Where’s the innovation in sports?

We’ve spent the last few weeks with team execs and owners, talking through where growth in sports comes from next. The conversations ranged widely, but one thing kept coming back: fan loyalty is one of the most special assets in all of commerce, and a team’s instinct is often to mine it rather than foster it.

The problem

Teams and leagues need growth that the existing technology and commercial models are ill-equipped to deliver. As fan behaviors and expectations continue to evolve, this dynamic becomes a real threat.

Growth is simple when broken down:

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.

The bulk of 20+ years of sports “innovation” has lived in one quadrant, same products, same fans, higher prices, and there’s only so much left to mine there. Nobody has successfully gone upper-right: a new product for new fans.

But an ecosystem of rented parts and indirect customer relationships paralyzes teams seeking expansion, so they default to optimizing the existing products with their existing fan relationships. Ticketing, retail, broadcast, and the app are each run by a partner, and each partner holds its own piece of the fan.

Everything today focuses on the fan coming to the arena, buying the same products a team has sold forever. New fans and new products have been inaccessible to teams. Cota changes that.

What we believe

Cota exists to create something additive to the business of sports. The fan relationship is the area we know best and the area with the greatest opportunity. We see so many examples of “innovations” that are simply extracting a few more dollars or shuffling the same margin from one place to another. We want to create a platform built for the new era of sports business that enriches our industry’s most important asset: the fans. We’re betting that adding value wins long-term over near-term margin manipulation.

We know there are hundreds of millions of underserved fans today because of legacy models. These are fans teams would love to know and create products for, but simply can’t today.

Our approach

Membership as a foundation has resonated most with team execs, and it is the expansion play: a new product for existing fans, and new fans reached through a product that holds value out of market.

It combines the fan-focused orientation of UK football with the commercialization of US sports, and it lets US teams sell memberships for the first time. Something I know has historically been inaccessible for teams.

For reference, Manchester United and Liverpool already drive meaningful revenue from membership, roughly £30M (500K memberships) and £18M (320K memberships) respectively, on a modest product with almost no partner ecosystem behind it.¹

Now combine this with the commercial benefits of a more robust network of partners to monetize.

A team-owned fan credential, a portable, programmable, and upgradable representation of fandom, unlocks so much value for teams, fans, and partners. Tokenization is the only form factor that makes it possible. The credential has to work across partners the team doesn’t control, so it can’t live inside any one of them. That is where fan relationships stall today.

Every fan can and should get a team-issued ID. This alone is a big step for teams. From there, teams build compelling membership packages that resonate with a broader section of their fanbase, known and unknown. These fans buy those memberships, effectively upgrading their ID to get benefits across the commercial ecosystem. All without the team losing the contractual money and distribution from a ticketing, merch, or media partner.

This is what makes it different from a points program or a partner login. The credential is persistent, portable, and upgradable. It carries a fan’s status across a commercial ecosystem that was never integrated, ticketing, merch, media, and the rest, and ties it together in a way that has not been possible before. Each partner reads the status it needs and writes activity back, so the record compounds in one place the team owns.

This solution resonates with US sport execs. I’ve previewed it with NBA, NFL, NHL, and MLS teams, and the response so far sounds like, “this is what we need, but there’s no way to actually do it.” We’re widening that conversation to many more teams to pressure-test it, and we’re already diving in with several.

Global memberships have never materialized because they were too cumbersome for teams to design and execute. Every partner in the stack had to be wired up by hand, so band-aid solutions passed the effort onto the fan, promo codes, manual fulfillment, and the ROI was impossible to defend. A lot of good, value-adding ideas have died because of the models described above.

The Cota credential removes that friction. It works across a team’s ticketing, merch, and media partners the way a Supporter ID works in all of Manchester United’s stores, and it lets the team, fan, and partner connect without any of them rebuilding their systems. Tokenization is the form factor that makes it portable, which has never been possible before.

We now have even more conviction in where to build and how to make a meaningful impact: a tokenized credential, designed alongside a small group of rights holders as early design partners, starting now.

With this foundation in place, the use cases are endless. A credential that already travels with the fan can carry a season of loyalty into a presale, a jersey, a stream, a ride home, and eventually into something bigger. We see a day when fans sit next to private equity on their team’s cap table, not as a gimmick but as the natural end point of membership done right. That step isn’t open to teams yet, and it only works once the relationship exists. So we start with membership, and we build the network of partners and fans that makes the next step a short one. Cota is the platform that brings more fans closer to the teams they love.