Sports decision-makers are missing an evidence layer

What AFC Richmond’s “Higgins problem” tells
us about the way commercial teams work

Ted Lasso’s AFC Richmond face a familiar commercial challenge. The club is considering the launch of a women’s team. Director of Football Operations Leslie Higgins is tasked with pulling together the evidence that owner Rebecca Welton needs to understand how the opportunity stacks up commercially.

The data exists, but getting from the mountain of information to a clear recommendation is another matter. It is a fictional example, but the problem is very real to many in Rebecca’s shoes (however expensive).

The observation: Sports organisations have plenty of data

A modern sports organisation rarely suffers from an absence of information. There will likely be ticketing data, fan research, digital behaviour, audience measurement, sponsorship studies, broadcast data, CRM records, financial projections and analysis from multiple specialist partners. Each source tells the team something useful, but the difficulty comes when an important commercial question cuts across several of them.

Launching a new team is a good example. Understanding its potential isn't simply a ticketing question, a sponsorship question or a fan-engagement question. It requires questioning all of them at once.

The problem: the evidence lives in different places

This is where Higgins gets stuck. We can see that he has the inputs he needs, but somebody else still has to bring them together, compare them and work out what they collectively mean. One partner supplies audience data, another provides sponsorship measurement – and they don’t necessarily need to know about each other. Another handles fan research and ticketing sits somewhere else. Finance has its own forecasts. Internal teams maintain spreadsheets and presentations in isolation of other teams using other data for other purposes.

The important commercial questions rarely respect those boundaries.

What will drive demand? Which audience is most commercially valuable? How would a new property affect existing partners? What evidence gives us confidence in our revenue assumptions? Where are the risks?

Hypothesis: the missing piece isn't another dataset

The natural response to a data problem is often to buy more data, but that is not necessarily what is missing to form a coherent picture.

What organisations increasingly need is an evidence layer across the information they already hold: something capable of bringing different forms of data-as-evidence together and allowing commercial teams to interrogate all of it as a connected whole.

That changes the role of technology. It’s not just about producing a report faster; it’s about helping leaders and analysts understand the relationships between the data.

Evidence: connecting sources changes the questions you can answer

Imagine if Higgins could interrogate Richmond's existing evidence base rather than manually assembling it. He could then explore how fan interest relates to potential ticket demand. He could test sponsorship opportunities against audience characteristics. He could compare financial assumptions with evidence from comparable properties. He could identify where different datasets reinforce or contradict one another.

Crucially, he could trace the evidence behind the conclusion before putting it in front of Rebecca. Technology removes much of the manual assembly and gives him more time to ask the questions that matter: what does the evidence mean, where is it weak, and what should Richmond do next?

The real-world parallel

Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian invested around £20m for a minority stake in Chelsea Women in 2025, but he wasn’t simply jumping on the women’s sport bandwagon. He described the opportunity to turn a women’s football club into a global brand in explicitly commercial terms. Sporting performance, audience growth, commercial revenues, brand potential and what he had already seen elsewhere in women’s sport all informed his view of what the asset could become.

Decision: move from data to evidence to action

Sports organisations have spent years becoming data-rich. The next challenge is making those assets work well enough together to support important decisions with considered confidence.

In AFC Richmond's case, the question is whether to launch a women's team. For another club, league, rights holder or venue, it might be how to price a partnership, where to invest in fan acquisition, which markets offer the greatest growth potential, or why commercial performance has changed.

The opportunity: an evidence layer across the commercial organisation

This is the gap Experienz is designed to fill. Experienz brings together the research and data an organisation already holds, enabling teams to interrogate different sources together, identify relationships and get from fragmented information to commercial evidence faster. The opportunity isn't necessarily more data. Some of the most valuable insights may sit between the evidence you already have.

Team Experienz