The Premier League has launched an expansive AI-powered transformation in partnership with Microsoft, introducing new digital tools to enhance fan engagement and modernize its operations. The five-year strategic partnership, announced in July, represents one of the most significant technology transformations in the League’s 33-year history as it seeks to better serve its global audience of 900 million homes across 189 countries.
What’s driving the change: The Premier League is fundamentally reshaping its role from primarily selling media rights to directly engaging with fans through digital products and services.
- “Historically, the mandate of the Premier League and the role has been to run the competition in terms of media sales and a small, central sponsorship program,” says Alexandra Willis, the League’s director of digital media and audience development.
- The League’s evolving strategy now requires a mature, future-proof technology foundation to offer digital touchpoints that connect with fans worldwide.
Key AI innovations: Microsoft Copilot and Azure OpenAI are powering a new Premier League Companion that draws from over 30 seasons of statistics, 300,000 articles, and 9,000 videos.
- The Companion is currently available through the official Premier League mobile app and web platforms, initially featuring pre-written prompts for delivering answers based on the complete Premier League content library.
- Future updates will introduce open prompts for customized insights and localization features for non-English speaking fans, including deeper integration of video and audio content.
Fantasy Premier League gets an AI assistant: Later this season, Microsoft AI will power a personal assistant manager within Fantasy Premier League to help the game’s 11.5 million players make better squad decisions.
- The AI assistant will access users’ fantasy gameplay records, statistics, and past decisions to provide personalized research tools.
- “There are third-party applications that do some of this, but being able to sit on the actual source of truth — the game database itself — and combine that with your own personal history and the decisions you’ve made is going to be quite impactful,” Willis explains.
Infrastructure overhaul: The Premier League is migrating its core technology infrastructure to Microsoft Azure while integrating AI across broadcast operations and internal workflows.
- Azure AI Foundry services, including Azure OpenAI, will provide real-time data overlays during live matches and power post-match analyses.
- Internal operations will be modernized through Microsoft 365, Power Platform, and Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations to streamline workflows and enable data-driven decision making.
What they’re saying: Microsoft executives emphasize the cultural transformation aspect of the partnership beyond just technical implementation.
- “We’re putting AI tooling into the hands of all Premier League staff, and it goes beyond the buildout of Copilot embedded in the fan engagement app,” says Darren Hardman, CVP and CEO of Microsoft UK & Ireland.
- “It transforms all the information workers across the Premier League. It’s not just a technical transformation, it’s a cultural transformation of how you use AI assistants to perform tasks you do every day.”
The big picture: The partnership showcases how major sports organizations are leveraging AI to deepen fan relationships and modernize operations, with the Premier League’s global reach making it a significant test case for AI-powered sports entertainment at scale.
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