The Slowest Fastbreak in History
In 2009 I failed to convince sports businesses to monetise their fans like media audiences. Seventeen years later, Fastbreak Digital comes back to life.
"Every sports business is already a media business." By now it is an agreed conclusion, repeated on conference stages and in vendor presentations.
Saying it is the easy part. Running a sports business like a media business is not, and only a few in sport have set themselves up for it: a defined strategy, a data infrastructure, advertiser-facing products that systematically turn an audience into income, privacy treated as both a commercial advantage and differentiator. All lessons learned by media and advertising over two decades, often through expensive mistakes.
I know because I tried to sell that idea once before, when nobody saw it that way. Myself included: until 2009 I was convinced that my previous work in sports and actual involvement in media and advertising were two experiences with nothing in common.
In 2009 I left Yahoo!, where I had run data and targeting products for Europe, and the two experiences blended: I could bring what I knew about audiences and data to my first love and industry, sport. That is when Fastbreak Digital first came to life. The idea was already clear: partnerships built, activated and measured using data, not sold as a logo on a shirt. Sponsor acquisition teams who knew the audience they were offering, activation teams able to tailor initiatives and packages to advertisers’ needs, and fan engagement driven by a direct, personalised connection.
The timing could not have been worse: the peak of the financial crisis. I was approaching some of the biggest teams, leagues and athletes in the world, who happened to be based in Spain, a market then years behind the US and the UK in digital maturity, and that gap affected their perspectives. And it was sport, an industry behind media and tech in digital monetisation, busy falling in love with social media ("we are fine, we don’t need any help, we have a Facebook Fan Page"). The audience and the data were there, but the effort to persuade the industry was more than one person could sustain.
So I went back to media and advertising. Over twenty years (Yahoo! and earlier included) I worked inside the companies that defined how attention turns into revenue, on every side of the table: the platforms and data companies that captured the value, the agencies that bought the attention, the research companies that measured it, and the media owners fighting to take it back. That fight is documented in years of columns arguing the media owners' case.
In the meantime, everything that had blocked my idea in 2009 turned in its favour. Media ran the experiment first, the hard way: it held the audiences, did not know what they were worth digitally, and lost the revenue to the intermediaries who did. Privacy regulation made the consented, direct relationship with the audience the scarce asset of the ecosystem. Sponsors and media agencies now ask sport businesses exactly the questions media spent those years learning to answer: who is the audience, what is it worth, and can you prove it. The investment the financial crisis had drained is flowing back into sport: it buys franchises, rights and players, but rarely reaches the audience infrastructure that makes monetisation possible, often outsourced and leaking more value and revenue than it should. The industry that wasn't comfortable with the idea in 2009 now repeats that conclusion from every conference stage: we can comfortably say that the theory has caught up. Practice, though, hasn't yet.
The same intermediaries that extracted value from media companies, or others like them, are not waiting for sport businesses to prepare. Platforms, ad networks, data companies and betting operators already sell access to sports fans: they capture what fans do around sports content and sell it back as insight and targeting capability, bypassing the organisations that directly or indirectly generated the attention. They have moved into the areas easiest to control: official data and betting are tied up in long exclusive deals, and the streaming platforms are taking distribution.
The part they do not yet control is the most important: the direct relationship with the audience and the advertising products built on it. Plenty of audiences have intensity, or frequency, or longevity. Sport is one of the few that can hold all three together, organised around identity. That relationship is not included in any rights agreement. No contract transfers it. It can only be built by the sports business itself, in its own environment, on its own properties and its own terms.
Sport's owned and operated infrastructure is still half-built across most of the industry: a handful of leagues and clubs have already built that direct relationship, and the gap between those few and everyone else keeps widening. Plugging in a third-party tech partner and leaving them in control is not ownership. Ownership is treating the technology as an enabler, with the strategy set by the sports business and the assets under its control.
That is the work I do with Fastbreak Digital, bringing it back to life seventeen years later. The slowest fastbreak in history.
What the infrastructure looks like in practice, and how every engagement starts, is on the site: https://fastbreak.digital.
Alessandro De Zanche
The biggest lesson of those years on both sides: there is no wall between a sports audience and a media audience. They are the same people: following the match on Saturday, reading the news on Monday, playing a game at lunchtime, streaming a movie in the evening, scrolling the same feed in between, where a sports business's content appears alongside everyone else's.
Sport holds attention and connection at their deepest. Monetising them relies on the lessons media companies learned over two decades. Which is also why Fastbreak Digital is an addition to my work in media, not a departure from it: the media practice continues, with each side building on the other.
For sport, the opportunity is to start monetising the audience it already owns, like the media business it already is. This time the timing is right. But media taught us the window will not stay open forever.
