Relationship Overreach: What SPORTBIZ EUROPE 2026 Revealed About the Business of Sport
Over two days of panels at SPORTBIZ EUROPE in Barcelona, speakers from EuroLeague, the IOC, Atlético de Madrid, FC Bayern München, MotoGP, the NFL and more than a dozen other organisations kept arriving at the same conclusion: in sport’s attention economy, reach can be rented, but relationships have to be owned.
The defining question at SPORTBIZ EUROPE 2026 was not how to reach more fans. It was how to keep them. Rights holders described turning down viral growth that did not fit their identity, measuring return visits instead of impressions and building assets that no platform algorithm can take away.
The four-day event opened with a networking reception on 6 October, held its panels at Antigua Fábrica Estrella Damm on 7 and 8 October and closed with visits to Camp Nou and The Venue Barcelona on 9 October.
Four threads ran through the sessions: relationship overreach; AI taking on the volume while people earn the trust; the athlete as the new media unit; and the live experience as the one channel that cannot be rented.
Relationship overreach
The clearest test of the event was put by James Cavanagh, EMEA Manager at Horizon3.ai, moderating the “Beyond the Algorithm” panel on 7 October: if a platform closed tomorrow, how many of your fans would reach out to you directly? If the answer is almost none, the question implied, an organisation has a content-supply relationship, not a community. Answering it, Marcos García Alonso, Head of Partnerships for Spain at Substack, cited Substack’s 5 million paid subscribers worldwide as evidence that audiences will pay for content they value, and pointed to Spain as one of the company’s fastest-growing markets.
Esteban González, 3×3 Digital Content Manager at FIBA, went further: no one truly owns the fan, he said, and attention is only ever rented. Sport’s real competitor is not other sport but every form of entertainment. His prescription was to use short-form content as a funnel towards owned channels: website, newsletter, app and subscription.
Benny Bonsu, Director of Daily Content at Olympic Channel Services (IOC), described reach as a vanity metric. The question she puts to her team is not how many people read a story, but how many read three, and how many came back four or five times. Utility content such as schedules and results brings audiences in, she said; human stories make them stay.
Several rights holders described walking away from growth that did not fit. Can Keyder, Head of Social Media at Euroleague Basketball, said 50,000 followers gained overnight from a TikTok trend were not worth damage to the brand. Alberto Doblaré, International Communications Manager at FC Union Berlin, said the club would not publish content that reached five times the audience if it did not feel like Union. The club’s approach, he explained, is to know who it is before telling its story, built on distinctive assets such as its standing terraces and annual Christmas carol singing.
Keyder was clear that brand discipline and growth are not in conflict: content fans genuinely want is what the algorithm rewards. EuroLeague’s social video views reached around 2.3 billion last season, Keyder said, driven by more access, deeper collaboration with clubs and players, and a team that thinks like fans. The league’s own season review puts its 2025–26 figure at 2.27 billion, up 49% year on year (Eurohoops).
On 8 October, CF Badalona’s rebrand showed the same logic at club level. Paula Cruañas, Head of Strategy at B-Bruce, which led the project, described replacing a crest born of a merger with an identity rooted in the city’s own history, built from fan interviews and surveys before any design work began. The guiding shift was to stop expecting fans to come to the stadium and go to them instead. Marc Serra Sallent, Co-Owner and Board Member of CF Badalona SAD, said sporting results alone cannot sustain a club without a brand and a clear identity. Cruañas’s question for any organisation considering a rebrand: is it building for next season, or for a long-term asset that keeps the community and investment growing?
AI takes the volume; people earn the trust
AI came up in almost every session, and the consensus was consistent: use it for scale and efficiency, keep it away from the moments that build trust.
Sabrina Ratih, Chief Operating Officer of G2 Esports, said the organisation uses AI only in the back office, for inventory, briefing decks and pitch automation, and returns every hour saved to its creative teams. Its fans are vocal about AI in external-facing content, she said; G2 even ran a campaign centred on handmade embroidery to open a conversation with them about it. Daan Appel, Senior Global Partnerships Manager at 433, described the extremely negative reaction to the platform’s first AI post, and said AI-generated video now has to clear a near-perfect quality bar before 433 publishes it. García Alonso said Substack has added a prompt so readers know when content is AI-generated.
Bonsu described the division of labour most clearly: AI produces utility content such as schedules, results and medal tables, freeing her team for human stories. Alex Teixidor of MotoGP was not yet convinced AI belongs in creative activation at all, warning that it risks standardising brand identity. Harry Unwin, Head of Partnership Solutions & Insights at FC Bayern München, said AI is changing every stage of the sponsorship process, and that player image rights and access contracts need rethinking now that a single shoot can produce clips in 50 languages within minutes. At Atlético de Madrid, Alejandro Ugarrio, Director of Atleti Lab, described a club-wide AI programme with governance and usage analytics built in, and a simple filter for partner projects: value for the fan, value for the partner, value for the club.
The same discipline applies to data. Callum Parton, Product Venture Builder at ClubOS, said football’s problem is not a lack of data but a lack of context: a drop in a player’s sprint distance means little without the tactical and training-load picture behind it. The biggest barrier, he argued, is cultural, not technological, as clubs rarely plan beyond the next match even though a decision taken today can shape the next three years. On the “Decoding the New Fan” panel with Learning Partner Johan Cruyff Institute, Pablo Sánchez Marquiegui, President of Real Club de Polo de Barcelona and founder of sports-tech company Guestin, said customer data often goes unused once a ticket is sold, and that organisations should define four or five clear KPIs before collecting data, not after. On the same Johan Cruyff Institute panel, Guillermo Fortuño Antón of FC Barcelona’s stadium activation team added that walking the stadium floor still yields insight that data misses.
For David Dwinger, Co-Founder and President of Estrella Football Group, data is the investment case itself. Estrella runs what he described as a horizontal multi-club model, with no flagship club extracting value from the others, and currently owns three clubs in Portugal and Italy. The long-term value, he said, sits in aggregated on- and off-pitch data, from player trading to sponsorship and fan behaviour, which makes it a long-term play rather than a three-year exit.
The athlete as the media unit
Across sports, speakers described the same order of discovery. Rubén F. Vargas, NFL International Content & Media Specialist, said new international fans almost always arrive through a player first, then a team, then the league, citing Odell Beckham Jr., Patrick Mahomes and Tom Brady as gateway figures. Dwinger made the same point from football: younger fans are player fans rather than club fans, which multi-club groups see as a chance to build loyalty to the wider group.
Rights holders are reorganising around this. González said FIBA 3×3 gets clips onto players’ phones within minutes and co-builds content and commercial presentations with them; if an athlete grows bigger than the federation, he argued, that brings new audiences and new revenue. Appel described 433 as increasingly an aggregator across many athletes, holding up Erling Haaland’s open, playful content as the model to follow. Creators are becoming distribution partners in their own right: Ratih said creator co-broadcasts of G2’s League of Legends matches sometimes outperform the main broadcast, while Teixidor described MotoGP’s shift from business-to-consumer to business-to-creator, routing hospitality and experiential assets through carefully selected creators.
For Bonsu, the athlete is the story and the medal is the moment. The Olympic story starts years before the Games, she said, so that audiences arrive at LA28 already invested in the athletes rather than discovering them. She pointed to Tom Daley: 1.6 Seconds, the Olympic Channel’s co-production with Warner Bros. Discovery, built on footage spanning Daley’s life in competition. For Bonsu, the film shows what it means to grow up in front of the camera: audiences follow an athlete’s whole journey, not just the medal moments.
The live experience: the channel that cannot be rented
Asked what FIBA 3×3 is building that no algorithm can take away, González pointed to the live event and the urban culture around the sport: something fans have to experience in person. Several sessions at SPORTBIZ EUROPE showed rights holders investing accordingly.
At Atlético de Madrid, Ugarrio described Ciudad del Deporte, the sports and leisure district taking shape around the club’s stadium. Its centrepiece, Gemswell Surf Madrid, is a 23,000 m² surf lagoon billed as Europe’s largest, developed with Atlético and due to open in spring 2027. Inside the stadium, the club has let fans stream video from their seats onto the scoreboard and built an accessibility project with Telefónica for blind and partially sighted fans: a tactile table that tracks the ball, specialist audio commentary and haptic vibrations for key moments such as goals. It is free with a ticket, and Ugarrio said it changed the club’s relationship with a group of fans who had previously been excluded.
Participation sports make the same case from the ground up. Ponseti identified community and social connection as the core driver of padel’s growth, noting that club owners worldwide report players using it to meet and date. Ponseti also cited the Nordics as a cautionary tale, where a post-COVID boom was driven by a lack of alternatives rather than deep engagement, and said the UK is showing similar signs. Albert Escofet Calsina, CEO and Co-Founder of Smash Pickleball Agency, said getting children aged six to eight playing through school programmes is the foundation of any new market.
Clubs are also rethinking the matchday itself. On the “Decoding the New Fan” panel on 7 October, featuring Learning Partner Johan Cruyff Institute, Fortuño Antón set out two principles for any change to the game, such as the hydration breaks used at the 2026 World Cup: athlete performance must not be harmed, and business and entertainment value must be served. Lukas Dorda, Director of International Relations at Johan Cruyff Institute, argued that the better a club knows its fans, the more precisely it can serve them, from digital content for fans in Southeast Asia to in-person events for local communities, and urged clubs to involve fans in decisions such as choosing matchday activations.
What sport owns
Taken together, the two days of panels at SPORTBIZ EUROPE described an industry shifting its measure of success from how many people it reaches to how many it keeps. Leagues are converting licences into permanent assets, clubs are rebuilding identities with their fans, and rights holders are drawing a line between what AI should automate and what only people can earn. The question James Cavanagh put to the “Beyond the Algorithm” panel was the one the whole event kept returning to: if the platforms went dark tomorrow, who would still be there?
Divya Rai writes The Sports Capital Playbook, an analysis of the business of sport published on LinkedIn and Substack and has been researching the commercial models that make or break emerging leagues and sports.
Images: Sportbiz Europe
