The next wave of growth needs to come from somewhere else.
Rights holders have a mandate to grow, and to be fair, teams have tried. Loyalty programs, loaded value, experimental merch: new on the surface, but all aimed at the same fans, the ones who are already showing up. There is only so much left to mine there.
The reason is structural. Ticketing, retail, broadcast, and the app are each run by a partner, and each partner holds its own piece of the fan. An ecosystem of rented parts makes expansion hard, so teams default to optimizing what they already have.
Nobody has gone upper-right: a new product for new fans.
20+ years of effort in one box.
Cota was started by people who spent the last decade inside the business of professional sports, working with teams and leagues on how they reach, serve, and grow their fans. The same ceiling came up in every conversation: teams know their most valuable asset is the fan relationship, but legacy systems and commercial models make it nearly impossible to grow.
Cota is the platform built for the next era of the sports business. It gives a team a fan credential it owns, and a membership product it can finally sell, one that can grow into ownership over time.
The work is being designed alongside a small group of rights holders as early design partners.
Not from charging the same fans more for the same things. Hundreds of millions of fans are underserved today because of legacy models. Teams would love to know them and build for them, and simply can’t.
Not to the ticketing partner, the retailer, or the broadcaster. Too many “innovations” shuffle margin from one vendor to another and leave the team holding a sponsorship check instead of a relationship.
Cota exists to be additive to the business of sports. Enrich the industry’s most important asset, the fans, and the commercial outcomes follow. That is the long-term bet.
When the team owns the relationship, every new product, partner, and fan builds on the last instead of starting over. Cota is that foundation, and it lets teams evolve their business in ways that were previously out of reach.
Cota combines the fan-focused orientation of UK football with the commercialization of US sports. For reference, Manchester United and Liverpool already drive a meaningful share of revenue from a modest membership offering, with almost no partner ecosystem behind it. US teams have never been able to sell memberships at all. Cota lets them.
Known and unknown, in market and out. A portable, programmable, upgradable representation of fandom that the team owns.
Fans upgrade their ID to unlock benefits across the team’s commercial ecosystem. A new product for existing fans, and a product that reaches new fans because it holds value out of market.
Ticketing, retail, and media read the credential without rebuilding their systems, and the team keeps every existing contract and distribution deal. Tokenization is the form factor that makes the credential portable.
Global memberships have never materialized because they were too cumbersome to design and execute. Every partner had to be wired up by hand, so the effort got passed to the fan as promo codes and manual fulfillment, and the return was impossible to defend.
The Cota credential removes that friction. It works across a team’s partners the way a supporter ID works in every one of Manchester United’s stores, and it lets the team, the fan, and the partner connect without any of them rebuilding their systems.
Fans have moved online and out of market, and the tools teams rent were built for neither. The pieces to fix that now exist.
of Big 4 (NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL) fans live outside their favorite team’s market. Team products are still built for the arena.
growth in tokenized real-world assets, ’24–’26. The rails that make a credential portable across partners are now mainstream.
Figures as publicly reported by the sources named. They describe the market, not any Cota result.