The Premier League transforms the fan experience with AI

The Premier League’s Summer Series kicked off in the US on Saturday with matches between Everton and AFC Bournemouth, and Manchester United and West Ham, both at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey. The matches were also a way to showcase the League’s new AI capabilities, the first efforts of a five-year strategic partnership with Microsoft, inked at the beginning of July.

The Premier League is the highest level of the interconnected leagues in the English Football League (EFL), consisting of 20 clubs. It’s the world’s most-watched football league, reaching 900 million homes in 189 countries, and this new partnership with Microsoft represents one of the most significant technology transformations in its 33-year history, says the League.

“Historically, the mandate of the Premier League and the role has been to run the competition in terms of media sales and a small, central sponsorship program,” says Alexandra Willis, director of digital media and audience development for the Premier League. “Therefore, we haven’t needed to have technology, a technology architecture, or a technology stack to service our global fan base.”

But the League’s evolving role means it, in fact, does now need a mature and future-proof tech stack that enables it to offer digital products, services, and touchpoints that help it engage with fans everywhere.

Willis, formerly the communications and marketing director for Wimbledon, joined the Premier League three years ago to lead its digital media group. The group, part of the League’s broader media division, used to focus on selling the League’s media rights. But for the past several years, it’s taken point on the League’s digital transformation journey as it seeks to feed the appetite of global fans wanting to engage with their favorite teams and players.

“Our group looks after the digital products and platforms that people can engage with, all of the content that exists on those platforms, and every story we can tell,” she says. “We also look after all the fan marketing efforts to reach those individuals across email, push, and so on.”

A tactical partnership

As the League’s cloud and AI partner, Microsoft is working with the League to provide the foundation for that digital platform and its business operations.

On the fan engagement front, they’ve started working on a new digital Premier League Companion powered by Microsoft Copilot and leveraging Azure OpenAI to draw information from more than 30 seasons of stats, 300,000 articles, and 9,000 videos.

“From a consumer perspective, what really excites us about putting copilot in the hands of our Premier League fans is making it a source of discovery,” Willis says. “Fans around the world are different. It could be one particular thing that sparks your interest, but you sort of fall into the fragmentation of the overall media landscape. If we can guide fans, and help them learn more and find the right touch point, then hopefully they can become a fan for life and spend time with our clubs and our broadcast partners.”

For now, the Companion is available via the new official Premier League Mobile app and web platforms. The initial offering, available for the Summer Series, leverages a set of pre-prompts for delivering answers based on the whole body of Premier League material, including stats, written material, and video. Willis also notes the League has introduced data specific to the Summer Series, but more is on the way.

“We’re working to quickly introduce open prompts so you could look for whatever particular insight you’re after,” she says. “We’re also working to introduce localization, so if you don’t speak English, it services you, including much deeper surfacing of video and audio content.”

Virtual fantasy

Later in the season, Microsoft AI will be leveraged within the app and the website’s Fantasy Premier League to deliver each fan a personal assistant manager to assist with fantasy squads. Willis explains the manager will have the ability to access a user’s fantasy gameplay record, statistics, and past decisions to provide a deeper and more versatile research tool.

“There are third-party applications that do some of this, but being able to sit on the actual source of truth — the game database itself — and combine that with your own personal history and the decisions you’ve made is going to be quite impactful,” Willis adds.

Fantasy Premier League had more than 11.5 million players last season, and Will Brass, the League’s chief commercial officer, believes the integration of Copilot will make the offering even more popular.

“Fantasy Premier League has been one of our great successes over the last couple of decades and we’ve already had a very strong response to the launch of the game last week,” he says. “The assistant manager we’re creating with Microsoft is going to help fans make better decisions. It’s not an algorithm that’s going to win you the game, but it’s going to help you choose your transfers and your squad, and think progressively about how to play the game.”

As part of the transformation, the League is also migrating its core technology infrastructure to Microsoft Azure, which it says will unlock scalability, security, and agility across its digital ecosystem, including seamless integration of AI services.

The League plans to overhaul its broadcast experience, too, via some of those AI services, and is integrating Microsoft Azure AI Foundry services, including Azure OpenAI in Foundry Models, to provide real-time data overlays as part of the live match experience. Those services will also power post-match analyses.

Finally, the partners will modernize the League’s internal operations, streamline workflows, enhance collaboration, and enable data-driven decision making via a combination of Microsoft 365, Power Platform, and Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations.

“We’re putting AI tooling into the hands of all Premier League staff, and it goes beyond the buildout of Copilot embedded in the fan engagement app,” says Darren Hardman, CVP and CEO of Microsoft UK & Ireland. “It transforms all the information workers across the Premier League. It’s not just a technical transformation, it’s a cultural transformation of how you use AI assistants to perform tasks you do every day. How do you remove the mundane and get people focused on the creative value-driving levers of the business?”

A second set of matches, between West Ham and Everton, and Man U and Bournemouth, will take place this Wednesday at Chicago’s Soldier Field, and the teams will round out the Summer Series with two matches at Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta on August 3.