The Buying Mistake Most Sports Leaders Still Make
The market has never had more options, and executives have never been more overwhelmed. Before you look outward, the right answer starts inside.
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Last week I had one of my monthly check-ins with a sports tech department head at one of the world’s largest sports agencies. Those conversations are with someone who spends a significant portion of their time advising leagues, teams, and rights-holders on tech decisions, among other things. Part of the discussion has been sitting with me since, and I think it’s worth unpacking here. Because it touches on something I keep circling back to the more I cover this space.
The Noise Problem Is Real, and It’s Getting Worse
I write, read, and research sports tech every day. And even I can’t always keep up.
So imagine being an athletic director, a league president, or a head of operations. You’re getting pitched constantly. Every week there’s a new platform, a cleaner dashboard, a smarter algorithm. The taglines are almost interchangeable at this point: insert AI, optimise performance, reduce costs, improve efficiency. Rinse and repeat.
(On a somewhat related sidenote: I’ve been researching sports IP (trademarks, patents, etc.) and I came across a report published this year. It talks about the number of sports tech IP that’s been created over the past few years — staggering. Speaks to the very point of this post.)
The department head I spoke to put it plainly: the people he advises come to him and they don’t even know where to start. Not because they lack intelligence or curiosity. But because the signal-to-noise ratio in this market is genuinely terrible right now.
A LinkedIn post from a high-performance consultant I came across made the same point from the other direction. He’d been in a room with ten elite sports directors discussing what technology had actually worked for them. The conclusion they all landed on: the best tools answer a performance question. Not a marketing question. Not a procurement box-ticking question. A real, specific, day-to-day performance question.
The follow-up observation was equally sharp: clubs have cupboards full of mistakes. Expensive ones. Tech that was procured with enthusiasm and abandoned with embarrassment.
So how do you avoid adding to that cupboard?
The Answer Is Probably Already Inside Your Building
Here’s the part that I think gets skipped most often. Before you look at a single vendor, before you sit through a demo, before you let anyone show you a slide with “7 billion data points” on it, talk to your own people.
The executives signing the contracts are rarely the ones living inside the problem every day. The physio, the video analyst, the ops coordinator, the performance scientist hold the answers you seek in boardrooms. They know exactly what slows them down, what they wish they didn’t have to do, and what they’d automate in a heartbeat if they could. They’ve probably been quietly frustrated about it for months.
The audit doesn’t have to be complicated. A round of honest conversations, a simple internal survey, or even just a standing question in your next team meeting: what takes up your time that it shouldn’t? The answers will surprise you. And more importantly, they will give you a far cleaner brief than any RFP process ever will.
There’s a catch, of course. In high-performance environments, people don’t always say what they actually need — especially upward. So the audit only works if there’s genuine psychological safety around it. If your staff think the answer to “what do you struggle with?” will be used against them rather than for them, you’ll get polished non-answers and learn nothing.
Assuming that’s not an issue, the internal audit does something else that’s underrated. It changes your negotiating position with vendors entirely. You walk into those conversations knowing precisely what you need, rather than being sold a solution to a problem you haven’t fully defined yet.
The Questions Worth Asking Once You’re In the Market
Let’s say you’ve done the internal work and you have a clear picture of the problem you’re trying to solve. Now you’re evaluating options. This is where it gets complicated, because, as the department head and I discussed, a lot of solutions that look different on the surface are functionally very similar. The real differentiator is rarely the technology itself. It’s track record.
A useful set of questions at this stage (this will look different for everyone):
Do they have a client at your level and in your sport?
Not just any client, a comparable one. A startup’s first logo in your sport is a test run, not a validation. The more telling question is: what did their second client in your sport look like, and what did renewal look like after year one?
What’s the honest churn picture?
First contracts tend to be short, discounted, and provisional. What happens at the end of year one? If a company can’t tell you their renewal rate with confidence, that’s valuable information.
Where is this company in three to five years?
The consolidation wave we’re seeing — Catapult, Hudl, Teamworks, Vald sweeping up the market — is not going to slow down. Are you buying into a platform that will grow with you, or a point solution that either disappears or gets absorbed into something else? Neither is automatically wrong, but you should know which one you’re doing.
Who owns the integration headache?
Multiple vendors means multiple onboarding processes, troubleshooting cycles, and integration problems. Someone in your organisation will carry that weight. Who is it, and are they resourced for it?
Would your staff notice if it disappeared tomorrow?
This one is borrowed almost directly from the performance consultant’s post, and it’s the best single sniff test I’ve come across. If the answer is “probably not for a while,” you’re not solving the right problem.
Where This Market Is Heading
The department head and I also talked about what the next two to four years probably look like. The picture isn’t that complicated.
The companies that survive and scale will be the ones that grind through the growth ceiling — roughly the point where ARR plateaus and growth stalls because the addressable market within any one sport is finite, contracts are short, and churn chips away at the bottom line faster than new logos can replace it. Getting past that requires either time and sustained sales execution, or consolidation (more on this in a future post).
Most will consolidate. And that’s probably fine. More services, more clients, more data, and a much more compelling story for a mid-market software investor who understands enterprise SaaS and doesn’t particularly care whether it’s deployed in a Premier League training ground or a FinTech back office.
For the buyers on the other side of these deals — the teams, leagues, and federations — consolidation is also good news. Fewer vendors, more comprehensive platforms, less integration friction. The era of seven different point solutions, each requiring its own onboarding and its own contract, is winding down. Not quickly. But it’s winding down nevertheless.
Which is another reason the internal audit matters now. The platform you pick today, or more accurately the relationship you build with the right provider today, could become the backbone of how your organisation runs in five years. All the more reason to get it right.
The best place to start is the same place the consultants and the agency heads keep coming back to: a specific, honest question about what actually needs solving.
Just make sure you’re asking the right people first.
Thanks for reading,
Dean
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This matches what I saw running multi-unit operations for 15 years. Most buying mistakes aren’t a tooling problem, they’re a clarity problem - leaders shop for a product before they’ve defined the outcome they’re actually accountable for. The overwhelm is a symptom. Once you can state the result in one sentence, the vendor list shrinks to two or three and the decision gets easy. Looking inward first is the unglamorous answer nobody wants to hear.
This is excellent practical advice. I would double down on the point about what you are using and why? Auditing your tech stack, stripping it away and understanding from first principles, what you are trying to achieve it critical here. Often though there is no one owning this process and they just keep on keeping on with a stack that is not fit for purpose.