LaLiga boosts fan engagement with multiple digital channels and conversational AI

LaLiga, the Spanish national football (soccer) league, is currently in its ninetieth season, and it is more than just a sporting competition, it’s a global entertainment powerhouse. Its televised games attracted more than 2.7 billion TV viewers during the 2017–2018 season, and the league’s Facebook page has nearly 52 million followers. LaLiga fans are a passionate group, eager to delve into match statistics, manage fantasy league teams, and follow the daily activities of the league’s biggest stars. And LaLiga is happy to give them what they want.

“A key to the success of LaLiga is that we put the fans in the middle of every conversation,” says Alfredo Bermejo, Digital Strategy Director at LaLiga. “Whether we’re developing new broadcast technologies—like our Replay360—or building out social media platforms in 16 languages or setting up football academies for kids in other countries, we do our best to cultivate the enthusiasm for LaLiga in every way we can.”

Increasingly, that enthusiasm centers on digital media. “People consume information in different ways than they did in the past,” explains Jose Carlos Franco, Head of Data & Analytics at LaLiga. “It’s no longer just about television broadcasts, it’s about offering a full ecosystem of digital channels. We want to give our fans what they want, when they want it, and how they want it, and to do that we need to be at the leading edge of interactive technologies.”

Embracing innovation to boost fan engagement

LaLiga isn’t merely a source of entertainment, it’s a fixture of Spanish society that the world enjoys. The league employs 581 people globally, and football-related revenue is equivalent to 1.37 percent of the Spanish gross national product. Everywhere you go, you can see adults and kids proudly wearing their team colors and talking about a great goal from the last game or an exciting matchup soon to come. LaLiga also strives to be an inclusive league—in addition to the 41 teams in the two men’s divisions, there is a league for players with cognitive disabilities and LaLiga also supports a women’s league.

A lot of technical work happens behind the scenes to keep all this exciting sports action flowing smoothly, particularly when LaLiga aims to keep giving fans fresh ways to engage with the league and its teams. “Our three main business pillars are strategy, product, and data, and we strive to introduce innovation in all those areas,” says Franco. “That includes not just promoting the league itself, but also supporting our teams with technology they can use to manage their businesses, strengthen their brands, and connect with their fans.”

While LaLiga is creating better content and experiences for its fans, it’s also trying to understand those fans better. The league’s different apps and online channels all generate telemetry data, so LaLiga knows who uses its services, how and when people use them, and for how long. “We use this knowledge to be proactive with our fans,” says Franco. “For example, if someone usually follows a couple games a week but hasn’t connected for a few weeks, we’ll send them a notification just before their favorite team’s next game so they can reconnect.”

Analyzing engagement data offers real-time insights into what fans really want, and that feeds back into development plans and guides the creation of new services. “Any decision within the organization should be supported by data,” says Franco. “We use scorecards that include fan analytics, marketing campaign analytics, and over-the-top (OTT) analytics from recommendation and pricing models. We just created the first scorecard for our international department to give our workers in 43 countries customized, up-to-date information about LaLiga engagement in their own locations.”

Acknowledging the digital transformation imperative

Changes in media consumption patterns have affected every sports organization around the world, making digital transformation not so much an option as a necessity. For LaLiga, this has included acknowledging that the fan experience extends well beyond the 90 minutes of a typical game. “We need to keep the audiences engaged and make LaLiga relevant for them during the rest of the week,” says Bermejo. “To do this, we’ve grown into new business models that bring us closer to the fans. We’ve shifted from interacting primarily in a business-to-business scenario with our partners to adding direct business-to-consumer interactions.”

To manage and promote all these activities, LaLiga developed a digital innovation platform to use for new services and products designed to support the league’s core business, the needs of member teams, and fan access to apps, games, and merchandise. LaLiga chose to build this foundation with the Microsoft Sports Digital Platform, a suite of Microsoft Azure services and tools that makes it easy for LaLiga to manage social platforms, boost business intelligence, and deploy mobile apps for the league and its teams. For a strong global brand like LaLiga, it made perfect sense to partner with a strong global brand like Microsoft.

“Digital transformation is not just about technology, it’s also about understanding organizational change and the impact that the transformation will have on people,” says Minerva Santana, Director of Innovation and Global Development at LaLiga. “Microsoft has a wealth of experience helping some of the world’s best-known companies drive technological innovation, and that gave us a high degree of confidence that it was the right choice for us.”

For LaLiga, Azure is not just a technology solution, it’s a key part of the league’s overall IT strategy. “With Azure, we get a wide range of products and services that are easy to deploy and connect—not just with other Microsoft products, but with third-party tools as well,” says Santana. “That gives us the flexibility to choose the best products for every situation, depending on our needs. Microsoft has also devoted extensive resources to security and compliance, and that is especially important to us because of Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation. Using Azure, we can centralize user consents, independent from our different channels, which makes our job easier and improves the fan experience.”

Building a personal digital assistant with conversational AI

LaLiga is constantly monitoring trends in digital consumption, and the league believes that one of the biggest changes happening today is a move away from text-based communication toward voice-based interactions and conversational AI. “We see most of the major technology companies developing voice products,” says Bermejo. “It’s the easiest and most natural way for humans to interact, so we wanted to give our fans that option. They don’t need to navigate through an app to find information, they just ask a question in plain language.”

So the league developed the LaLiga virtual assistant, a personal digital assistant designed to deliver a consistent, high-quality fan experience across all major voice channels. The LaLiga virtual assistant has launched for Google Assistant and Skype, and the league plans to add Cortana, Facebook Messenger, Alexa, Slack, and other channels. When someone asks a question—for example, “Who is Lionel Messi?”—the assistant returns the answer in a graphic, in text, and in spoken word. In this example, that answer includes a picture of Messi, his basic statistics, a link to his season results, and an option to dive deeper for more information, making it a valuable resource for hardcore fans as well as casual ones.

For more avid fans, the assistant can help manage fantasy league teams—using machine learning to analyze a fan’s roster and offer suggestions about which players to drop and which to add. The assistant can also link to third-party data to promote tie-ins with sponsorship partners like footwear and apparel manufacturers if a fan asks about a player’s gear.

LaLiga worked with Microsoft to develop the assistant using a variety of Azure technologies, beginning with Microsoft Bot Framework for bot development and Azure Bot Service to host the bot in Azure and connect it to common channels. The development team created an initial prototype in just a couple of weeks and then began adding more sophisticated functionality. The assistant uses Azure Cognitive Services Language Understanding and Azure Text Analytics to process incoming queries and determine user intents in multiple languages. The main storage system is Azure SQL Database, and the assistant uses a highly optimized caching system with Azure Cache for Redis to reduce computing load. Each channel has different scalability requirements, so each one has its own Azure App Service to fine-tune and cover those needs. That is essential given the league’s projections for the assistant.

LaLiga anticipates having a large volume of unique users a day, each of whom may ask multiple questions, thus generating a huge number of queries. So the league needs the ability to scale out quickly and reliably, which Azure delivers. “Building the assistant with Azure also means that it works seamlessly with our organization’s overall data platform,” says Franco. “As a result, we can gather information on what fans are asking about and use that within our analytics tools to continue delivering better experiences.”

Through the course of development, LaLiga learned valuable lessons about how to optimize and maintain the logic behind the assistant to make retraining and redeployment as easy as possible. For a closer look at how LaLiga produced a voice assistant that can satisfy the needs of a huge, multilingual, global fan base, read the blog post.

Driving brand identity and looking to the future

Although LaLiga is already one of the world’s best-loved sporting brands, the LaLiga virtual assistant is a way to boost its image even higher. “With tools like this, we’re sending a message to the market that LaLiga cares about its fans around the world, about satisfying their needs—whatever those are—and about delivering a superior experience on every channel,” says Santana. “At the same time, we’re letting the sporting world know that LaLiga is all about innovation and that being on the leading edge is an essential part of our brand identity.”

To stay on that leading edge, LaLiga is exploring things like augmented reality and applying AI to business intelligence processes to learn more about the organization and its fans. LaLiga is also looking to promote new developments by creating an Inspiration Center—an open innovation platform where startups and entrepreneurs can work with LaLiga and have an impact on the sports and entertainment industries. All this exciting work will build on the firm foundation LaLiga already put in place.

“Our digital innovation platform built on Microsoft Azure helps us deliver the best possible fan experiences for the world’s best sports league,” says Franco. “I think it would have been impossible for us to achieve our many advances of the past year without all the different services and products that we are using in Azure.”

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