Adding digital transformation firepower to Arsenal FC

Transformation as a team sport

From a commercial perspective, clubs are always exploring ways of deepening their connection with supporters, fuelling performance and drive growth. For Arsenal, business transformation is very much a team sport.

Speaking at the SportsPro Live 2025 event in April 2025, Arsenal FC chief commercial officer Juliet Slot said that the club’s underlying commercial strategy was “really simple” and rooted in serving supporters, adding that tech had opened up new possibilities.

“If you have a global club and you have a global supporter base, you need a digital transformation to enable you to reach them and serve them in a way that practically could not have done 10 to 15 years ago,” said Slot at the time. “That strategy helps us to understand the supporters, to understand what their needs are, and therefore define what we need to build to give them what they want, when they want, where they want.”

Specifically, this means that Arsenal would like to serve more content, product and experiences in the digital environment to allow fans to feel closer to the club. And in this shows the transition of football clubs such as Arsenal, which started out locally focused and representative of their origins–- such as Woolwich – but are now true global endeavours.

A robust digital environment allows Arenal to have that globality in how it serves supporters and gives them the required experiences and touch points. Slot believes that the partnership with NTT has given the club the wherewithal to build a tech stack against the strategy it had put together.

Arsenal and NTT Data announced their partnership in September 2024 and are still effectively in the starting phase. NTT Data’s UK and Ireland CTO Tom Winstanley sees the key role for his company as providing “supportive experiences” from a general IT point of view and in focusing on network infrastructure and back-office operations.

“We’re going to change the way fans are being supported across all of their channels, and we are providing a full stack of support from consulting, software engineering platforms all the way through to core infrastructure,” he says.

“Sports teams are often relatively medium-sized enterprises, and they often find themselves with a messed-up ecosystem of partners, data infrastructure and compute infrastructure that is just simply not fit for that transformation journey that they want. Our work [in general] is to create the next-generation foundations, the data and the network infrastructure to create those new experiences.

“[We are providing Arsenal with] legacy transformation for relatively small organisations, but with this incredible reach being pulled by fans. They’re recognising that there are opportunities for them to hugely expand their supporter base and build much more engaging experiences that then drive on for the business in a way that they’ve not done before. So, internationalisation, media, and personalised and targeted content suddenly create new streams for them beyond their core traditional business of sponsorship.”

‘The world in one place’

Slot says that the club has a clear sense of its history and culture, and part of any tender process is around how that culture is aligned and how it is going to work with partners especially since it is a case of bringing external parties into small organisation. This also means it is vital to be able to work together to get through challenges.

“We are essentially the world in one place,” she says. “We are a retailer, digital business, a ticketing business, an events business, an experiential business. Around the actual football, we are a lot of things to people, [whether] coming into to the game or coming into our digital ecosystem.”

As Arsenal works on transforming its commercial strategy and commercial outputs over the next few years, what does this mean in practice? Slot stresses that not all fan experiences are the same, so her team looks deeply at the support base to define their relationship with the club based on their behavioural interactions while also considering their demographics.

“Through that segmentation, we wanted to build product and content experiences,” she says. “We have our own additional insights team that we’ve built over the past three years – what I call the marketing engine at the club. This [provides] digital insights to really combine sales tools and build that segmentation. We built our creative studio to develop content that allows us tell stories to the supporters around the world. And what we needed around that was to build a tech stack.

Our supporters generally join us at the age of seven and they are with us for life. It’s important to ensure that you put them at the heart of everything you do

“We had an idea of what we wanted, but bringing our partner on board allowed us to augment it through their experience and to challenge us in our thinking. One fundamental is [we are in this] honoured position as [guardians] of our brand. Our supporters generally join us at the age of seven and they are with us for life. It’s important to ensure that you put them at the heart of everything you do. By doing that, we will make more return from them.”

Providing innovation into the technology stack is precisely what Slot wants from the deployment, stating she seeks two basic things from the technology partnership: “I want to have the best technology stack that will allow us to serve our supporters, as the number one priority. Number two is to deliver against their needs and their outcomes – the outcomes that they want.”

The club has been helped by the fans through the Gooner Voice service, which lets them ask the team any question about the club such as they products that they would like to see. Artificial intelligence (AI) will also play a role.

 “We will be using generative AI [GenAI] to inform our supporters, delivering what we think they want, and [seeing] if they are acting the way we anticipate them to act,” says Slot. “And then we want to be nimble enough to build to be able to amend what we do. Our journey is not going to be solved in one step. I think the way we are working with NNT Data is intuitive and what we’re building is important.”

The journey to digital

Winstanley adds that in any digital transformation project in any sector, digital services need to focus on being customer centric. With Arsenal, it was clear that creating a supportive experience was the primary objective of the business transformation.

“We always prioritise the end user impact,” he says. “What is the supporter impact, customer impact in that context? What was the ask of us? The ask of us was to help them get from their ‘messy’ estate that was not yet ready for the business journey that they’re on to create those new supporters’ experiences. [And then] effectively build out the digital foundations, the compute, network, data and analytics – that is, the foundations to create those personalised experiences for their supporters both in the stadium and around the world.”

Another issue that Winstanley raises as interesting is the business culture of those on a transformation journey. He notes that there often aren’t many sports teams in his line of work talking genuinely about transforming their business.

“It is an industry that is increasingly needing to go [digital, that needs] to say, ‘We’re going to change the way that we operate as an organisation’ and it’s not just about front of house. It’s also about how they become a more digitised business in the background. The visible experience created when supporters arrive, when they’re online, when they’re viewing the latest insights into the teams, wherever they are – that’s the tip of the iceberg.”

That said, Winstanley emphasises that key performance indicators (KPIs) for Arsenal and for other similar projects are what he’s expect from more enterprise-type customers. “In the past, when we’ve dealt with sports teams, it’s been making something ‘shiny’. That wasn’t the ask here – here, we’re on a journey to become an incredible powerhouse in this sector. We want to create the most impactful, the most interesting experiences for supporters across all the different channels. To do that, we recognise we’ve got to change the business and the technology estate behind it, end to end. That’s the journey we want to go on.”

Part of this journey includes the deployment of AI – in particular  the NTT Data-built Tsuzumi small language model – to reduce learning and inference costs in optimising network performance and to support edge use cases.

The AI has given insight into the correct loads of what is being delivered, especially regarding video content, and network background to gain the right balance of the network infrastructure, says Winstanley. It is also looking at audio systems supported by AI, again involving connection to the edge.

Ultimately, Winstanley says there is still a journey to go on regarding the transformation Arsenal’s digital assets. There is work to be done regarding the network and infrastructure part of the deployment, but it is just a matter of time. The goal for Slot is to have a business that can offer multi-channel, immersive experiences on site, at home and around the world, transforming commercial business to enable Arsenal to transform on the pitch. Net profits – in all senses.