How the Premier League Uses Artificial Intelligence to Enhance Fan Experience and Achieve New Business Goals

Transforming the Digital Experience: In its pursuit of digital transformation, the Premier League is collaborating with Adobe to leverage the capabilities of generative artificial intelligence, aiming to enhance the fan experience and achieve new business goals. This partnership seeks to meet the diverse demands of fans worldwide, especially with the growing number of followers outside the UK.

Digital Transformation Strategy and Fan Needs

Understanding the Fanbase: Alexandra Willis, the Premier League's Digital Media Director, considers UK-based fans to be the league's lifeblood, while new fans worldwide have different needs and aspirations. Therefore, the organization's digital transformation strategy focuses on finding ways to serve all football enthusiasts.

Utilizing Adobe Technology: In this context, the Premier League employs Adobe technology to create digital experiences powered by artificial intelligence for fans everywhere. Through Adobe Experience Platform and the company's AI clients and applications, Willis's team integrates fan preferences and uses this data to develop new experiences. Willis affirms that this Adobe platform provides her team with a powerful tool, allowing them to explore how to use this technology to support their comprehensive strategy and provide more services to their fanbase.

Strong Digital Foundations: Adobe's suite of technologies serves as the Premier League's first customer data platform. Other business leaders have also affirmed to ZDNET that having strong digital foundations is crucial for any company seeking to interact with customers in the age of artificial intelligence, and this applies perfectly to the Premier League.

Web and App Development: Willis points out that the launch of a new website and app are essential elements of the Premier League's digital platform strategy. The organization uses Adobe analytics technology to gain a deep understanding of fan preferences across digital channels, in addition to its artificial intelligence models to deliver personalized experiences.

Enhancing the Fantasy Football Experience with Artificial Intelligence

Adobe's AI Features: The Premier League also leverages Adobe's AI-powered features, such as Generate Video and Clip Maker, to help fans create content from text prompts. They also use Adobe Firefly, which allows fans to create content within the organization's fantasy football game. Willis prides herself on the ability to develop their digital transformation strategy and turn it into a tangible reality through the launch of the new app and website, offering unique fan experiences.

Developing the Fantasy Premier League Game: The use of artificial intelligence to enhance the Fantasy Premier League game is an important step. With the start of the English football season, one of the most popular side activities also begins: fantasy football. The Fantasy Premier League, with over 11 million players, is the largest and most famous fantasy football game in the world. Willis's team is keen to use artificial intelligence to improve the experience of this game.

Adobe Firefly in Fantasy: This process has already begun; this season, fantasy team managers can use Adobe Firefly technology, powered by generative artificial intelligence, to create custom badges and kits for their teams in Adobe Express. Willis considers empowering fantasy team managers to create their own assets to showcase their teams and performance as an aspect of how artificial intelligence is used in the creative side of the work.

New Strategic Partnership with Microsoft

Microsoft AI Integration: In addition to its partnership with Adobe, the Premier League announced on July 1, 2025, a five-year strategic partnership with Microsoft to enhance the digital experience for fans globally. This partnership will integrate Microsoft AI, including Copilot AI, into the Premier League app, website, and its fantasy football platform. This will provide fans access to over 300,000 articles, 9,000 video clips, and detailed statistics dating back to the league's founding in 1992. The AI-powered "Premier League Companion" will also offer fans the ability to ask natural language questions about players, teams, and historical data, such as "How many goals did Cole Palmer score after the 60th minute?" or "Should I play him in fantasy this week?" with instant answers. Future updates are expected to include text and audio content translation into fans' native languages, as well as enhanced tactical support and team management in the fantasy football game. (CNBC, July 1, 2025) (AP News, July 1, 2025) (Forbes, July 2, 2025) (Premier League, No Date)

Empowering Fans and the Interactive Future

The Future of Fan Engagement: Alexandra Willis believes these AI-powered developments point to the future of fan engagement, where customers in the age of generative artificial intelligence want to create content, not just receive marketing materials. She explains that it's about empowering fans to use Premier League content and images, share what they're passionate about, and use Express to re-integrate these things and add a personal touch to them.

The Role of AI in Interaction: Willis is eager to see the content that fans will create, noting that artificial intelligence helps enable new ways to interact with tech-savvy fans. She emphasizes that this initiative is proof that people want to participate in content creation.

Challenges: Data Security and Gradual Approach

Data Security and Governance: Data security and governance management are key considerations as the Premier League continues to explore generative artificial intelligence. Importantly, given the organization's initial initiatives in fan-designed content for the fantasy game, Adobe Firefly was designed to be commercially safe. This technology was trained on a dataset of licensed content, such as Adobe Stock. Willis asserts that this feature is of paramount importance to them, as, in general, ensuring the credibility, reliability, and integrity of what they do is fundamental, and they have made a great effort to deliver on this promise.

Gradual Evolution: Willis affirms that it's still early for artificial intelligence experiments, both generally and within her organization. She emphasizes the importance of gradual evolution. She states: "We are not trying to do too much at first. We have a passionate fanbase. We have about 50 million people in our database, and we want to take our time to discover what they want from us."

Focus on Customer Requirements: While other business leaders have highlighted the importance of using emerging technology to focus on the minutest details of customer requirements, Willis suggests that it's also important to carefully consider and refine their approach.

Customer-Driven Strategy: She explains: "Instead of jumping into hyper-personalization from the outset, our strategy revolves around following customer leadership and learning from them the things they want to follow and pay attention to, then seeing how they behave and interact." She adds: "I'm sure some fans might say, 'I'll never pay attention to what a specific player does,' and then suddenly, what that player does changes, contributing to the fan's fantasy team performance, and then that fan becomes immersed in seeking more about the individual player. These are the types of things we want to learn from, develop, and adapt to as we move forward."

Digital Leadership and Focus on Results

Alexandra Willis's Career Journey: Willis has refined her leadership approach in digital transformation throughout her career. She previously worked as a journalist, then at Wimbledon for over a decade, becoming Head of Communications and Marketing in August 2021. In September 2022, she moved to the Premier League. She emphasizes that smart digital leaders focus on results.

Achieving Strategic Vision: She says: "Success is about the ability to apply the strategic vision of the business and its goals and to use the tools and capabilities that technology provides." She concludes by saying: "This process involves working with other colleagues to understand and determine how technology contributes to broader business models. It must go beyond the narrow field of technology and truly commit to achieving the business strategy."