Three KPIs.Ten Rules.One flywheel.
Everything we measure and recommend comes from a small set of published models. They are in the two books, and they are what the diagnostic is built on. Here is each one, from the loop at the centre to the number that decides what earns investment.
Every turnmakes the nextone easier.
Attention drives revenue. Revenue funds performance. Performance deepens fan engagement. Fan engagement amplifies attention. The organisation does not grow in a line, it compounds.
A flywheel stores and releases energy. It needs consistent force to get moving, and once it has enough speed it becomes hard to stop. Cut the investment in new initiatives and it does not stop at once: it slows with every rotation until restarting costs far more than maintaining would have.
A wheel turns at the speed of its slowest stage. Attention without commercial means reach you cannot bank. Commercial without reinvestment means revenue that never becomes room. Sport without attention means a better product nobody sees. So the question for any club, league or event is which stage is braking.
| In the books | In the diagnostic | What it covers |
|---|---|---|
| Fans | Attention | Reach, frequency, loyalty and the depth of the bond |
| Revenue | Commercial | Sponsors, media rights, ticketing, the economics of the property |
| Sports performance | Sport | Talent, competitive strength, governance, durability over seasons |
The flywheel is not scale-specific. It is structural.
The inputs are smaller below the elite, the timeline is shorter and the ceiling is different. The architecture is identical. Every organisation can build its own version of the same compounding system, calibrated to its tier, its catchment and its realistic ceiling.
Headroom is not a KPI. It is what Commercial creates and Sport spends. That is why we score three KPIs, not four.
What creates the pull. And what turns pull into revenue.
Your organisation is the core. The stronger your values and the sharper your goals, the more Gravity Amplifiers you can run: initiatives and projects that create value. Value creation is what pulls fans in, and what turns fan pull into sponsor and media pull. Attention flows back to the core, and that is what you can measure and price.
-
01
Core
Your organisation as it actually is today: identity, story, who you are for.
-
02
Values
What you stand for, and who you refuse to become. The internal filter every decision goes through.
-
03
Goals
Where you are trying to arrive, derived from your values and your stakeholders. Not a target list. A direction.
-
04
Gravity Amplifiers
The initiatives and projects that create measurable value for your fans, your city, your sport. This is the layer we score and rank in the diagnostic.
-
05
Fans
The audience your amplifiers pull in and hold: reach, frequency, loyalty, and the depth of the bond.
-
06
Sponsors & Media
The commercial layer that follows fans, not the other way around. Rights value, sponsor renewal, editorial share of voice.
Attraction radiates outward, carried by your values, your goals and the initiatives you run. In return, Attention flows back into the core, and that is what PowerSCOAR reads, PowerBUILDR builds around, and PowerPLAYR keeps running.
Pull first.Technology later.
Sports organisations are already gravitational in a crowded entertainment universe. Every initiative should amplify that existing pull instead of bolting on artificial gimmicks.
So the method changes the question. Not “what can AI do for us?” or “how could we use sensors in our stadium?”, but “how can we deepen the emotional connection between our fans and our story?” and “what would make us so compelling that partners actively want to be part of it?”. Only once the attraction goals are clear do technologies come in, as amplifiers.
The core
Your fundamental goals and values define the starting point. What you stand for and consistently deliver creates the first attraction. Not marketing copy: the observable pattern of decisions over time.
Gravity amplifiers
Initiatives derived from your goals strengthen the field. More fans create more attention, more attention attracts sponsors and media. Projects that contradict your values weaken it, even when they look commercially attractive.
The self-reinforcing cycle
More resources enable more initiatives, which attract more fans, which generate more resources. It only holds while the initiatives stay connected to the core. Disconnected projects dissipate energy instead of building it.
Lens: the Hedgehog Concept
Adapted from Jim Collins for sport: find the intersection of what deeply inspires you and your community, what you can become excellent at in your context, and what drives your economic engine. That intersection is the filter for the initiatives that get your best resources.
Let valuedecide.
FanLiV is the foundational metric of Rule 6, Valuation. It measures what a fan relationship is worth over time, not just in one season's spend.
It covers spending patterns, and also engagement depth, community participation and advocacy: content creation, social amplification and community building that traditional customer metrics do not capture. Fan value goes far beyond the transaction.
Its job is to stop resource allocation by politics, personal preference or the enthusiasm of the moment. Before an initiative is scored, its expected effect on FanLiV is made explicit: which fans benefit, through which lever, by how much, and over how many seasons.
| Lever | Definition |
|---|---|
| ARPF | Average revenue per fan: identifiable fan-linked revenue divided by the number of identifiable fans |
| Retention | Share of identifiable fans retained year on year, the mirror of churn |
| Acquisition | Rate at which anonymous contacts become identified fans |
| Frequency | Revenue-generating interactions per fan per season: visits, purchases, digital touchpoints |
Every initiative is rated one to five on five criteria. The weights are configurable, because a club building from scratch and a club with a large fan base have different priorities. These are the default weights.
| Criterion | Default weight | What it asks |
|---|---|---|
| FanLiV impact | 30% | How much does it move fan lifetime value, for which segments? |
| Strategic alignment | 25% | Does it serve the goals and values that define your direction? |
| Feasibility | 20% | Do you have the capability to deliver it, or a partner who does? |
| ROI potential | 15% | What value does it create relative to what it costs? |
| Risk | 10% | What could go wrong, and how exposed are you if it does? |
Instead of twenty mediocre projects, a few essential ones.
From a frameworkto principlesyou can act on.
The Sports Innovation Alignment Framework, SIAF, rests on one principle: alignment first, then action. In clear contrast to technology-first or AI-first approaches, which have led many sports organisations into costly dead ends.
SIAF looks at every initiative from four perspectives at once: the internal one of departments, staff, teams and athletes; the fans and members; sponsors, partners, media and service providers; and the digital and technological requirements. That is why it starts with values, not technology analysis, and with stakeholders, not competitors.
| Tool | Role |
|---|---|
| The 10 Rules | The guiding principles for thinking and deciding |
| PowerSCOAR | The diagnostic: an honest view of where you stand, strengths, gaps and readiness, as a heat map. Introduced in the book as the Sports Club Readiness Assessment |
| SIAF | The implementation framework that aligns initiatives with vision, stakeholder needs and capabilities |
Does a framework exist for spectator sport?
Andy's question, and the honest answer: no. Only methods borrowed from other industries that did not fit a business where the product is a competition.
SIAF is published
Nils Sterenborg and Thomas Lutz publish the framework in three connected phases. Inspire & Assess builds a shared picture of the future and confronts it with an honest look at today. Plan & Design turns it into priorities, project plans and capabilities, scored with a weighted model. Execute & Evolve moves from proof of concept to a minimum loveable product, with fans as co-creators.
The model gets a diagnostic
SIAF is extended with a readiness diagnostic, first published as the Sports Club Readiness Assessment and today PowerSCOAR. Before the roadmap, the question is whether the organisation can execute: governance, cross-functional working, a shared definition of attractiveness, a baseline.
The framework crystallises into ten principles
The complexity is distilled into rules leaders can apply at once and return to. SIAF lives on inside them: Rule 1, Structure, is the three phases. Every rule gets its template set and a checklist for five tiers.
The method becomes an instrument
PowerSCOAR diagnoses where you stand. PowerBUILDR decides what to build and houses the 10 Rules. PowerPLAYR keeps it running.
Not tips.Value creationdirectives.
From the Sunset Sports Festival edition of The 10 Rules, chapter one: rethinking value creation in sports. It reads the rules as a C-level and investor-grade framework for the people who carry final accountability, chairs, chief executives, revenue and sporting directors, boards and the investors who back them. This reading is becoming its own book: The 10 Rules of Sports Management, a practical guide for operators and investors in the spectator sports mid-market.
Define what you measure: fan attention, financial performance, sporting results.
Define how you make decisions, in a sequence a board can follow and defend.
Defines the mechanism that turns those decisions into compounding value.
That is the system. Everything else is implementation.
Five patterns.One root cause.
Most organisations make long-term asset decisions under short-term structural pressure. In open league systems, relegation can halve revenue in a season, so every decision is filtered through one question: does this help us win this season?
That is not a management failure. It is a structural one, and a structural problem needs a structural answer. Long-term value in spectator sport is not created by good ideas. It is created by good systems.
Most clubs already know what they're missing. Few know what it's costing them.
The 10 Rules of Sports Innovation · Sunset Sports Festival edition
Talent dependency
The capacity to create value lives in two or three people. When they leave, the capability leaves with them. Nothing has been institutionalised.
Idea abundance
The problem is not generating ideas. It is selection and sequencing. Without a method, more ideas produce more noise, not more progress.
Short-term success
Language, metrics and applause all run on a seasonal clock. A second, longer planning horizon is rarely installed next to the operational calendar.
The measurement vacuum
Attendance, followers, shirt sales and league position get tracked. Attractiveness as an asset does not. Without a baseline there is no roadmap, and every investment is a guess.
The digital facade
A platform is installed, an app launched, a head of digital hired. The tools are new. The decision-making structure underneath is identical.
Efficiencyhas a ceiling.Effectivenesscompounds.
Efficiency asks how to do the same things better. Effectiveness asks what entirely different things you could be doing, for whom, and with what compounding return.
Building means revenue streams that are not tied to match results, fan relationships grounded in identity and community that survive a bad season, and partnerships that grow because the organisation's attractiveness grows. Attractiveness can be measured, diagnosed and systematically improved.
We do not estimate. We diagnose. We create value.
Portfolio governance
Are initiatives governed as a portfolio, with structured prioritisation and accountability?
Working relationships
Do the departments that must work together on an initiative actually do so, or do they operate in silos?
A shared definition
Does leadership share one measurable definition of attractiveness, or is every proposal judged by who is in the room?
A baseline
Is there a current baseline that progress can be tracked against and reported to a board or investor?
With the answers, a twenty-four month roadmap becomes operational. Without them, the same roadmap stays aspirational, which is another word for expensive.
One method,three ways in.
Power Play
The sport innovation playbook by Nils Sterenborg and Thomas Lutz, with chapters from ten practitioners. Meyer & Meyer Sport.
Read about the book → 08 / KnowledgeThe 10 Rules
Ten rules of value creation for sports management. More than eighty templates, five revenue tiers.
See the ten rules →See your gap. Know your room.
Before any initiative is designed, the right question is not what to do. It is where exactly you are, and what that is costing you. The Fast Lane answers it in about twenty minutes.