Sport's invisible commercial infrastructure

There is a version of this conversation that most commercial directors have had at some point. Someone from the digital team presents the app metrics with open rates, session times, and monthly active users. The commercial director listens, asks whether it drives ticket sales, gets a slightly unsatisfying answer, and mentally files it under "important but not urgent." The meeting moves on to the sponsorship deck.

The problem is the actual argument.

Sergey puts it simply: the app itself actually generates zero direct revenue. Now, before you unsubscribe to this email and reply with “why is this useful for then?”

It is, in pure accounting terms, a cost centre. But 99% of the actions that generate revenue — ticket purchases, streaming subscriptions, merchandise — flow through it.

Every time a fan buys a hospitality package, renews their season subscription, or picks up a replica shirt, they almost certainly do it through a website or mobile app. The physical fan shop and the stadium box office are essentially decorative at this point.

So when a commercial team looks at app investment and asks what percentage of revenue it generates, they're asking the wrong question entirely. Which is exactly what I asked Sergey.

You wouldn't ask what percentage of matchday revenue your stadium generates. You'd ask what would happen to everything else if the stadium didn't exist. The app is the same thing. It's infrastructure, and nobody debates whether infrastructure is worth funding once you frame it that way.

After speaking with Sergey, and honestly, after watching this pattern repeat itself across the industry for years, it comes down to three things:

The commercial window is not what most properties think it is. You have roughly 90 minutes of live action where your fans’ attention is completely captured. Everything else — the other 29 days of the month, the entire off-season, the 23 hours of every race day that aren't the race itself- is dead air unless you build something to fill it.

Sergey makes this point in a way that is hard to argue with. If you take a month, you have 29 days to activate your fanbase digitally. The 90 minutes are almost irrelevant to the commercial opportunity because you already have those fans at that moment. The question is what you are doing with everyone else, at every other moment, across the rest of the calendar.

The apps that understand this work year-round. F1, NBA, MLB — you can open any of them in the off-season and find things to explore, with content to consume, and community to participate in. Sergey notes that if you open a Bundesliga club app in the summer, you are essentially looking at a waiting room. Nothing to do, with nowhere to go, and no reason to come back tomorrow. The product communicates, without saying it, that the organisation only needs you when there is something to sell.

For motorsport specifically, this is a sponsorship problem as much as it is a product problem. Partners are paying for a year-round presence. The digital infrastructure that could deliver that presence goes dormant between seasons. The value proposition that was sold in the partnership deck quietly stops being true for eight months of the year.

Humbleteam was working with a major football club on their ticketing experience. The brief involved adding video content to the ticket purchase flow — the kind where you choose between a VIP hospitality package and a standard seat, and you can see what each experience looks like before you commit. Sergey and a designer sat down with Claude and Lovable and built a working, live prototype in 12 hours. The engineering team's response was that it would be added to the 2027 roadmap.

That gap — 12 hours versus three years is an organisational one, and it runs much deeper than one anecdote suggests.

Sergey's view is that the sports industry has a talent pipeline issue that most organisations have not honestly confronted. Designers do not aspire to work at sports clubs the way they do at Google or a well-funded startup. The career cachet simply is not there. He has attended design conferences for years and can count on one hand the number of speakers from a sports organisation. The result is that the people building these products are often fans who ended up in the role rather than specialists who chose it, and that distinction matters enormously when you are trying to move at any kind of pace.

The arithmetic compounds quickly. If your release cycle runs on three months, you get four shots per year at closing the gap between what your app does and what your fans expect it to do. Meanwhile, the apps your fans are spending their actual time on — TikTok, Instagram, YouTube — are shipping updates continuously. Every quarter you do not close that gap, the distance grows a little wider, and the catch-up cost gets a little steeper.

And Sergey points out something that product owners in motorsport should pay attention to. The same negative App Store reviews for certain series have been sitting there, unanswered and unaddressed, for years. Fans are emailing [email protected] directly because they are so frustrated that they track down an address and compose a message. That level of proactive effort was entirely ignored. He points out that simply reading and acting on what fans are already telling you for free would solve around 20% of the problems immediately.

No fan has two club apps open at the same time. A PSG supporter is not choosing between the PSG app and the Barcelona app. That competitive dynamic does not exist in the real world, and yet most properties benchmark their digital experience against rival clubs and rival series as though it does. Sergey's point is that the actual competition is TikTok, Instagram, and Twitch. Fans under 35 compare every digital experience they have to the most polished, frictionless apps they use daily.

Commercially, this matters because the consumption layer and the community layer require completely two ways of thinking. Motorsport, to its credit, has largely built the consumption layer. I was surprised to hear the F1 has game mechanics and is at the same level as the NBA and NFL. It’s become the bare minimum to have, but the gaps in motorsport are in the community layer. Beyond that buzzword, that layer has stories, comments, social interaction, and a two-way conversation. Humbleteam's audit of 27 leading sports apps found that only 19% have Stories and only 19% have TikTok-style vertical clips. F1, despite being the best motorsport app by a significant distance, had no comments and no social layer at the time of the audit — gaps they have since started closing, which tells you the report identified something real rather than something theoretical.

The onboarding flow is where this gets most commercially interesting. Every question a sports app asks during onboarding is an opportunity to collect first-party data. Your favourite driver, location, or viewing preferences.

Depending on the type of questions you ask, the sponsorship package becomes more valuable because it makes your audience more legible to potential partners.

F1 does onboarding well precisely because it treats it as an exchange rather than an interrogation. You tell the app your favourite team, and it gives you something back immediately.

You share your location, and it shows you race times in your timezone. Give and take, every step of the way. Most apps ask for everything upfront and give nothing in return until you have already decided whether to abandon the flow — and Sergey's data shows that millions of users do exactly that every single month.

And the login experience is usually where you lose them first. Sergey's data from client analytics shows millions of users hitting the "Forgot password" link every month — which means they wanted to come back, found the barrier too high, and left. Only 40% of the 27 apps audited offer third-party login through Google, Facebook, or Apple. Motorsport sits almost entirely in the other 60%.