A few months ago, I received a data report from our team at Gameday that stopped me mid-scroll.
Italy’s Lega Volley Femminile – the professional women’s volleyball league we invested in through Gameday by NJF Holdings – had surpassed 1.4 billion digital views during the current regular season alone. Not the full season. The regular season. The original target, set at the start of the year, was one billion views for the entire campaign. We’d passed it months early.
Forty-five million social interactions. A 2.8% engagement rate. The second most-followed sports league in Italy by social audience. For a women’s volleyball league that most people outside Italy would struggle to name twelve months ago.
I don’t share this to boast. I share it because it crystallises something I’ve been thinking about for years – and that I believe is one of the most important dynamics in the sports business right now.
When Gameday invested in the Lega Volley Femminile, the case wasn’t complicated. Italian women’s volleyball had a strong underlying product – serious athletes, passionate clubs, a genuine sporting culture. What it lacked was distribution, digital infrastructure and the kind of platform strategy that could connect that product to the audiences it deserved.
Through our joint venture, Spike Media, we rebuilt the digital layer around the league. Better content. Smarter distribution. Athlete-led storytelling. Direct fan engagement rather than dependence on broadcast intermediaries. Data systems that allowed us to understand audiences precisely and serve them better.
The results are what they are. But the more important point is what they tell us about the model.
Women’s volleyball in Italy wasn’t broken. It was under-distributed. Those are very different problems with very different solutions. One requires rebuilding the product. The other requires rebuilding the infrastructure around it.
That distinction matters enormously for investors. The sport itself – the competition, the athletes, the culture – was already there. We didn’t create the audience. We helped it find what it was already looking for.
Gameday was built around a specific thesis: that the most significant long-term value in sport is created not at the level of individual franchises, but through the infrastructure built around entire leagues.
Leagues, when properly structured and digitised, are among the most powerful units of long-term value creation in the entertainment economy. They provide governance, consistency and commercial alignment. They create the conditions in which clubs, athletes, broadcasters and sponsors can all grow together.
Most leagues are still under-digitised. Most still rely on legacy broadcast frameworks that limit their direct relationship with fans. Most haven’t yet built the data infrastructure that would allow them to understand their audiences precisely and monetise them properly.
That is where the opportunity sits. Technology – from content distribution platforms to data analytics to direct-to-consumer fan products – is the mechanism that unlocks it. The league becomes a platform. The platform becomes a data asset. The data asset becomes a more resilient, more scalable business.
Within that broader technology thesis, artificial intelligence deserves its own mention – because it is reshaping the economics of sport in two distinct ways simultaneously.
On one hand, AI is an extraordinary operational tool. Personalised highlights, real-time analytics, smarter sponsorship measurement, content that reaches the right audience in the right format at the right moment. Used properly, AI doesn’t displace the match. It builds everything around it into something more valuable.
On the other, AI is changing the value of live sport itself. As the content economy fills with synthetic media – text, images and video generated at near-zero cost – the premium on things that cannot be automated rises. A last-minute goal. A championship decider. A moment of genuine human excellence under real pressure with real consequences. These can’t be manufactured. In a world where most content increasingly can be, that authenticity compounds in value.
I’ve spent two decades investing in technology, including as an early and major investor in Groq before its acquisition by Nvidia. I understand what AI can do. The sports industry should treat it as an accelerant, not a threat.
As private capital continues to flow into sport globally – and it is accelerating rapidly – the investors who understand the distinction between owning assets and building infrastructure will be best placed for what comes next.
The LVF numbers are one data point. But they point to something larger: a market in the early stages of a structural transformation, where technology is finally being deployed seriously against one of the most loyal, most emotionally engaged audience bases in the world.
Sport has always commanded attention. What’s changing is who captures the value that attention creates – and how.
The match is the anchor. Everything else is what we build around it.