Liverpool FC vs Big Data

Liverpool Football Club plays in a stadium that holds just over 60,000 people, but its fan base runs into the hundreds of millions.

That gap creates a problem the club cannot solve through football alone. While a crowd in a stadium moves together, a global following does not. It spreads across time zones, devices, habits, and local gatherings, with each supporter experiencing the club in a different way.

At SAS Innovate 2026, the annual conference of the world’s pioneering data analytics firm, it was startling but not surprising, then, to see Liverpool represented on the keynote stage in Dallas, Texas, in a discussion of “big data” and analytics.

It was also a topic foremost on the mind of Jenn Chase, chief marketing officer of SAS.

“We started discussions with Liverpool about 18 months ago, and it was very clear that they would be able to offer us exposure to such a scale of fans,” she told Gadget on the sidelines of the conference. “This is the most significant partnership we’ve done on a sports marketing partnership. They are in the English Premier League, which has the highest audience of any sport globally. If their fans were a nation, they’d be the third most populous nation in the world.”

Scale explains the attraction of Liverpool as a customer, but it also explains the complexity of the challenge. Liverpool’s supporters, like those of any other major club, watch matches, follow highlights, buy merchandise, attend games, and form local fan clubs, like the one in South Africa, where Liverpool claims it has 12,5-million fans.

And these fans engage across multiple platforms. Liverpool says it has 8.9-million South African social media followers and had 37-million cumulative TV viewers last season. Each interaction leaves a trace but those traces dissipate into different systems before they can be analysed as big data. This is where SAS comes in.

“They’re using SAS Customer Intelligence 360, our solution for marketers, and (the data analytics platform) SAS Viya,” says Chase. “They’re going to use our software, and then we are going to promote ourselves as a member of the club.”

The arrangement will run for five years. Liverpool will use the technology to understand and respond to supporters across channels, while SAS will use the partnership as a live demonstration of how its systems perform under pressure and at scale.

Why would a company born in North Carolina, best known in industries like health and financial services, get in bed with an English football team?

“One of the challenges I have leading an organisation that’s been around for 50 years is that somebody’s exposure to SaaS could be from a period long time ago,” says Chase. “We want to make sure they know what we have in terms of our capabilities today. So brand awareness is a big pillar for us.

“The second is around demand generation. We’ll be able to tell those stories that have people thinking, ‘Oh, wait a minute, fans are really just customers. I could use that type of application in my business’.

“Then we get to use our software to engage with a fan base that is passionate, and we really want to make sure we’re doing the right personalisation.  They talk about a fan journey of one: every fan is different in terms of what they want their experience to be with the club, and we’re excited to be able to help enable that.

“They’ve got tremendous data about their fan base and their operations, and they’re looking to be able to act on that and to do that at scale and personalised.”

Banks, retailers and telecom operators all manage large customer bases and large volumes of data, often without turning that data into meaningful interaction. The Liverpool use case, says Chase, opens the door to those customers.

“Liverpool is such a widely revered club, whether you’re a Chelsea fan or a Real Madrid fan. We realised that other sports organisations will begin to look at that and say, ‘That’s something I’m interested in too.’

“We chose sports because it’s so relatable for anybody. Somebody who’s leading a financial services organisation or a bank can easily say, ‘I want to engage with my customers in that same personalised way.’ So it allows us to expand that metaphor to work in other industries.”

* Arthur Goldstuck is CEO of World Wide Worx, editor-in-chief of Gadget.co.za, and author of “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to AI – The African Edge”.