CEO at PTI Digital | We Help Boards Align Tech and Commercial Strategy | Vendor-Agnostic | Trusted by Leading Venues and Rights Holders
Sport is obsessed with chasing revenue. The big deals. The sponsorship glamour. The top-line excitement. But here’s the reality. Most organisations are leaking thousands behind the scenes. In almost every audit we’ve done, we’ve found: ↳ Duplicate systems across departments ↳ Licences being renewed but not used ↳ Manual work that tech could easily automate It’s not glamorous. But it’s fixable. And fixing it changes everything. Our Sports Leadership Benchmark Report found 57% of leaders don’t believe tech will create efficiencies this year. That’s a huge opportunity being missed. Every sports organisation has untapped potential to save money, reduce risk and fund innovation. Efficiency creates the headroom to grow. Drop me a message if you’d like to find out how we can help.
Great post Ben. The right tech, with the right partner who has undertaken the right BA and discovery in the best interest of the customer is game changing for sports teams with a future focus. Unfortunately sports works on a kind of reverse economy where spend is committed before money is made, so the short term pressure on revenue and results prevails. Having a strategic outlook which helps on both sides of the P&L via tech has both long term and short term impacts and should be seen as an investment rather than cost item.
With you on this Ben. Sport professionals are tracked and incentivised to chase revenue. If efficiency and tech integration were equally measured and rewarded, then perhaps sport's obsession would start to shift.
Good stuff, Ben. I sense we are in the “early majority” phase of this S-curve trend. It’s all about optimising what one has since topline is marginal relative to cost inflation. To borrow a phase commonly used in investment terms: it’s about a “picks n shovels” approach rather than (a more speculative) “panning for gold”
Tech, if used right, is a huge unlock for sports. The main problem is the incentives to adopt new tech are not there. “Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM / Microsoft / Salesforce etc”. Each implies the same principle: safety in orthodoxy beats risk in innovation. Michael Broughton - just wrote a fantastic article on this and how to fix it.
We could also add the pure ‘refusal to change’ - including ‘huge risk aversion’ - also ‘change agreed at the management level’ but stopped at the ‘Board’ - We could go on!
Agree Ben!
Commercial Growth Leader | SaaS & Sports-Tech | Strategic Partnerships | EMEA Expansion
3dI had the fortune (perhaps consider otherwise) to experience West Ham FC vs Brentford on Monday night. If you want to look at leaking money you only have to look on the pitch - some of the players on display command (apparently) 150k GBP per week. Given their collective and individual display - which was shocking - especially in front of a new coach - I wouldnt be paying them for this weeks work at all! Interestingly there are no published figures on the attendance from Monday night! However, if the average WHUFC player receives 59000 (average) per week and theres 29 players in the squad - that totals 1.7 M GBP before they open the doors, before they sell a ticket, before they wrap a shirt and before they sell a relatively meaningless sponsorship of a ball, a signage board or player sponsorship. In an age of exorbitant broadcast deals, how does any of this really make any sense? Whats the point? I know not all sports are as nonsensical as the football business - but leaning on the customers (who already pay more than they should) is not the answer....and rewarding players (for not performing) is not the answer either.... Football perhaps is the anomally - it rarely operates within its means - but sport is a business and it should.