The Fan Engagement Gap: What Fans Expect, and How AI Helps Teams Deliver

• Fans want relevant, year-round relationships with their teams.
• Younger supporters show the strongest demand for deeper connection.
• Better engagement can increase stated loyalty, attendance and spending.
• AI can extend personalized outreach without removing human involvement.
• Connected systems turn existing fan relationships into measurable opportunities.

Fans follow their teams year-round. Too many teams connect with fans primarily when there is a ticket to sell or a result to announce. That imbalance is the fan engagement gap, and supporters have been clear about what they want instead.

In a 2025 Infobip survey of 1,500 dedicated sports fans, drawn from followers of American football, baseball, soccer and cricket across North America, Europe and India, nearly half (49%) said they feel like a number rather than a valued supporter, and 55% said they feel let down by a lack of relevant content and communications. The frustration is not that fans have stopped caring. It is that the relationship runs mostly one way.

There is a commercial cost to that gap, and a commercial opportunity in closing it. The highest-intent opportunities are often already within the team's existing audience: the ticket buyers, members and lapsed supporters a team already has.

Engagement built around the calendar, not the fan

Most teams build engagement around the schedule. It peaks when there is something to sell and goes quiet in between, which is when fans say they most want to stay connected. In the same survey, 82% of fans said they want to feel more connected to their team and better informed across the full year, not on game day alone.

Cost is a real frustration too, though it sits outside what an engagement platform can change. Infobip found 61% of fans feel priced out of the game, driven by paid TV subscriptions (41%), ticket prices (37%) and merchandise costs (33%). What a team can change is the quality and consistency of the relationship with its avid fans. That is where the opportunity sits.

What fans actually want

Fans' demands are specific, and the data makes them concrete. They want access to players and behind-the-scenes content: 73% say personal player stories inspire them, and 70% say regular access to players and behind-the-scenes content would make them feel more connected. They want a voice in decisions that affect them, yet 69% say they have not been asked their opinion in at least two seasons. And they want community, with 66% saying they would join a digital fan community.

None of this is unusual. Fans already get this standard of personalization from the consumer brands they buy from, and they notice when their team does not match it. The appetite is strongest among fans under 35, where the share who want to feel more connected climbs to 96%. For teams that wait, the gap only widens.

Fans are ready for AI to help

Fans are increasingly comfortable with AI playing a role in their sports experience. In a 2025 IBM study of more than 20,000 sports fans, 85% saw value in integrating AI into that experience, while 80% believed AI would have the greatest influence on how they follow sports by 2027. That receptivity centers on content, personalization and real-time information.

For teams, that creates an opening to use AI thoughtfully across content, service and personalized communication, provided the experience remains relevant and connected. AI engagement infrastructure will not solve every dimension of fandom. It will not create the player stories or community experiences fans want. What it can solve is the operational problem underneath them: identifying the right audience, starting relevant conversations, carrying context across channels, collecting responses and moving interested fans toward the right next step.

The revenue is already in your fan base

Survey respondents also pointed to the upside of getting this right. In the Infobip survey, 34% of fans said they would be more emotionally invested in their team if it made them feel more valued and connected. A quarter or more said they would attend more games (27%), buy more merchandise (25%), or pay for a membership or subscription (28%). These figures measure stated intent, not guaranteed outcomes, but the direction is consistent: recognition earns investment.

Most of that upside sits in relationships a team already has. Past ticket buyers, lapsed members and fans who drifted away are closer to a yes than an audience a team has yet to find. This is the opportunity 21X SPORTS was built to capture: incremental revenue from existing fan relationships. It reconnects with dormant fans and past customers, sells tickets, renewals, premium and group seating and merchandise through timely outreach, and turns relationships that went quiet back into active ones. That engagement should remain grounded in fan consent, channel preferences and responsible use of first-party data, particularly when teams reactivate older relationships.

The same approach extends past tickets. 21X SPORTS can also activate sponsors through measurable, interactive engagement rather than logo placement, and it can collect feedback and run surveys, then apply what it learns to the next interaction.

Built for collegiate athletic departments, professional and minor league teams, leagues, and sports product and apparel companies, and developed in partnership with GameAbove Sports, 21X SPORTS is aimed at a single question: how does an organization turn more of the demand already present within its fan base into revenue?

One connected system, not one more tool

The reason teams struggle to engage fans consistently is rarely effort. It is structure. Fan relationships are spread across app-based systems, email tools, texting services, ticket reps and outside vendors, so no single system holds the whole relationship. A fan can buy a ticket, ask a service question and ignore a renewal offer without any of it adding up to one view of that person.

21X works across voice, SMS and email with shared context, so each conversation builds on the last instead of starting from scratch. It is designed to connect ticketing, CRM, merchandise, loyalty and payment systems, so the relationship is acted on where it already lives. This is not a standalone chatbot. The AI handles the structured work of starting conversations, answering quickly, following up and identifying intent, while team staff stay central to the conversations that need expertise, negotiation or a real relationship. When a fan is ready for one of those, 21X qualifies the interest and routes it to the right person on the team.

21X is built on more than 500 million conversations across industries like real estate, mortgage and financial services, refined with human feedback, and more than a decade of work in conversational AI. 21X SPORTS brings that foundation to sports.

Closing the fan engagement gap

Fans have been clear about what they want, and they have signaled they are open to AI helping deliver it. The teams that act on both will do more than satisfy supporters. They will deepen the loyalty and capture the revenue that comes with a fan who feels like part of the community. 21X SPORTS is the engagement infrastructure designed to help teams reach more of their fan base consistently, without requiring staff to manage every interaction by hand.

Try 21X AI for yourself to experience an AI-led conversation firsthand. Or book a demo to explore how 21X SPORTS can re-engage past buyers, qualify fan interest and route revenue opportunities to your team.