformation allowed executives and business users to spend less time reconciling competing versions of the truth and more time identifying opportunities, making decisions, and acting on reliable insights.
The consistent data foundation helped the league establish and track common North Star metrics around its marketable fan base, enabling it to achieve their core fan-growth objective ahead of expectations.
During the broader transformation period, the league also experienced more than 20% growth in its subscriber base and more than 25% growth in subscription revenue. The new foundation:
The transformation allowed executives and business users to spend less time reconciling competing versions of the truth and more time identifying opportunities, making decisions, and acting on reliable insights.
The consistent data foundation helped the league establish and track common North Star metrics around its marketable fan base, enabling it to achieve their core fan-growth objective ahead of expectations.
During the broader transformation period, the league also experienced more than 20% growth in its subscriber base and more than 25% growth in subscription revenue. The new foundation:
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