Future of Sports
“Women’s sport is booming, but behind the headlines, coaching is still failing women.”
Stephanie Hilborne OBE, CEO, Women in Sport Page 11
“AI can explain, test scenarios and recommend next moves with trustworthy results.”
David Geddes, CEO, International Sports Technology Association, Strategy Head, CogSoft® Page 11
Why investing in local sports facilities is vital for healthier communities
Community sports facilities are more than places to exercise — they’re vital social hubs. Yet ageing infrastructure threatens participation, inclusivity and the long-term health of local communities.
When you speak to people about their relationship with sport, they’ll probably have stories of pitches played on, sports halls that housed PE lessons and leisure centres up and down the country where their children learned to swim. These facilities go beyond a space for exercise. They’re some of our most important social assets where friendships are cultivated, confidence is built and communities are helped to lead healthier, happier lives.
Ageing infrastructure’s impact on communities
Facilities built decades ago are struggling to meet modern needs. Issues range from accessibility and inclusivity to sustainability and cost efficiency; rising energy prices and maintenance costs are pushing many facilities to the brink. Without action, we risk losing these vital local community spaces and services, which millions rely upon. This matters because access to the right environment shapes who takes part in sport and physical activity. Where facilities are ageing or not designed with diverse local communities in mind, participation falls and inequalities in activity levels increase. Certain groups — like people with disabilities or older people — are less likely to be active.
The future of football is built on community
Future of community sport depends on fit-for-purpose facilities
Modernising sporting infrastructure presents opportunities to unlock higher participation in sport and physical activity, which builds stronger communities and drives better local health outcomes. Sport England’s research calculates that active lifestyles prevent more than 3.3 million cases of chronic health conditions a year and save £8bn annually for the health and care system.1
Alongside the Government’s £400m commitment to invest in new and upgraded grassroots sport facilities,2 Sport England is committed to renewing the nation’s sport and physical activity infrastructure. This means prioritising investment where the need is greatest, ensuring no community is left behind. It means creating facilities that are not only fit for purpose today but resilient for future generations to enjoy.
If we’re serious about the future of community sport, we must be serious about the places and spaces where it happens too.
References:
1. Sport England. (2025). Health, wealth and happiness - the £123bn value of activity. https://tinyurl.com/yj3edhhz.
2. Department for Culture, Media and Sport & The Rt Hon Lisa Nandy MP. (2026). New and upgraded grassroots sport facilities to get the UK active. https://tinyurl. com/438nbsx4.
Modern life can be lonely, even in a world of constant communication, leaving us craving genuine connection more than ever. Community still matters deeply, whether it’s built through friendship groups, shared routines or collective passions.
For many, that sense of belonging is found in football, either in the stands, at the pub or gathered around a screen with friends or strangers who quickly become something more.
Where belonging feels natural
Football remains one of the few places where belonging feels immediate rather than forced. Shared emotion cuts through differences in celebration or despair. A near miss or a lastminute screamer can unite a room in a heartbeat.
Yet too often, this is not a universal feeling. For many women, matchdays can be accompanied by judgment, exclusion or harassment. When safety and respect are uncertain, belonging becomes conditional, and the joy that football promises begins to fade.
Why Her Game Too matters
As the most popular sport in the world, and one that continues to grow, football should be inclusive by default. Yet reports of sexism and misogyny rose by 67% in the 2024/25 season.1
Her Game Too has become a leading voice in challenging unacceptable behaviour and championing positive change. Through visibility, education and partnership, the campaign shows that inclusion is not only possible, but essential to the long-term future of the game.
Turning venues into communities Community is built through action, and Her Game Too’s commitment to community has shaped their partnerships, too. During the Women’s European Championship 2025, Her Game Too partnered with Stonegate pubs and independent establishments
across the country to host watch parties centred on safety and connection. The watch parties were accessible, safe spaces where women and girls could relax, feel represented and enjoy the tournament without fear. Friendships were formed, belief grew and a clear blueprint for future tournaments emerged.
With the Men’s World Cup taking place now, Her Game Too hopes to build on that momentum by expanding inclusive watch parties and highlighting venues where everyone feels welcome.
WRITTEN BY
Angharad Evans Writer, Her Game Too
WRITTEN BY Simon Hayes CEO, Sport England
Why coaching is failing women
Women’s sport is booming, but behind the headlines, coaching is still failing women. Research shows the issue isn’t recruitment but a system pushing women out.
WRITTEN BY
Stephanie Hilborne OBE CEO, Women in Sport
Women’s sport is growing; our national teams are achieving global success and breaking records, but the system shaping sport hasn’t kept pace.
Stop trying to fix women
There are still fewer women coaches than men, despite years of effort to create balance. Our research reveals the problem is the system, not the women.
Drawing on the experiences of more than 2,000 coaches, ‘Reimagining Sport Coaching: Designing a System That Works for Women’1 finds that coaching remains one of the most male-dominated areas of sport. Women are entering both voluntary and paid roles, but the environment doesn’t support them in staying.
Women coaches can help girls stay and thrive in sport and challenge outdated ideas about leadership and authority. Without them, we limit the impact sport can have on the lives of everyone involved.
Coaching offers little long-term security. Men are almost twice as likely to hold full-time roles, while women are more likely to be unpaid, on zero-hours contracts or working without agreements.
Progression is unclear — just 12% of women1 receive
Pregular feedback. Bias still shapes who is seen as a ‘real’ coach, with women 18%1 less likely to feel heard and respected — a gap that widens at higher levels of sport.
Thirty percent of women coaches report bullying, compared to 15% of men.1 Despite 95% of organisations1 claiming zero tolerance, many women avoid perpetrators rather than report them, showing a lack of trust in reporting systems.
The opportunity for change
We can retrofit women into a system that was never built for them or redesign it with better conditions. But change requires clear action, including tackling misogyny through policy and training, gender budgeting to expose and address inequality and gender-balanced leadership. Sport reflects and shapes society. If every young person is to thrive, we cannot accept a system that quietly filters women out.
References:
1. Women
sport coaching: Designing a system that works for women. https://tinyurl.com/svvb4t4e.
Beyond sports
data: What is the next billion-dollar sports opportunity?
AI is running the game — ads, drafts, training, refs and fandom. The next edge isn’t more datadriven analytics; it’s knowledge-powered AI that understands the moment and helps teams or fans make smarter calls.
hilosophers debate the lines between data, information and knowledge, but few loom larger than Immanuel Kant. His ideas still punch hard: experience is where knowledge begins, but it’s not a recording of reality. The mind is an editor — shaping what we see, hear and feel into meaning. Kant’s Theory of Knowledge provides a basis for the missing layer in high-stakes AI-driven decision systems.
AI’s problem in sport
Today’s pattern-matching AI can’t
always explain why a play turned or what to do when conditions shift. Live sport runs on context — an ankle tweak, foul trouble, a whistle, wind shift or the matchup. Humans still read these cues, weigh intent and evidence and anticipate what’s next. The next AI wave involves explicitly engineering that context. Enter the graph. Whether AI uses statistical approximations or exact software representations, it’s converging on the same backbone: graphs. Graphs model entities and relationships so systems can reason over connected
context — not isolated data — to produce more accurate, explainable and usable decisions. They’re efficient, intuitive to humans and increasingly useful in graph databases, analytics, engines — especially knowledge graphs.
Applications of knowledge graphs
A knowledge graph doesn’t store stats, but things that matter — and how they connect: facts, roles, rules and the “why” behind decisions. In sports, that could mean scouting notes, coaching theories, injury protocols, officiating standards and fan behaviour.
AI can explain, test scenarios and recommend next moves with trustworthy results. The point isn’t to replace people; it’s to provide interactive support in real time –context lives in a knowledge graph. The next AI investment wave won’t depend on data, but on how organisations translate context into decisions, and explain them under pressure. Treat a knowledge graph as a core asset, and you don’t just optimise performance; you build a defensible advantage in how the organisation thinks, acts and engages. The next billiondollar sports brands will be built on executable knowledge graphs.
in Sport. (2026). Reimagining
WRITTEN BY David Geddes CEO, International Sports Technology Association Strategy Head, CogSoft®
Putting the fundamental in fun: How data and technology are transforming the sports experience
Wearing whites on manicured lawns under the rain of the English summer makes the Wimbledon Championships a central part of tennis heritage. But what about its future, and that of sport in general?
Because innovation is adopted and absorbed so fast, it can often feel like a mere process of evolution, but in fact, the fan experience is going through a revolution, with tennis at the forefront.
In the digital era, watching sports has become more interactive. Sports technology lies behind this shift: actionable, data-backed products and services that power the entire sports industry.
It informs every broadcast and stream a fan watches. It’s inside every bet they make and keeps those bets safe from corruption. It also influences a huge amount of the social-media content fans read – even the in-game tactical decisions players and coaches make.
Sports technology is what puts the fundamental in the fun of sport.
Sophistication
Analysis of the raw data that sports produce is performed across varying levels of sophistication. Level one is the scheduling and scoring data. Level two is automated tracking data, which uses machine-learning models to understand the live action. In tennis, that might consist of shot types, winners and errors, rally lengths and so on.
Level three is the deeper tracking data that keeps a close eye on both the player and the ball. That involves instantly plotting the position of each player and the ball on the playing surface — imagine it as a mappable grid with the ball height also marked at fractions-of-a-second accuracy.
this year, the ATP announced its partnership with Infosys to launch Ally, an AI-powered chatbot delivering real-time insights.
Engagement
The pace and quality of data capture are fast improving through the increased resolution of camera technology, better processing speeds through GPUs and generative AI. These advancements have come all at once, and together, they’ve enhanced the standard of computer vision around sports, presenting a growth opportunity to tap into new fan trends.
“AI and Gen AI give us a whole new dimension of what is possible,” said Patrick Mostboeck, SVP for Fan Engagement. “Consumption patterns have shifted from watching two, three hours in a row to much shorter engagements – not even a like or a click but just a scroll over something. We feed this into our product development.” Automated clips and highlights are being delivered almost instantly and consumed at an increasing scale. Virtualised content, with animated players and playing spaces, also provides the fan with more choice over their viewing experience through custom viewing angles and AI-generated commentary. Products like Sportradar’s 4Sight Streaming embed 3D-animated overlays with stats and insights directly into the match broadcast.
“When we started, we only had some of the data on some of the courts, some of the time,” said David Lampitt, CEO of Tennis Data Innovations, the subsidiary of the ATP men’s tennis tour responsible for managing and commercialising its data.
“So, we created a whole footprint, not only across the main ATP tour – the top 60 or so tournaments – but we’ve also done that across the Challenger tour, the approximately 250 tournaments below that. It’s a big tech deployment, but it’s been transformational for us in terms of what we’re able to create and what we’re able to deliver to Sportradar as our partner.”
Through data, sports can also reach new potential fans, explaining the game in terms specifically tailored to their understanding – and in any language. Earlier
And with better information at their fingertips through live-action visualisations, fans naturally feel more equipped to deepen their attachment to a match through the betting markets. To this end, new “micromarkets” are offering more narrative-based opportunities based on the more granular feedback sportsbook operators are receiving from the live action.
For example, in tennis, that might mean betting on whether the point will end straight after the return. Will the winner be a forehand, backhand or volley? How many shots will the next rally last? Thanks to real-time data, in-play markets now account for 90 per cent of all tennis betting.
“We partner with sports leagues and federations, including Wimbledon, Roland-Garros and the US Open, to collect data, refine it and build products with that data,” said Rainer Lichtmannegger, SVP for Sports Content and Products. “Overall, tennis is the ‘perfect’
WRITTEN BY Adam Pennock VP for Risk and Investigations, Sportradar
WRITTEN BY David Lampitt CEO, Tennis Data Innovations
live-betting sport. It serves the client base that prefers competitor-versus-competitor sports over team sports.
“Tennis is a point-by-point sport, and the models can predict probabilities for everyone, so it’s always on for betting.”
In the past, tennis’s fast score resolution has made it unsuitable for the ‘betbuilder’ markets – where multiple selections are taken at once – that have become highly popular in other sports. But innovative approaches to creating narratives from the wealth of new data mean that opportunity will now grow in tennis too.
“If you get a pre-built proposition, then it will be easy to back the story of how the next game will evolve”, added Lichtmannegger. “For example, for a player to win their service game, having more than one ace and the longest rally in the game being seven shots or more. These kinds of bets are becoming possible, and I think they will be popular with the tennis community.”
Because the data are so fast and reliable, technology is now also being used in officiating. Line judges have been retired across the ATP, with the only human official now the umpire. Tracking technology now relays an audio file to the court.
Enhanced
athletes and defend sports-betting markets from corruption. For instance, data drawn from live action and real-time betting tickets are the base layer for Sportradar’s Universal Fraud Detection System AI bet-monitoring tool that scans markets for suspicious activity to protect against match-fixing.
And great strides are being made to protect the athletes themselves, too. Sportspeople are public figures, and many of them have a substantial online presence that reflects that, leaving them wide open to abuse. The company’s Integrity Services team reports that 6.5% of all online comments made to athlete accounts it reviewed were classified as abusive or threatening.
Sports technology lies behind this shift: actionable, data-backed products and services that power the entire sports industry.
Sports technology companies can now shift from reactive to predictive data, augmented by wearables that capture player data. That player data is being used for performance tracking in matches and training, assisting athletes with coaching, injury resilience and wellbeing.
When combined and triangulated, data delivers immense accuracy to predictions, helping to protect
“Some players receive over 5,000 abusive comments – and some have experienced many more, with up to 70 % of all comments they’ve seen across a nearly two-year period being abusive,” said Adam Pennock, VP for Risk and Investigations. He explains that, although abusive accounts are anonymous, users’ digital footprints can be tracked.
“We seek to identify the repeat offenders responsible for a disproportionate amount of the abuse, link the profiles, build the intelligence profiles and work with law enforcement to be able to take action against them.”
Data are the microscopic atoms of the digital world, whether in sports or otherwise. And with every improvement in fans’ understanding of what the data are and what they say, everything becomes a little less unpredictable – even in sport, the greatest unscripted narrative of all.
Image provided by Sportsradar
Forty percent of young people cannot name a single sportswoman
Alarming data shows many young people still aren’t connecting with women’s sport.
Women’s sport has never been more visible, yet Hark’s research finds it’s not reaching and engaging the next generation of sports fans.
Shockingly, 40% of young people aged 11 to 17 cannot name a single sportswoman.¹ That rises to 45% among boys, compared with 35% of girls.¹ Despite record broadcast deals and growing media coverage, awareness among young people isn’t keeping pace.
Desire growing, but industry isn’t keeping pace
Seventy-five percent of girl sport fans want more women’s sports on TV and social media, and 81% want to attend a live women’s sporting event.¹ They want it; they just cannot find it. One in three girl fans doesn’t know where or when to watch, and 40% struggle to find highlights online.¹
It’s an audience the sports sector needs to engage more with, particularly as the number of girls identifying as sports fans declines with age. The percentage of girls identifying as sports fans falls from 62% at ages 11 to 13 to 50% by ages 16 to 17. Meanwhile, boys hold steady at around 75%.¹
Real reasons for optimism
Sportswomen identified by young people span a diverse range. Our research captured 177 different names across 34 sports and 33 nationalities.¹ Footballers led the way, but athletes from tennis, athletics, swimming, cricket and beyond all featured.
Girls told us they want to know more, and every teacher we spoke to wants more information to help them talk about women’s sport in school.
So, what’s needed? More stories reaching young people beyond social media. Schools are a major part of the answer, but there’s a bigger opportunity beyond creating educational content about athletes.
It’s about co-creating content with and for young people, grounded in what they’re actually looking for, and using authentic player and role-model stories to help them see themselves in sport. This is where Hark’s work with the Premier League, the LTA and the FA has shown real impact.
Reference: 1. Hark. (2025). The fan gap: The girls missing from sport fandom – and how to reach them. https://tinyurl.com/3y9hckbr.
WRITTEN BY
Kathryn McColl
Co-Founder, Hark
