How the Premier League uses AI to boost fan experiences and score new business goals

ZDNET’s key takeaways

• The Premier League is working with Adobe to exploit generative AI.
• Explorations show customers want to create, not just consume content.
• Long-term hyper-personalization goals should be approached carefully.

The English Premier League football season starts this weekend. With 1.8 billion people watching the competition in 900 million homes across 189 countries (streaming on Peacock), it would seem there’s limited scope for emerging technology to boost supporter engagement. However, Alexandra Willis, director of digital media at the Premier League, has other ideas.

Willis told ZDNET that while UK-based supporters are the lifeblood of the Premier League, new supporters around the globe have varied demands and requirements. She said the organization’s digital transformation strategy focuses on finding ways to serve all football fans.

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As part of this process, the Premier League uses Adobe technology to create AI-powered digital experiences for supporters worldwide. With the Adobe Experience Platform and the tech firm’s AI agents and applications, Willis and her team are consolidating fan preferences and using this data to develop new experiences.

“The Adobe Experience Platform is giving our team something powerful,” she said. “We’re going to learn together and work out how we can use the technology to benefit our overall strategy. It’s an exciting opportunity because we can do a lot more in the service of our fans.”

The Adobe technology suite is the Premier League’s first customer data platform. Other business leaders have told ZDNET that solid digital foundations are crucial for any business that wants to engage with customers in an age of AI, and that’s also the situation at the Premier League.

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Willis said a new website and app are crucial elements of the Premier League’s digital platform strategy. The organization uses Adobe’s analytics technology to gain an in-depth understanding of fan preferences across digital channels and its AI models to deliver personalized experiences.

The Premier League also uses Adobe’s AI-powered features, including Generate Video and Clip Maker, to help supporters create content from text-based prompts, and Adobe Firefly, which allows fans to generate content within the organization’s fantasy football game.

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“To be able to develop our digital transformation strategy and then have it come to life, and for it to become real with the launch of the new app and a new website, and to be able to deliver new experiences, is something we’re proud of,” said Willis.

Using AI to boost Fantasy Premier League

The start of the English football season marks the beginning of a popular off-field activity: fantasy football. With over 11 million players, Fantasy Premier League (FPL) is the world’s biggest and most popular fantasy football game. Willis and her team are eager to use AI to refine the FPL experience.

That process has already begun. This season, FPL managers can use Adobe’s Firefly gen AI technology to create personalized badges and kits for their teams in Adobe Express.

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“Enabling FPL managers to create assets to show off their team and how they’re doing is one aspect of how we’re using AI on the creativity side of the business,” she said.

Willis said these AI-enabled developments point the way to the future of fan engagement. In an age of gen AI, customers want to create content, not just receive marketing collateral.

“It’s about allowing supporters to utilize Premier League content and imagery, and share the things equally they’re excited about, and using Express to sort of remix those things and to put their personal touch on them,” she said.

Willis is keen to see what content fans will create and suggested that AI is helping to power new ways of engaging with tech-savvy supporters.

“It will be interesting to see how people behave and how they use the tools,” she said. “This initiative is a demonstration of the fact that people want to be able to participate in content creation.”

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Of course, data security and governance are key considerations as the Premier League continues to explore gen AI.

Crucially, given the organization’s nascent forays into fan-designed content in FPL, Adobe Firefly is designed to be commercially safe. The technology is trained on a dataset of licensed content, such as Adobe Stock.

“That feature is incredibly important for us,” said Willis. “In general, ensuring that what we’re doing is credible and trusted and safe is fundamental, and we’ve put a lot of effort into delivering on that promise.”

Evolving and adapting customer personalization

Willis said it’s early days for AI-enabled experiences, both generally and within her organization. She said it’s important to walk before you run.

“We’re not trying to do too much at the beginning,” she said. “We have this passionate fan base. We have around 50 million people in our database, and we want to take the time to discover what they want from us.”

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While other business leaders have told ZDNET about the importance of using emerging technology to hone in on the finer details of customer requirements, Willis suggested it’s also important to reflect and refine your approach carefully.

“Rather than leaping into hyper-personalization right from the very beginning, our strategy is about following the customer’s lead and learning from them the things that they want to follow and want to pay attention to, and then seeing how they then behave and react,” she said.

“I’m sure some fans might say, ‘I’m never going to pay attention to what a certain player does,’ and then, suddenly, something that player does is different, they contribute to the supporter’s FPL team’s performance, and then that fan goes down a rabbit hole of learning more about the individual player. Those are the types of things that we want to learn from and evolve and adapt to as we go.”

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Willis has refined her leadership approach to digital transformation during her career. Formerly a journalist, she worked for Wimbledon for over a decade, becoming communications and marketing director in August 2021. In September 2022, she moved to the Premier League. She said smart digital leaders are focused on outcomes.

“Success is about being able to apply the strategic vision of a business and its objectives and to utilize the tools and capabilities that technology provides,” she said. 

“That process includes working with other colleagues to understand and identify how technology contributes to broader business models. You need to go beyond the narrow field of technology into genuinely delivering against business strategy.”