Boardroom’s Shlomo Sprung provides his biggest takeaways after attending the 19th annual MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference last week.
Executives, experts, and employees of more than 120 teams and leagues converged in Boston over the weekend for the 19th annual MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, with two days of illuminating and insightful panels centered around the key concept of analytics in motion.
Across dozens of hours of panels, I distilled my thoughts from the conference into several takeaways with overarching themes:
The Evolving Future of the Sports Fan
Brian Rolapp, the NFL‘s chief media and business officer, said that how you build the next 20 years of sports fans is entirely different from the previous 20. What seems to scare sports leagues the most right now is figuring out how to reach the next generation of sports fans.
FanDuel CEO Amy Howe said that rather than watch full games, her teenage sons opt for NFL Sunday Ticket, RedZone, or simply watch highlights to consume sports. Yet, there’s still power in live sports among young fans, with WWE Chief Content Officer Paul “Triple H” Levesque mentioning that his three teenage daughters know sports are the only events that are important to watch at a given period.
Leagues are trying to take advantage of that with a diversified, nimble approach by putting games on both broadcast and streaming to go where sports fans of all ages are. ABC is still a huge ratings driver for Disney games, usually on ESPN, Endeavor, and TKO President and COO Mark Shapiro pointed out, while Netflix has been pivotal for the WWE over the last two months.
Younger fans need to be targeted more individually, Jonathan Kraft, the New England Patriots and Kraft Analytics Group (KAGR) President, said. That includes more targeted and personalized marketing, Jessica Gelman, Sloan co-founder and KAGR CEO, added with teams utilizing better data and programmatic marketing to achieve those goals.
Had the pleasure of speaking @SloanSportsConf yesterday in Boston alongside Bela Bajaria & @jessicagelman. @netflix and @WWE have created the example for what weekly live programming can provide to the audience. pic.twitter.com/DKTzIXDEWh
— Triple H (@TripleH) March 8, 2025
For sports bettors, Kraft said that it will eventually feature home viewing interfaces that will allow you to live bet on your screen with personalized live bet props based on your betting tendencies as the NFL works on better data collection tools and an algorithm that will be licensed to betting companies. Beyond technology, eventually starting flag football leagues for men and women and a growing variety of annual international games will also be ways in which the NFL reaches new audiences.
Sports fans are now less wedded to teams and gravitate more toward individual athletes. Just take LeBron James, who has six times more Instagram followers than the team he plays for, the Los Angeles Lakers. Young fans, on average, have two favorite teams, Gelman said, putting more importance on teams needing to get fans engaged on the local level so they have an affinity for the name on the front of the jerseys more than the names on the back of them.
Julie Uhrman, Angel City‘s president and co-founder, went so far as to say if they’re considering two equal players to bring to the team, they’d prefer the athlete with local ties. Teams that have players with connections to their home cities may be a growing trend moving forward if it means both retaining young fans and increasing their chances of bringing in new ones.
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How Women’s Sports Can Grow Even Further
“We’re just on the precipice,” Shapiro said about the explosion of growth in women’s sports. However, leagues, companies, stakeholders, and individuals must take steps to build the right way.
In the WNBA, Shapiro notes that demand for new teams is currently outstripping the supply, and the league can’t dilute the product and should be choosy for expansion cities and owners. Improving the current product includes drastically upgraded facilities and infrastructure, former U.S. Women’s National Team and NWSL champion Lauren Holiday said. Klutch Sports women’s basketball agent Jade-Li English said that if you’re a WNBA team and your facilities aren’t up to par, top free agents probably aren’t going there.
Analytics in women’s sports is still years behind the men. There’s still a data shortfall in evaluating players for the WNBA Draft or no scouting combine, Connecticut Sun President Jennifer Rizzotti said. There’s a huge market for data and analytics in women’s sports, Uhrman agreed. For the hundreds of college students in attendance at the conference, Harris Blitzer Sports & Entertainment co-founder David Blitzer implored them to go into women’s sports.
There are still so many reasons for optimism, too, of course. Women’s athletes are finally starting to get marketed like their male counterparts, Blitzer added. At the same time, DraftKings Chief Business and Growth Officer Marie Donoghue noted that athlete-driven content like podcasts from Sue Bird and Megan Rapinoe and Cameron Brink has been jet fuel for the growth of women’s sports. Once women’s sports were more readily available to watch, it became easier for the casual fan to become an avid one. It’s allowed for more revenue streams in sports like women’s soccer, which is rapidly globalizing after seeing USWNT superstar Naomi Girma‘s record-setting transfer from the San Diego Wave to Chelsea.
While there’s a lot of work to do, women’s sports is still on the upswing.
AI’s Growing Role in Sports
In one of his few panel appearances, conference co-founder, co-chair, and Philadelphia 76ers President Daryl Morey said he uses an AI-learned language model as a scout or an extra individual vote or voice when weighing a major trade, draft pick, signing, or transaction.
AI will never fully replace a coach or a scout, Kraft said, but it will make their jobs easier in preparation and make them more efficient. To that point, Houston Texans General Manager Nick Caserio said AI will never call plays on the field as a coach or coordinator but can help build game plans. On fan outreach, Blitzer said AI will allow teams to personalize offers and messages further when combined with more sophisticated data collection.
Maverick Carter’s New League Model
It’s no secret that Maverick Carter, the co-CEO of Fulwell Entertainment, is aiming to create an alternate international pro basketball league alongside private equity funds and foreign sovereign wealth funds. On Friday, Carter said that sports leagues are run on models that have been around since the 1950s and that new models should exist. Sports is the only business in the world, he continued, where you can draw a line from a given individual to enterprise growth, and they don’t participate in the profits.
Carter used Stephen Curry as an example, who’s helped the Golden State Warriors 10x their valuation without seeing direct profits aside from his player contract. Leagues like Unrivaled with player equity are beginning to change that paradigm, but expect more leagues moving forward, to Carter’s point, to utilize a newer, less outdated model.
WNBA Players Won’t Back Down
While expressed in a more subtle way than Angel Reese did in a recent podcast, English and her superstar client A’ja Wilson said that if WNBA players don’t receive what they deserve in talks for the collective bargaining agreement that expires after the 2025 season, there’s the potential for a work stoppage. Led by a new 11-year, $2.2 billion TV deal kicking in next year and skyrocketing attendance and revenue across the board, W players expect to be adequately compensated for this massive era of growth. If the league doesn’t step up to the plate and deliver, it doesn’t seem like the players will mess around if they don’t receive a bigger slice of the pie.
Bonus takeaway
As the conference closed Saturday, the Los Angeles Lakers received an Alpha Award for the transaction of the year after their blockbuster trade for Luka Dončić. And since they were in town to play the Celtics that night, Lakers Vice President of Basketball Operations and General Manager Rob Pelinka surprised the crowd by accepting the award in person. While he thanked his behind-the-scenes analytics staff on-site at the conference, I’m not sure much analysis was needed to sway LA into doing this deal.
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