Secret Storytelling Sauce for Sport to Succeed

By Lou Fargeot

Your 2025 sports business bingo card must include content creators, personalisation, community and authenticity if you want a shot at a full house this year. Industry panels constantly tell us fan engagement will be our saviour, but rarely reveal how to actually engage sports fans.

Well, fans are humans. And humans connect through stories. As sport embraces its role as entertainment, telling compelling stories is how you engage fans. 

Stats Are Not Stories

There's more data available in sport than ever, but collecting and cleaning it costs time, energy and money. Rights holders want a quick return on any investment, and there aren’t many off-the-shelf storytelling solutions available yet. That’s why most data projects, at best, end up with a few numbers making it to the screen without real purpose.

Is 100kph fast? What does it feel like? There’s a gap between the metric and the meaning.  Data only becomes valuable when it creates impact. That’s where the value of storytelling lives.

All the Pieces, No Picture

Sport has the components that top-tier entertainment needs: massive characters, built-in rivalries. real drama and unscripted moments that beat anything you could write. Being live provides an authenticity advantage. Anything can happen, and often does. 

The problem is, it is not always obvious what you are watching. You need to be a seasoned fan to spot the nuance. That’s not good enough on YouTube, Netflix or TikTok where prospective fans are scrolling through and flicking between competing content.  

Submerged scripts and storylines

Historically, it has been the responsibility of commentary and production to construct a one-size-fits-all narrative and add context. Today’s fans expect more. Modern entertainment demands a more personal experience with instant impact to capture and retain attention.

Every match or race contains thousands of data points that can drive and shape meaningful stories if you know where to look and why they matter. These stories already exist. They are in the data, but they need surfacing.

Another Job for AI

To surface stories, you need structure. Disparate data sources need to be aggregated into a central location that is optimised for realtime analysis. With that infrastructure in place, our artificial intelligence robotic overlords can work their magic, autonomously identifying meaningful moments amongst masses of data.

Faster, more effective, and at much greater scale than any human production team, AI can group and visualise these individual moments to build stories that twist and turn while adding context to the live action.

Distribution by Design

Stories need to meet fans where they are, and HTML graphics make that possible. When data is unified and visuals are generated centrally, you can control distribution from a single source while keeping a consistent look and feel across every output.

When implemented properly, technology can turn your storytelling into a flexible content system capable of serving multiple audiences. The same visual stories can drive broadcast graphics, in-venue screens, social posts, dashboards and fan apps, with each tailored to suit its specific use.

Storytelling is the Strategy

Sport has always been entertainment, and the business of sport is always chasing new revenue. We’re now seeing it start to play by the rules of modern media. I’ve written before about how Broadcast is Dying, and this year has seen a clear shift toward YouTube for sport, not just for core media rights, but for alternative formats too.

Raw data has never been the product; stories are. Attention is the currency in the engagement economy, and storytelling is what drives value. Sports organisations need to make storytelling part of their strategy to succeed with the next generation of fans. 

Ones to Watch

Organisations like the Professional Triathletes Organisation know that attention can be monetised through sponsorship, participation, and loyalty. Their recent investment in Dataworks is part of a wider move in the industry toward making data-driven storytelling the foundation of how sport is presented, consumed and commercialised. 

So yes, fans want authenticity. They want community. They want connection. But more than anything, they want stories.

The secret storytelling sauce is made of data, smothered in AI, and prepared to perfection.

Lou Fargeot is the Chief Product Officer of Dataworks and Co-CEO / Co-Founder of We Are Sweet