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Thought Leaders in association withLBB Events
Winning Fandom in the Agentic Era and Why AI Has Changed Sports Marketing Forever
lbbonline.com
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06/08/2026
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Jon Williams, founder and CEO of the Liberty Guild discusses how AI is beginning to change the way millions of people understand football and fandom as it increasingly becomes the interface between fans and the sport itself
The phrase agentic commerce is suddenly everywhere. I even heard Salesforce advertising their version of it on one of my favourite football podcasts.
But surely sport (and especially football) is one of the few remaining cultural experiences that AI cannot meaningfully replace? No one wants a synthetic last-minute winner, a simulated derby or an algorithmic version of watching your country go out on penalties.
The whole point of sport is that it happens beyond our control. It is live, unreasonable, emotional and frequently unfair. Just ask Gianni Infantino. People still want to gather around it in real time (checks local pub at 4am on Monday 6th July in the UK and sees it packed).
Yes, the emotional event itself is safe (for now). But almost everything that surrounds it is not. Again, just ask Gianni Infantino
What AI is doing is beginning to change the way millions of people understand football and fandom as it increasingly becomes the interface between fans and the sport itself: the explainer of rivalries, the curator of clips, the interpreter of tactics, the recommender of games, the summariser of controversy and, increasingly, the narrator of meaning. In essence, creating a fundamental change in how fandom is formed, interpreted and commercialised.
Fandom has always relied on interpretation. We do not simply watch sport; we learn how to care about it. Traditionally, that education came from parents, friends, newspapers, broadcasters, commentators, pub arguments (many many pub arguments), phone-ins and the strange folk memory of supporter culture.
More recently, it has come from creators, podcasts, YouTube channels, fan forums, TikTok edits and Reddit threads. The next layer will be AI systems that absorb all of those signals and package them into answers.
This means a new fan entering football through an AI assistant may not spend months wandering through articles, message boards, old clips and supporter folklore. They may simply ask: why does this rivalry matter? Which team should I follow? Who is the most exciting young player? What is the story of this tournament? The answer they receive will feel neutral, helpful and instant. But it will be built fromeated
In other words, AI becomes football’s new storyteller.
This has profound consequences for rights holders, clubs, sponsors and media businesses. Fandom is no longer only something to be broadcast to, it is something to be understood by machines. Community content, which used to be treated as peripheral, suddenly becomes infrastructure. Reddit threads, fan podcasts, local blogs, supporter videos and creator explainers are not just evidence of passion; they are the raw material AI systems use to construct the story of a club, a player, a competition or a brand.
This approach also creates a risk. Football culture has always depended on pluralism: rival interpretations, unreasonable loyalties, local idioms, tactical obsessions, old grudges and entirely contradictory versions of the same event. If millions of people start receiving the same AI-generated explanations, fandom could become cleaner, flatter and more uniform. The danger is not that AI misunderstands football completely; it is that it understands it too neatly.
For sponsors, this changes the job of sponsorship. Traditionally, it worked largely through visibility: the logo on the shirt, the board by the pitch, the broadcast exposure, the association with fame. Future sponsorship will still need fame, but it will also need narrative authority. The question becomes not simply whether fans have seen you, but whether AI systems understand why you belong in the story. Nike nailed a proper narrative with Norway, using a 1,500-year-old runic alphabet.
That is why vague marketing language will die first. Claims around passion, innovation, performance and community are almost useless in an AI-mediated environment because machines respond to specificity, consistency and repeated cultural signals. They need to know what you are associated with, who talks about you, in what context, with what evidence and how often.
This does not make creativity less important, though. It actually makes it more valuable. If AI can compare price, access, fixtures, highlights and statistics instantly, the emotional layer becomes the scarce layer. Sport already owns the things most brands spend fortunes trying to manufacture: identity, belonging, rivalry, mythology, shared suffering, redemption and belief. AI is very good at organising information, but sport’s commercial power has never come from information alone. It comes from meaning.
Sports businesses will therefore need to start measuring a new kind of visibility: share of model. How often does an AI assistant recommend your club, venue, sponsor, platform or content? What story does it associate with you? Which competitors appear beside you? What
Google monetised search because search became the gateway to intent. AI-mediated recommendation will be monetised because it will become the gateway to interpretation. The sports organisations building narrative authority now will be better placed when those commercial layers mature, and the World Cup will make all of this impossible to ignore. Now ‘Row Row Row. ’
Thought Leaders in association withLBB Events
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