Data & Insights
Who are your fans, really? Your sponsors want to know
Sam Cherry
Founder
,
2403 Group
8
minutes to read
KEY TAKEAWAY
Your fan data is, in effect, your sales deck. A single, clean, consented view of who your fans are lets you personalise for them and prove what they're worth to partners. Without it, you're walking into every renewal negotiation with the lights off.
Picture the first proper meeting with a new sponsor. Sooner or later the questions turn to your fans: how many there are, who they are, what they care about and whether the brand can reach them again. That's what it's buying, far more than the logo. Now picture how most rights holders would answer. The honest version gets vague very quickly, and that vagueness costs money at every renewal.
The frustrating part is that the data usually exists. It's sitting in the ticketing system, the shop, the app, the newsletter tool and a spreadsheet someone in partnerships keeps, and none of it adds up to a picture of an actual fan. Until it does, you're asking partners to pay for an audience you can only gesture at.
71%
of consumers expect companies to deliver personalised interactions
McKinsey
$12.9m
average annual cost of poor data quality to an organisation
Gartner
75%
of consumers won't buy from organisations they don't trust with their data
Cisco, 2024
Fans notice when you don't know them
McKinsey found that 71% of consumers expect companies to deliver personalised interactions, and 76% get frustrated when it doesn't happen. The upside is just as clear: some 78% said personalised content made them more likely to repurchase, and personalisation most often drives a revenue lift of 10 to 15%.
For a rights holder, the missed sales are easy to picture: the season-ticket holder who gets the same email as a first-time buyer, or the family that bought a festival pass and never hears about the children's programme. Personalisation starts with knowing who someone is across every place they touch you.
That's harder than it sounds. Poor data quality costs organisations at least $12.9 million a year on average, according to Gartner research. A club or festival's bill will be smaller, but the pattern is the same: duplicate records, missing consent, emails that bounce and segments nobody trusts.
A sponsor will pay for the audience you can prove. Anything else is guesswork, and they know it.
Joining the dots on each fan
The biggest rights holders are solving this with a single fan identity. FIFA has worked with Globant on FIFA ID, which connects supporters' interactions across FIFA's digital platforms and tournament attendance. During the 2026 World Cup, FIFA's digital platforms drew more than 260 million unique visitors, and its two apps generated an aggregated 60 million users.
Identity only works if fans use it, though. FIFA reported midway through the tournament that over 4.2 million FIFA FAN ID cards had been distributed, with over 37% activated by people tapping or scanning them. If you're a smaller rights holder, I'd take some comfort from that: even at the world's biggest event, handing out an ID and getting fans to use it are two different jobs.
You don't need FIFA's budget to do this, either. One record per fan, matched across ticketing, retail, app and email, is within reach of a club, a festival or a museum, and once you have it, you can value your rights by the people a sponsor will really reach.
Would your fans say yes to a sponsor?
Trust decides whether fans share data at all. Cisco's 2024 Consumer Privacy Survey found 75% of consumers will not purchase from organisations they don't trust with their data, and for the first time a majority (53%) said they were aware of their country's privacy laws. So the way you handle data affects whether people buy from you.
Brands look at audiences in much the same way. When choosing creators to work with, 58% of ad buyers weigh creator reputation and 56% weigh audience alignment. Rights holders face the same test: a partner wants to know the audience fits before it pays to reach it.
That makes consent a commercial asset. A smaller list of fans who've agreed to hear from you and your partners is worth more than a large database you can't use. Ask for partner consent explicitly, so a sponsor offer never arrives as a surprise. The fans who chose to hear from a brand are the ones a brand will pay to reach.
Worth pausing on
If a sponsor asked for a profile of your fans tomorrow, how long would it take to produce, and would you trust what you handed over? And how many separate systems are holding a record for the same fan?
Three Key Steps
First join the data up, then earn the right to use it, and only then turn it into something a partner can buy.
1
Connect the data you already hold
Bring ticketing, retail, app, email and membership data into one place and match the records to a single fan ID, cleaning duplicates and fixing fields as you go. Poor data quality is expensive. Then set a few simple rules for how new records get created from now on, so the mess doesn't build up again.
2
Build consent into the experience
Ask for permission clearly at the moments fans are already engaging with you, like buying a ticket or joining a membership, and explain what they get in return. Trust drives purchase decisions. Treat every consented fan record as an asset that grows in value over time, and look after it accordingly.
3
Package segments for sponsors
Build a handful of audience profiles a partner can understand, such as families, travelling fans or young digital fans. Personalise your own offers to them first, to prove the segments respond. Then show sponsors the profile, the size and the results before you put a value on access.
A sponsor will pay for the audience you can prove. Anything else is guesswork, and they know it.
Who holds the data on Gulf fans?
Gulf audiences are among the most digital anywhere. In Saudi Arabia, 99.0% of the population uses the internet. So almost every fan leaves a data trail, and the real question is whether rights holders capture it in a form they can use, or leave it with the platforms and ticketing partners they rely on.
Regulation is catching up with that reality. The UAE's Personal Data Protection Law came into force on 2 January 2022 and prohibits processing personal data without the owner's consent, with limited exceptions. Saudi Arabia has its own personal data protection law as well. Build consent into your fan data now and you'll be ready; bolt it on later and you may find you can't use records you thought you owned.
Across Asia and Africa, the challenge is often scale before structure, with audiences growing fast on social platforms the rights holder doesn't control. Getting fans onto owned channels, with a single ID and clear consent, is what turns followers into an audience you can describe. I'd expect the rights holders who do that early to set the standard for their markets.
How sellable is your fan data?
Use these to find out how ready your data really is to sell.
How many of our systems hold a record for the same fan?
What share of our fan records have valid marketing consent?
Could we describe our audience to a sponsor on a single page?
Are we personalising anything at all today?
Who actually owns fan data around here?
From 12,500 AED
Timeline
Findings within weeks
It's easy to file fan data under IT projects, and that's a mistake. It's the evidence behind every sponsorship you sell and every renewal you want, and it's what lets you show a partner exactly what their deal gives them: the brand visibility, the benefits and the metrics they care about. The rights holders who can describe their audience will always negotiate from a stronger position. And the raw material is usually already there, waiting to be joined up.
If your fan data is scattered across systems, the first step is finding out what you actually have. Our CRM & Insights Accelerator reviews your data, CRM and consent and gives you a clear roadmap within weeks.
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