How are sports organisations turning fan passion into measurable, long-term value? iSportConnect’s Taruka Srivastav spoke with Pareekshith Shetty, Co-Founder & CTO of Proem Sports, about the growing importance of fan data, season-aware engagement and technology built specifically around the unique rhythms of sport.
In the conversation, Shetty discusses how fragmented fan data can limit retention and commercial growth, why the crucial window for converting a first-time attendee into a repeat fan may be just days, and how Proem is using behavioural intelligence, personalisation and AI to help sports organisations understand and engage supporters more effectively.
He also shares Proem’s perspective on the differences between markets such as India, Australia, Europe and the Middle East, the role of AI in the future of fan engagement, and why technology should augment human judgement rather than replace the authentic voice of a sports organisation.
Proem Sports is entering an increasingly competitive fan engagement market. What gap did you identify that convinced you there was still room to build a new platform specifically for sports organisations?
The gap sits in the connections between the technologies sports organisations already use, and in what happens after the first interaction. When we analysed more than 30 seasons of fan data across sports, clubs and geographies, one pattern kept appearing. For every 100 fans acquired, around 10 go on to transact, and around 80% of those paying fans do not return. That works out to an acquisition-to-repeat-buyer rate of roughly 2 to 3%.
The data needed to fix that is usually fragmented and rarely clean. Ticketing knows who attended, commerce knows who bought, digital channels know who engaged, and the same person can appear under different names, emails or identifiers across every one of those systems. Most organisations have never resolved those records into a single profile, so they cannot say with confidence whether the person who bought a ticket also bought a jersey.
Building that resolution layer properly takes time, and most rights holders assume they need to complete it before doing anything else. We think that gets the sequencing backwards. Every home fixture brings in first-time attendees whose window to convert into a second attendee closes within a fortnight, so waiting seasons to get the data foundation perfect costs more than it saves. Proem is built to connect those interactions as they arrive, resolve identity progressively, and use behavioural intelligence to identify where each person is likely to go next, whether that is repeat attendance, membership, participation or renewal.
Many clubs and leagues already use CRM, marketing automation and ticketing solutions. How does Proem Sports differentiate itself, and why should organisations choose your platform over existing alternatives?
There are some very good CRM and customer engagement platforms in the market. The issue is that most weren’t designed around the particular economics and rhythm of sport. A conventional platform is generally built around behaviours such as a purchase or an abandoned cart. Sport has another layer of complexity, because the calendar itself changes the likelihood of action. A matchday creates urgency, a rivalry fixture carries a different emotional context, and a winning streak can become a commercial opportunity in its own right.
Organisations that try to force sports logic into a general-purpose platform usually spend six to twelve months and considerable budget building it, and often still cannot trigger a campaign natively off a win streak. Proem combines unified fan identity, season-aware analytics, sports-specific triggers and pre-built lifecycle playbooks, so a club can typically be live within three to six weeks rather than a year, with campaign turnaround moving from a matter of weeks to a matter of hours.
There is also a difference in how we are incentivised. Ticketing and merchandise vendors earn on transaction volume, so a fan who never returns costs them very little. We are measured on whether that person comes back, which puts our economics on the same side as the organisation’s. We integrate with existing systems rather than replacing them, so organisations can activate the data they already hold without a rip-and-replace project.
Your client base spans some very different sports organisations. Tell us a bit about who you work with.
Our client base and experience range across a diverse group of rights holders, from popular teams in football and cricket to leagues, federations in handball and table tennis. That spread matters to us, because the retention problem looks different at each level. A top-division club with an established fanbase is usually trying to convert emotional loyalty into repeat behaviour. A federation or an emerging-sport organisation is often building a first-party audience from close to zero while competing for attention against far more established sports.
Our existing client portfolio and the engagements behind it give us confidence that the platform adds value across that full range, from major professional clubs down to grassroots and developing sport. Wherever fan data starts out fragmented across ticketing, merchandise and digital channels, connecting it and acting on it produces measurable gains in conversion, retention and revenue, regardless of the sport’s size or maturity.
You describe Proem as a season-aware fan engagement platform. How does understanding the unique rhythm of a sports season create better commercial outcomes than traditional customer engagement models?
Timing has a major influence on behaviour in sport. Our data shows that fans who attend two or more games are around three times more likely to return the following season than fans who attend only once, so the second attendance is the real growth lever. The window for converting a first-time attendee into a second attendee is roughly 8 to 13 days after that first game. Inside it, the emotional connection is still high and conversion holds up well. Beyond it, the same message to the same person performs considerably worse, and many organisations either send nothing in that period or send a generic message weeks later once the feeling has faded.
The wider sporting calendar provides further signals. Matchdays, winning streaks, player milestones and renewal windows at 90, 60 and 30 days out all change when someone is most likely to act. A traditional engagement model treats every day the same, which tends to burn fans out through over-messaging in some periods and silence in others. Connecting the calendar to individual behaviour allows organisations to engage around the moments most likely to produce an outcome, which increases the percentage of people who progress from one valuable action to the next and stay engaged across multiple seasons.
You’ve already powered more than 40 million fan interactions and analysed over 30 seasons of sports data. What are some of the most surprising insights you’ve uncovered about fan behaviour across different markets?
A few things have stood out. The first is how short the emotional half-life of a first interaction actually is. Most organisations plan re-engagement around the next fixture, but our data points to that 8 to 13 day window after someone’s first game as the period where conversion into a second attendance is strongest. After that, an organisation is effectively acquiring the person again rather than reactivating them.
The second is how much rests on that one step. Fans who attend twice are roughly three times more likely to return the following season, around 56% retention against 18%, yet almost all marketing effort in sport still goes into producing the first attendance rather than engineering the second.
The third is that emotional and behavioural loyalty are barely correlated. Someone can feel deeply connected to a club while giving it almost no usable data, following every result and defending the team online without ever registering, attending or buying. This is why so many organisations sit on very large social audiences alongside small first-party databases, and on our modelling converting even 10% of that emotionally loyal group into behaviourally loyal fans is worth around 5 to 7% of overall revenue. What has struck us most is how consistently these patterns hold across football, cricket and other sports, even across very different markets where the channels and commercial models vary considerably.
Founded in Singapore with development headquarters in Bengaluru, Proem has a strong footprint across Asia-Pacific, Europe and the Middle East. How do fan expectations differ across these regions, and how does your platform adapt to those differences?
The underlying motivations of fans are more consistent across markets than people expect. The channels and commercial structures vary considerably more. India is mobile-first and messaging-led, and organisations there often have very large social audiences alongside relatively small owned databases, which creates a significant opportunity to build direct, identifiable audiences. Australia has a strong membership culture in many sports, which makes renewal and long-term member value particularly important.
Europe tends to have organisations with established, multi-generational relationships with supporters, alongside mature expectations around consent and data handling. The Middle East is different again, with significant investment going into clubs, leagues and sporting infrastructure while many organisations build their fan ecosystems from a much earlier stage, which creates an opportunity to establish first-party data capability early rather than retrofitting it later. International, multilingual audiences also make identity, consent and channel orchestration more important there than elsewhere.
Across all of these markets the platform adapts on channel mix, language and consent framework, while the underlying process stays the same: understand the individual, identify the opportunity in front of them, and measure the outcome.
Looking ahead, which emerging technologies or trends do you believe will have the biggest impact on fan engagement over the next five years?
I’d resist answering that as a list of capabilities coming down the line, because most of what matters here is already usable today. The tools exist. What’s changing is how much of a marketing team’s week they can take off their hands.
A lot of fan engagement work is still manual pattern-matching that a person is doing badly because there are too many fans to do it by hand. Which of our 40,000 fans looks like they’re drifting away. What should this particular segment actually be told, in what tone, on what channel. That used to require either a data analyst a small club doesn’t have, or a marketer guessing. AI can now reason through that directly, and do it for every fan rather than a sample, which is what genuinely changes what a team of two or three people can cover in a week.
Where I’d push back is on using the same technology to write what the fan actually reads. A model can draft a first pass, but if a club’s matchday messages start sounding like they came out of the same system as everyone else’s, that’s the one place AI actively damages the relationship rather than helping it. Fans notice generic tone faster than almost anything else, because the whole premise of the relationship is that it isn’t generic.
So the split I’d draw isn’t AI versus human, it’s judgement versus voice. Let AI handle the analysis and the segmentation, deciding who should hear from the club this week and why. Keep a person doing the final pass on what it actually says. Get that right and a small marketing team ends up working at a scale that used to require a much bigger one, without the fan on the other end ever feeling like they’re talking to a machine.
Cost is central to every conversation, whether it is a small club or a large organisation. If you had to make Proem’s cost and ROI case to a CFO in one breath, what would it be, and what should a club realistically expect to invest and gain?
In one breath: you have already paid to acquire these people, most of them will not come back without a system built to bring them back, and increasing the percentage who take another valuable action is the most efficient growth available to you. The business case depends on which outcome is being improved, whether that is repeat attendance, membership, season tickets or merchandise, and I would build it around the organisation’s own numbers rather than a generic benchmark: audience size, current conversion and retention, and the specific gap being addressed.
What I would put in front of a finance team first is a break-even figure rather than a growth projection. For most organisations the platform is covered by a few dozen additional converted individuals, against an existing base of tens of thousands who have already interacted once, which is a very different and more honest conversation than a headline uplift number. I would also encourage any finance team to measure the return against controllable revenue rather than total turnover, since broadcasting and central distributions are not influenced by fan engagement and make any genuine improvement look proportionally smaller than it is. On trust and data handling, our position throughout is that the organisation owns the relationship and the underlying data, with no lock-in, which matters as much to a CFO’s risk assessment as the revenue case does.
What is your long-term vision for Proem Sports, and where do you hope the platform will be positioned within the global sports industry over the next decade?
Sophisticated fan intelligence remains concentrated among the largest organisations that can afford large data teams and lengthy implementation programmes. Within a single league you will often find two or three clubs with genuinely advanced capability and ten with almost none, and that gap affects commercial balance for everybody, including the league itself. We want that capability to be accessible much further across the sports ecosystem, from major clubs down to federations and emerging sports.
The commercial outcome will differ by organisation, but the underlying objective is consistent: increase the percentage of people who progress, stay and generate value over time, whether that shows up as repeat attendance, membership retention, a larger identifiable digital audience or stronger sponsorship value. We also see real opportunity in global digital audiences, since a supporter thousands of kilometres from a stadium may never attend a match but can still become valuable through content, merchandise or membership.
Put simply, we want to help organisations understand where each individual sits in their journey, identify the opportunity in front of them, and increase the percentage of people who take it.
