Microsoft helps Premier League fuel fan experience with AI
A new app built by England's top soccer division using the tech giant's data management and development capabilities draws on decades of data to deliver personalized insights.
As the English Premier League works to feed exploding fan interest in the U.S., Microsoft is providing an AI-powered assist.
England's top soccer division is the most lucrative in the world, outpacing Spain's La Liga and Germany's Bundesliga. It trails only the National Football League, the National Basketball Association and Major League Baseball in annual revenue among all sports.
The Premier League's presence in the U.S. is relatively nascent but expanding rapidly. Fueled partly by a broadcasting deal with NBC to televise Premier League games beginning with the 2013-14 season, the league's popularity in the U.S. has grown exponentially over the past decade, including a 62.3% increase in fans from 2020 to 2024. Now, to keep its existing fans engaged and hopefully attract new ones -- worldwide but particularly in the U.S. -- the Premier League is aiming to improve the fan experience through technology.
As part of that, the league announced a five-year partnership with Microsoft in July. The goal is for the Premier League to transform its business, including fan engagement, using Microsoft technology, according to Darren Hardman, the tech giant's CEO for the United Kingdom and Ireland, who spoke during Microsoft Ignite, a user conference held in-person in San Francisco and broadcast virtually.
Since July, the partnership has yielded the Premier League Companion, an application-based fan experience developed using Microsoft's Copilot and Azure OpenAI capabilities that enables users to engage with the league using natural language.
"The partnership isn't a sponsorship," Hardman said. "It's a transformation using Microsoft technology to reimagine the world's most-watched [soccer] league. At the heart of this partnership is the Premier League Companion app."
The application draws on 30 years of data, including statistics, articles and videos.
"It offers fans a very personalized and interactive experience," Hardman said. "It's an example of what happens when AI, the cloud and human passion come together."
Seizing opportunity
Before the Premier League's broadcast deal with NBC, some games were broadcast on Fox Sports and ESPN, but coverage wasn't widespread.
When the deal with NBC started, the network carved out specific, weekly time slots to broadcast Premier League games, devoting hours on Saturday and Sunday mornings to showing games and creating appointment television for the growing fan base in the U.S. All games are now available to watch either on broadcast channels or NBC's Peacock streaming service.
To capitalize on the growth that had already occurred and the potential further growth that the World Cup taking place in North America in 2026 might provide, the Premier League opened a U.S. office in New York in 2024. One of the office's initiatives was to create more experiences for fans in the U.S., according to Akash Jain, managing director for the league's U.S operations.
Such initiatives have included holding preseason matches in the U.S. and hosting local fan festivals in conjunction with NBC. In addition, they include making use of decades of historical data and the new data continually created in matches to develop the Companion app to make it easy for fans to deepen their knowledge of the league through AI.
"What's coming in 2026 with the World Cup is pouring gasoline on the fire," Jain said. "Millions and millions of fans are going to be consuming more and more [soccer], and that provides us a unique opportunity to further engage fans and grow our fan base. The partnership with Microsoft is central to that because we have to have digital tools and platforms to deepen that passion with fans."
We know it's critical to be able to serve fans with what they want, how they want it and where they want it.
Akash JainManaging director for U.S. operations, Premier League
The Premier League built Companion with the goal of bringing fans closer to the action through personalized AI-driven experiences, according to Jain.
For existing fans, that means serving up relevant data in real time. For new fans, it means providing a platform for discovery.
"We know it's critical to be able to serve fans with what they want, how they want it and where they want it," Jain said.
It's also critical to understand the different nature of a fan in the U.S. compared to one in the U.K., he continued. Fans in the U.K. develop their loyalty to teams through generational interest and geographical location. Fans in the U.S., meanwhile, are drawn to the league by a variety of factors and may not even have strong loyalty to one team but instead be interested in the league as a whole.
"The diversity of fandom makes it critical for us to deliver personalized experiences to be able to deepen fandom and continue to drive whatever their journey might be," Jain said.
Microsoft's role
While the Premier League's partnership with Microsoft has yielded rapid results, the league could have chosen a different vendor to help fuel its vision for using AI to better engage fans.
While Spain's La Liga and the NFL also partner with Microsoft, the NBA and Germany's Bundesliga use AWS to foster their fan experience. MLB, meanwhile, uses Google Cloud.
"Microsoft is a pioneer in generative AI with Copilot, and those technologies were critical in building the digital platforms we have," he said. "Also, bringing two global organizations together that share a passion for delivering fan experiences was really essential for us."
Security was an additional factor, Jain continued.
As enterprises such as the Premier League connect their proprietary data with large language models and other tools crucial to the AI development process, governance and security are critical to ensure that sensitive information isn't accidentally exposed and all data remains properly protected.
"To know we're using [development] tools in a safe, reliable, secure environment with a partner like Microsoft made it an easy choice for us," Jain said.
The technology used to develop the Premier League's new AI application is extensive.
It begins with data sources that are ingested into the development pipeline through APIs. Data is then prepared in environments such as Azure Databricks and Azure Data Factory before moving into an AI preparation layer featuring tools such as Azure Machine Learning, Microsoft Foundry and Azure OpenAI in Foundry Models. Finally, once prepared and processed for AI, data is published so it can be consumed by fans.
Although complex and extensive, the process takes milliseconds and data related to ongoing games is immediately available for analysis.
"The human passion that AI is fueling is bringing people to closer to the very things they love," Hardman said.
Development challenges
One of the difficulties when developing an AI tool is creating something that won't become obsolete in a matter of months.
AI development surged following OpenAI's November 2022 launch of ChatGPT, which marked a significant improvement in GenAI technology. Initially, many of the applications enterprises developed were chatbots that simplified previously complex tasks and processes by enabling users to input prompts in natural language rather than code. However, by mid-2024, AI agents capable of autonomous action had become the focus of most AI development initiatives.
Ensuring that Companion can evolve as AI technology evolves was one consideration for the Premier League, according to Jain.
"The pace of change is a challenge," he said.
Simon Brown, a digital solution architect for the Premier League, likewise noted that how quickly things change in AI development is a significant challenge.
"Because of the speed of change in the AI space, the stuff we started doing in January when we kicked off [building Companion] has either disappeared or completely changed," he said.
Other challenges include the data itself and the cost of developing AI tools, Brown continued.
With 30 years of data in different forms -- statistics that are structured data along with articles and videos that are unstructured or semistructured -- integrating and preparing the data to inform the new AI application is complicated. So is keeping the data up-to-date so that personalized insights are instantaneously available to Companion'susers.
"How do we get the data extracted out and then also indexed so we can slice-and-dice it however we like to service fans? Then you factor in things like freshness and how we reduce latency during match time so when something happens it gets reflected through the stack. These were the challenges," Brown said.
Meanwhile, the costs of cloud computing and AI development are often difficult to contain, he continued.
"There's been a tension point about how to maximize cost and performance," Brown said. "Obviously, AI is quite a costly beast to power, so we're looking at things like the caching. We've had lots of conversations over the last months on that balancing act."
The fan experience and the future
Ultimately, the Premier League's development challenges were overcome using Microsoft's AI development capabilities and Companion is available.
Through the application, a fan of a club such as Liverpool or Manchester United can wake up on the morning of a match and get basic information such as the opponent that day, the time of the match and whether it can be seen on NBC's main channel, the USA Network or Peacock. Beyond that, the app can contextualize the matchup, providing historical information on games between, for example, Arsenal and Chelsea, and which players excelled in the most recent meetings.
Once the match begins, if one club scores early, Companion can feed fans data-driven insights such as win probability based on the goal, historical performance when their team scores early and the earliest teams have ever scored in Premier League history.
If a U.S.-born player -- such as Tyler Adams, who plays for Bournemouth and is a member of the U.S. Men's National Team (USMNT) -- scores a goal, a fan can analyze how his stats compare to past USMNT members, such as Clint Dempsey, who also played in the Premier League.
"We're just scratching the surface with this, and as we continue to work, we'll provide more and more advancements," Jain said.
One way the Premier League will be able to improve the app is by using AI to learn from user interactions, he continued.
On an individual basis, Companion can learn the tendencies of individual users to better personalize their experiences. But on a larger scale, the app can derive insights from users as a group to understand what is of most interest.
"For every [enterprise], it's about customers and how to leverage AI to deliver value," Jain said. "For us, it's our fans. AI is an accelerator for our business, and … the personalized digital experience is transforming how we engage with our fans."
Specific ways the Premier League is looking to improve Companion include adding AI-generated narrations, translation capabilities with Spanish as the first language to be added and personalized video clip compilations, according to Brown.
"This is just the start of our journey," he said.
Eric Avidon is a senior news writer for Informa TechTarget and a journalist with more than 25 years of experience. He covers analytics and data management.
