Future Trends in Sports Insight: Human Understanding Powered by AI and Tech

The world we live in is undergoing monumental change, with global uncertainty the dominant theme in our lives - fundamentally shifting how we think, feel, and act daily.

And fans’ relationship with sport is no exception to the rule. As the competition for attention intensifies and fan expectations evolve, sports properties are realising that commercial success hinges not just on collecting more hard data, but on understanding and connecting with fans at a much deeper level.

Quantitative data and surface-level metrics provide a baseline, but they are no longer enough. To build meaningful, sustainable commercial growth, sports businesses must look beyond the numbers and embrace the contextual and often complex truths that will help them build stronger and more valuable relationships with fans.

My view - the future of sports research will be defined by richer narratives and deeper emotional insight underpinned by AI and technology innovation, with a renewed focus on appealing to the underlying human motivations that drive fandom.

But as budgets tighten, and AI and online tools offer increasingly cost-effective solutions, what options are actually available? Perhaps, for sports properties, this presents an opportunity to reset and recalculate the value equation for what matters most to them: depth, speed, and value.

So, with this in mind, here are three research trends that sports properties can rely on to build these narratives:

1. A New Era of Deep Fan Insight

For years, the industry has celebrated volume: more data points, more tracking, more measurement. But the next wave of growth will come from depth, not breadth.

What fans think is useful….but why they think it is transformative.

Future insight programs will rely heavily on:

• Real human relationships (in-person and digital) uncovered through ethnography, interviews, and groups to really understand how fandom integrates into identity and everyday life
• Cultural semiotics to identify specific market and generational social codes that drive behavioural norms when it comes sports fandom    
• Longitudinal connection to capture emotions, rituals, frustrations, needs, and hopes in real-time
• Co-created futures to shape fan-led innovation, transformation, and strategic investment
• Experience-based research to map the emotional rhythms of fan journeys and discover the drivers that increase acquisition, retention, revenue generation, and lifetime value

These approaches unlock the nuances that raw numbers miss; the motivations, behaviours, barriers, needs, and the stories that bind fans to clubs, athletes, and competitions.

2. Qualitative Insight that Fuels Commercial Strategy

Deeper fan understanding will underpin every major commercial decision - from product design to sponsorship strategy.

Sponsor brands are already taking a more nuanced and selective approach to investment, utilising their own qualitative customer insight programmes to inform brand fit, valuation, and strategy. The direction of investment has shifted and so has their value expectation – today, sponsorship means demonstrating clear ROI built on stronger understanding of customer value.

Sports teams, leagues, and properties will follow suit – by capturing deeper customer insight to strengthen commercial valuation, identify true partnership alignment, and showcase authentic relevance in a crowded market.

When human stories and experiences are used to inform commercial strategy, not only will sports properties and partner brands achieve greater mutual value, but fans will also benefit from a ‘product’ that feels more personal, meaningful, and emotionally rich.

3. AI as a Powerful Companion to Human Understanding

AI already plays a major role in research - from general process efficiency and AI data analysis tools to the complete replacement of real customers with synthetic users and digital twins - its adoption has been swift and, for the most part, effective.

But it is still an early-stage innovation and has its limitations, namely that accuracy and bias across LLM’s is often subject to the quality of the data and people training any given model. Further, the use of synthetic personas (the fastest growing segment in research) has been proven as severely limited when it comes to real world scenarios – unable to present a real reflection of human emotions and often wildly inaccurate compared to real customer data.

So, at this early stage of the AI innovation journey, what role will (or should!) it play in qualitative sports research?

For most part of this year, my agency (Simpson Carpenter) has been tackling that question. Our view is that, right now, its greatest current value lies in amplifying research expertise rather than replacing real customer data. By speeding up process and delivery time, supporting linguistic scope, tackling bias, and creating opportunities for depth at scale that have never been feasible before.

And we’ve done just that – with the development of our Avatar-led Nextgen interview tool, Quasai.

Tools like this show that AI can be used to create complementary tools that can help gather deep insight at scale in a way that overcomes existing cost, time, language, and quality barriers – creating added value for sports properties without removing research, advisory, and consultancy expertise.

Conclusion: The Future Belongs to Human Understanding

The future is uncertain – yet it is this uncertainty that creates opportunity. And sports businesses and partners have an unprecedented opportunity to define their future. In an industry saturated with top-level metrics, syndicated data, and automated analytics, the organisations that go further with deep, human-centred insight will stand out.

Commercial growth will be driven not by those who collect the most data, but by those who understand their fans most authentically – and AI has the potential to enhance, but not replace, how the industry goes about doing that.

Achieving true potential for growth begins with listening to the people that matter most, the fans.

Get in touch...  

...via email to find out how the Simpson Carpenter Sport Insight Team can help you bring the customer/fan voice into your decision-making.

This article is part of a series diving into the evolving sport business landscape from the perspective of a customer insight agency. Whether you work in customer insight, fan experience, innovation, marketing, or on the sponsorship side, we would love to hear your thoughts and connect to discuss how we might shape the future of sport now, next, and beyond.

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