Sports Orgs Seem to Forget That Fandom Goes Beyond a Season
Sports teams know 24% of their fans. Andrew Naugher built FanWayz to capture the missing 76%, and reminded me why fandom is a year-round job, not a matchday event.
Andrew Naugher said something during our conversation that got me thinking: “Players go off to the beach and have their tropical vacations, but the fans are left commiserating over what happened, looking at drafts, looking at transfers. They’re emotionally involved year-round. They don’t take an off-season.”
It was one of those moments where someone articulates something so obvious that you wonder how the entire sports industry has been operating as if it weren’t true. Being a fan isn’t a matchday activity. It’s preseason anxiety, off-season speculation, transfer window obsession, and year-round emotional investment that doesn’t pause when the final whistle blows. Yet sports organisations have built their entire engagement infrastructure around the 90-minute window of game day, treating everything else as the dark space between transactions.
Andrew’s company, FanWayz, exists because of this fundamental misunderstanding. But before we get to how he’s solving it, we need to understand just how broken the current system really is.
The $5 Million Amnesia Problem
When Dizplai’s Anonymous Fan Index dropped earlier this year, it confirmed what builders like Andrew and Alejandro Oletta at Nameless already knew from hundreds of conversations: sports organisations are flying blind. They only have identifiable, first-party data on 24% of their fanbase. For every four fans watching games, buying merchandise, or engaging with content, three are completely invisible—no database entry, no email, no way to contact, target, or convert them into higher-value relationships.
The financial cost of this invisibility is staggering. 62% of organisations estimate they’re losing over $100,000 annually because of it. A third put that number between $1 million and $5 million. Not potential revenue—lost revenue from fans who are already engaged but remain anonymous.
I wrote about this back in February when the report first came out, and the stat that bothered me then still does now: broadcast viewers are the hardest channel to convert from anonymous to known fans, cited by 67% of respondents. Social media followers are second at 33%. The fans consuming the most content are often the ones you know the least about, which is wild!
This is the infrastructure problem that both Andrew at FanWayz and Alejandro at Nameless are racing to solve. But their approaches reveal something critical about why this problem has persisted for so long: it’s not a technology problem. It’s a trust and incentive problem.
When Data Came From Dementia
Andrew’s path to founding FanWayz began with corporate dementia, though he didn’t call it that at first. As someone with 30 years in marketing and PR, Andrew’s instinct was to build a platform for organised storytelling—a way for families to preserve and share memories. He took the concept to about a thousand influencers and content creators for feedback. Then, at an event about community storytelling, a consultant who worked with pro teams and colleges approached him: “This needs to be a fan engagement platform.”
The parallel hit me as Andrew described it: teams suffer from the same amnesia. A fan comes to a game, has a profound experience, leaves the stadium—and the relationship effectively ends. The team has no idea who they brought, why they came, what made it meaningful, or how to stay connected beyond the next ticket purchase opportunity.
It’s corporate dementia at scale.
“I heard this over and over in interviews,” Andrew told me. “Teams would say: ‘I can tell you who bought tickets or merchandise, but I can’t tell you who they brought to the games or who they were buying the merchandise for and why.’ There’s plenty of data out there, but what’s missing is the human element, the why you became a fan and that emotional journey fans are going on.”
This is where FanWayz differs from every other fan data platform I’ve researched or read about. Most are trying to solve the data silo problem by aggregating transactional data better, building unified customer data platforms, or deploying sentiment analysis across social media. Andrew flipped the question entirely: What if you can’t get the data you actually need until you give fans a reason to share intimate details about themselves?
The Trust Bridge That Creates Data
When Alejandro Oletta at Nameless told me he was “making invisible sports fans visible and valuable,” he was describing the same 76% problem from a different angle. Alejandro’s approach involves capturing signals from prediction markets, social engagement, and scattered digital touchpoints to identify fans before they’ve bought tickets or registered accounts. It’s predictive identification, basically finding fans in the dark.
Andrew’s approach is invitational revelation, i.e. giving fans a reason to step into the light voluntarily.
“You’re not going to get that human data unless people are actually sharing intimate details about themselves. So you have to step back and ask: what are they doing now? Well, sports teams have defaulted to social media because they don’t know their fans and they’ve lost revenue and engagement. Social media platforms are making all the money off the content and eyeballs,” Andrew explained.
This is the infrastructure trap I’ve been documenting all year. Teams create content, fans engage with it on platforms they don’t own, and all the valuable relationship data stays with said platforms—companies that will never share the fan graph teams desperately need.
FanWayz’s solution: embed directly into team apps and create structured campaigns that give fans a compelling reason to come share stories on team-owned properties. Not just “post your game day photo” campaigns that generate shallow engagement, but organised storytelling initiatives that capture the deeper why behind fandom.
When a fan uploads content through a FanWayz campaign—say, sharing their tailgating tradition or their first game memory—the platform’s AI immediately goes to work. It analyses the photos and videos to identify what beverages they’re drinking, what food they’re eating, what jerseys they’re wearing, what vehicles they drove, whether they’re playing cornhole at a tailgate or watching at a pub in Dallas at 7 AM for a Premier League match.
But more importantly, it analyses the story itself. Is this a family tradition that started 25 years ago? Is this their “Sunday family” of friends who gather religiously? What emotional triggers and nostalgic elements are present? What does this reveal about their fan journey and identity?
Andrew reiterated, “Now you’re getting better insights for the team and for sponsors. And you’re building your own LLMs based on your own fans’ input. You’re really building an understanding about your own fans that’s way more valuable than transactional data.”
The Emotional Fan Graph
Here’s what makes this approach fundamentally different from every customer data platform or fan engagement tool I’ve covered: FanWayz isn’t trying to track transactions and infer meaning. It’s capturing the meaning directly and using that to understand transactions.
Traditional sports analytics work backwards from behaviour. They see you bought four tickets in section 214, purchased two beers and a hot dog, and bought a jersey in the team store. From this, they conclude you’re a high-value fan who might buy a season ticket package.
FanWayz works forwards from identity. They know you’ve been attending games with your grandfather since you were eight years old, that your Sunday tailgate crew has been meeting in the same parking spot for a decade, that you proposed to your wife at home plate (like Andrew did at Fenway Park), that being a fan is intertwined with your most meaningful relationships and memories.
“We’re starting to build out this whole 360 view of the fan,” Andrew explained. “We know what the emotional triggers are, the emotional bonds. We even know their favorite player or favorite game, and we can use that as leverage in marketing campaigns or offers.”
This is the emotional fan graph, and it solves multiple problems simultaneously: for teams, for sponsors, and for fans.
Year-Round Fandom in a Matchday Industry
This is where Andrew’s reminder about the nature of fandom becomes critical. The entire sports marketing industry has organised itself around the event: game day activation, matchday hospitality, event sponsorship. But fandom doesn’t work that way.
“The build-up to game day, you get the game day, everything drops back off, and then you’ve got to build it all back up again. In the off-season, it totally drops off. What we’re trying to do is keep this perpetual cycle in place,” Andrew said.
He calls it the FanWayz 360 value flywheel: An experience creates memories. Memories drive engagement. Engagement generates revenue. Revenue funds content and data collection. Data reveals what experience should happen next. And so it goes.
Think about what this means for a team like the Cowboys or Arsenal. Their fans aren’t just active during the NFL season or the Premier League season. They’re analysing draft picks in April. They’re debating transfer rumours in July. They’re watching training camp videos in August. They’re commiserating about playoff losses in February. They’re emotionally invested 365 days a year.
But teams have no infrastructure to capture or monetise that year-round engagement. They’re optimised for the 8-17 home games per season, treating everything else as the void between revenue events.
“Fans don’t take an off-season. If you understand where fans are emotionally with your team, it opens up more opportunities for engagement, but you’re also going to be more effective in your engagement. You’re going to find new opportunities with more relevant sponsors too,” Andrew emphasised.
This connects directly to what Chris Williams, Commercial Director at Supertri, mentioned in the Anonymous Fan Index: “Relying purely on broadcast numbers leaves you exposed, especially on your sponsorship proposition. The shift we’re making at Supertri is moving us away from vanity metrics and towards genuine attribution.”
You can’t prove attribution when 76% of your audience is anonymous. You can’t demonstrate genuine engagement when your only touchpoints are ticket sales and social media impressions you don’t own. FanWayz built the infrastructure to solve both problems.
The Missing Human Element
I’ve spent the year documenting sports infrastructure transformation—from the Anonymous Fan Index showing 76% of fans are invisible, to DrakeStar’s $200 billion consolidation wave, to Sportradar showing 82% of organisations deploying AI. The through-line connecting everything: organisations that own fan relationships will capture the next $100 billion in sports value.
But here’s what Andrew made me realise: you can’t own a relationship you don’t understand.
“There’s plenty of transactional data and third-party data and sentiment analysis,” Andrew told me. “But that leaves a huge void of the human element. That’s the glue that ties it all together—the why you became a fan and understanding that emotional journey.”
When I spoke with Alejandro at Nameless about making “invisible sports fans visible and valuable,” he was solving the identification problem: finding fans before they’ve revealed themselves through purchases. When Andrew built FanWayz, he was solving the understanding problem: what do you do once you’ve found them?
The answer: you give them a reason to tell you their story. Not through surveys or focus groups or sentiment analysis of their tweets. Through structured campaigns that invite them to share the memories and experiences that make fandom meaningful in the first place.
Andrew showed me how it works in practice. When a fan uploads content to a campaign about tailgating traditions, FanWayz’s AI immediately surfaces contextual insights: what they’re wearing, drinking, eating, where they are, who they’re with. But more importantly, it pulls out the emotional elements from their story—that this tradition started 10 years ago with their grandfather, that this group is their “Sunday family,” that there’s nostalgia and pride and belonging woven through every detail.
“A brand or the team can go in immediately and start identifying themes,” Andrew explained. “They can create a new campaign or outreach in that moment. We’re trying to catch them at that emotional apex.”
This is fundamentally different from targeting based on purchase behaviour or social media sentiment. This is understanding the emotional architecture of fandom itself.
Corporate Dementia at Scale
Remember how this started—with Andrew receiving a thousand messages about his father’s impact, each one a precious memory that might have been lost without a system to capture and organise them?
Sports teams are experiencing this at a massive scale. Millions of fans have profound emotional connections to their teams. They have stories about their first games, their favourite players, their traditions, their communities built around fandom. These stories exist in scattered photos on phones, in conversations at bars, in memories that will eventually fade.
And teams have no idea any of it exists.
“When we started hearing over and over that they didn’t know who their fans were, that’s when the data light bulb went off,” Andrew told me. “We can actually solve that issue. The engagement and content were already there, but it’s the data that comes from that which is the real gold. The data is what makes all of this tie together.”
This is the infrastructure insight that separates FanWayz from point solutions. Most platforms say: “Give us your data and we’ll help you engage fans better.” FanWayz says: “Let us help you engage fans in a way that creates the data you actually need.”
It’s the difference between trying to make incomplete data actionable versus creating a system that generates complete data as a natural byproduct of meaningful engagement.
The Multi-Sport Fan Reality
Here’s something else Andrew helped me understand: the assumption that fans have singular loyalty to one team or sport is as outdated as the assumption that fandom ends when fans leave the stadium.
“I’m a Chiefs fan. I’m an OU Sooners fan. I’m a Boston Red Sox fan. I love Man City too,” Andrew rattled off. “Sports bars in Dallas open at 7 AM for Premier League matches because you’ve got Arsenal fans that live here, Man City fans that live here, La Liga fans that live here. Those fans may never step foot in a stadium for their favourite team, but they feel like their fandom is just as valuable as anybody sitting in the stadium.”
FanWayz is built as a multi-tenant SaaS platform where each team sees their own data, but the system can also provide anonymised cross-sport insights. So the Cowboys might learn that a significant portion of their fans are also Formula One fans, opening up new sponsorship opportunities with brands that serve that intersection.
This is the type of insight that’s impossible when your data comes from ticket purchases and team-specific app downloads. You only see fans through the narrow lens of their engagement with your property. You miss the holistic picture of who they are and what else they care about.
“If different properties are using our system, we’re able to give them this bigger picture about fans than what they’re doing right now,” Andrew explained. “We can provide anonymised data so they can understand on a larger scale what’s going on.”
This matters enormously for the sponsorship model that BCG predicted in their “Beyond Media Rights” report—the shift from paying for reach to paying for demonstrable engagement with known audiences. A sponsor doesn’t just want to know that 5 million people watched a broadcast. They want to know that 50,000 of those people are identified fans who also travel frequently, host watch parties, or practice specific traditions.
The Infrastructure That Doesn’t Exist Yet
I asked Andrew how FanWayz has evolved based on the 350+ conversations he’s had at team and league levels. His answer reveals why this problem has persisted despite everyone knowing it exists:
“It really started out tackling fan engagement and owning the content. That was first. Then we started hearing over and over that they didn’t know who their fans were. That’s when the data light bulb went off—we can actually solve that issue.”
The evolution went: engagement → content → data → understanding.
Most platforms tried to go: data → understanding → engagement → content.
That’s why they failed. You can’t understand fans from incomplete transactional data. You can’t create engagement from incomplete understanding. You can’t generate meaningful content from superficial engagement.
Andrew flipped it: Create the conditions for fans to want to share stories. Capture the content and engagement. Extract the data as a byproduct. Use that complete data to understand fans deeply enough to create the next meaningful experience.
It’s the missing infrastructure between the anonymous broadcast viewer and the known, engaged, high-value fan.
When I spoke with Alejandro at Nameless, he told me prediction markets revealed fans who were “paying attention but haven’t shown up yet”—people placing bets on teams they’ve never bought tickets to see. That’s a valuable signal, but it’s still predictive inference.
When Andrew talks about FanWayz campaigns, he’s describing direct revelation: fans voluntarily telling you exactly why they care, what matters to them, who they bring to games, what traditions they practice, and what emotional bonds keep them invested year-round.
One identifies attention. The other captures identity. Both are necessary and both are missing from most teams’ infrastructure stacks.
The Plumbing of Modern Sports
At the end of our conversation, I told Andrew that what he’s building feels like “the plumbing of a sports team.” It’s not sexy. It’s not the kind of thing that gets celebrated in press releases. But it’s absolutely critical infrastructure that determines whether everything else can function.
“You’re tackling something that over the years has become very important,” I said. “Organisations have realised they can’t carry on the way they’ve been carrying on because this is literally critical—the plumbing of a sports team and league.”
Andrew agreed: “Understanding how to grow and monetise in other ways that they haven’t yet been able to because of the data silos.”
You can’t personalise experiences for fans you can’t identify. You can’t prove engagement value to sponsors when fans remain anonymous. You can’t monetise year-round fandom when your only touchpoints are matchday transactions.
But even when you solve identification, you still need understanding. Knowing someone watched your broadcast or bought a ticket doesn’t tell you why they care, what would make them care more, or how to keep them engaged between events.
What Being a Fan Actually Means
This brings me back to where Andrew started: reminding me what it means to be a fan.
“Being a fan doesn’t start and end on matchdays,” he told me. “It’s a full-on job—pre-season, post-season, off-season. Sporting organisations should do well to remember that being a fan goes well beyond just the league season.”
This isn’t just a philosophical point. It’s an infrastructure requirement.
If fandom is year-round emotional investment, then your engagement infrastructure needs to support year-round emotional connection. If fandom is about identity and belonging and shared memories, then your data infrastructure needs to capture identity and belonging and memories, not just transactions and demographics.
If fandom is “a full-on job” that fans perform voluntarily out of passion, then your monetisation infrastructure needs to respect that passion rather than treating fans as targets for extraction.
This is what Andrew meant by the perpetual emotional connection flywheel. Every experience creates memories worth preserving. Those memories drive ongoing engagement. That engagement reveals opportunities for new experiences. The cycle never ends because real fandom never clocks out.
Sports organisations have built their entire business model around the opposite assumption: that fans exist in discrete moments (game days) and that engagement happens in episodic bursts (campaigns) that marketers need to manually create and push.
FanWayz exists because that assumption is broken. The infrastructure doesn’t match the reality of modern fandom.
The 76% Problem Requires a Trust Solution
Here’s what I keep coming back to: every sports organisation knows about the 76% problem. The Anonymous Fan Index confirmed it. Industry reports have documented it. Executives discuss it at conferences. Investors ask about it in funding pitches.
Yet it persists.
Why? Because the solution requires something most organisations haven’t figured out how to create: a reason for fans to voluntarily share intimate details about themselves with teams and sponsors. Which isn’t a technology problem. It’s a trust problem problem.
FanWayz’s insight was recognising that fans actually want to share their stories and preserve their memories—they just need the right context and the right platform. Not “take this survey and maybe win a jersey” campaigns. Not “give us your email for a discount code” exchanges. But genuine opportunities to capture and share the experiences that make fandom meaningful.
When you create that context, fans opt into revelation. They tell you who they brought to games and why. They share what traditions matter to them and who started them. They reveal what emotional triggers keep them invested year-round.
And suddenly, the 76% problem starts to solve itself. Not through surveillance or data scraping or sentiment analysis. Through invitation and trust and the recognition that fans have stories worth preserving.
The Infrastructure Race
The organisations that solve this will capture the next $100 billion in sports value. BCG predicted it. DrakeStar’s $200 billion consolidation wave confirmed investors believe it. The Anonymous Fan Index quantified the cost of not solving it.
But here’s what Andrew helped me see: the solution isn’t just about connecting data silos or deploying better AI or building prettier apps. It’s about fundamentally rethinking what fan engagement infrastructure should look like when you accept that being a fan is a year-round identity, not a matchday transaction.
It’s about building systems that respect fandom as the “full-on job” that Andrew described—complete with emotional labour, time investment, relationship building, community participation, and identity formation that never takes an off-season.
Sports organisations that remember this, and build infrastructure around this reality rather than around the convenience of event-based marketing, will be the ones that actually know their fans.
The other 76% will remain strangers.
Thanks for reading,
Dean
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Really great read.