The end of a major global event like the FIFA World Cup is where the real opportunity begins. Brands will have accumulated a wealth of high-intent data: who engaged, what they cared about, how they interacted.
After a major sporting event, brands should follow up with fans, using the insights to continue the relationship.
Strategies to follow up with fans include delivering experiences tailored to fan preferences, expanding engagement into new channels and touchpoints, and using AI to refine and personalize future interactions.
Scale alone doesn’t guarantee impact: Organizations must rely on unified data and AI-driven engagement to enable them to engage in real time.
In 2026, the FIFA World Cup will make history.
Hosted across North America, it will be the largest tournament in the competition’s history and feature 48 teams, millions of fans in seat, and billions more engaging online. For brands, it represents one of the most concentrated moments of global attention in the next decade.
But the real opportunity isn’t simply engaging with fans. It’s in what happens after the final whistle. How do you turn a surge of attention into lasting impact? How do you convert first-time visitors into lifelong fans?
Events like the World Cup present a unique engagement dynamic. Engagement isn’t gradual—it’s explosive. Fans flood websites, apps, and digital experiences in real time, often interacting across multiple touchpoints in the same session.
At the same time, expectations are higher than ever. Fans want:
For many organizations, especially in industries like Sports & Entertainment, Retail, and Consumer Products, this creates a familiar challenge: systems built for steady-state engagement suddenly need to perform at massive scale during high peak seasons.
Without the right foundation, brands risk missing the moment, or worse, losing the audience as quickly as they gained it. And in today’s world, every marketing dollar matters.
Too often, engagement strategies around major events focus on the moment itself.
You’ve spent months ensuring your campaigns are timed to perfection, promotional pushes are created with precision, and every content and channel has been tested to its limits to prepare for the influx of customer engagement.
While these efforts can drive impressive results, they rarely translate into long-term value. The result is a pattern seen across industries: the dreaded unsubscribe.
The problem isn’t effort. It’s infrastructure.
To truly capitalize on an event like the World Cup, brands need to think beyond campaigns and build a continuous engagement engine backed by data connected across your entire business.
At the center of that engine is unified customer data. Every fan interaction during the World Cup—streaming a match, browsing merchandise, opening an email, downloading an app—creates valuable insight. But when those interactions live in disconnected systems, they miss the opportunity to maximize their impact.
Connecting your customer data in real time changes that by bringing together signals from across your business into a single unified profile.
This allows organizations to:
During an event as dynamic as the World Cup, this real-time visibility becomes a competitive advantage.
With unified data in place, engagement can evolve from static campaigns to dynamic, AI-driven conversations. Instead of sending the same message to everyone, brands can segment audiences based on live event behavior and trigger personalized communications in the moment.
This is especially powerful during live matches and tournament progression, when fan interest shifts rapidly based on outcomes, teams, and storylines.
AI enables brands to keep pace with the speed of fan expectations, optimizing engagement continuously, with less manual effort. Win or lose, this leaves every fan with a newfound sentiment towards your organization and a huge opportunity for marketers to compound this moment to grow their fan base.
Major tournaments—like the 2026 Football World Cup—ignite passion and bring people together across cultures and backgrounds. Fans don’t just watch; they live every moment, from dramatic build-ups to unforgettable finishes.
Gamification lets brands tap into that energy and turn passive viewers into active participants. By adding interactive experiences, you can reward curiosity, fuel competition, and deepen emotional connection with your audience.
Simple, engaging, and highly effective.
More interaction, richer customer data, and stronger brand loyalty—delivered in a way that feels natural and fun.
SAP makes this easy with plug-and-play gamification tools and flexible, customizable solutions tailored to your needs.
At SAP Engagement Cloud, we partner with some of the world’s most beloved sports teams, like FC Bayern and the San Jose Sharks, as well as prestigious sporting events.
Global sporting events are more than just moments; they are ecosystems of continuous engagement. For organizations like the PGA European Tour Group, delivering meaningful fan experiences means connecting with millions of people across digital touchpoints, languages, and moments in time.
The numbers behind the PGA European Tour Group tell a powerful story. During Ryder Cup event week alone, they see engagement soar to 7 million unique web users across its digital ecosystem. Their database includes more than 2 million fan records, and the mobile app sees hundreds of thousands of active users each month.
Their organization manages the DP World Tour, running year-round, offering regular opportunities to engage fans. The Ryder Cup, by contrast, is a global event held every two years—creating intense peaks in engagement but fewer opportunities to build relationships between events. Bridging those two models requires a unified, intelligent approach to fan engagement.
For the PGA European Tour Group, the issue was clear. Legacy tools and disconnected systems made it impossible to fully understand and engage fans.
Before its transformation, the organization relied on separate tools for email and mobile engagement, with no unified customer data approach. This meant fan interactions lived in silos, making it difficult to deliver coordinated, personalized experiences.
The brand’s transformation began with a strategic decision: to unify data, engagement, and intelligence on a single platform.
By adopting SAP Engagement Cloud and SAP Customer Data Platform, the PGA European Tour Group created a foundation built on three principles:
This unified approach allows every fan interaction—whether browsing a ticketing site, using the mobile app, or engaging with email—to contribute to a single, actionable profile.
Transformation is only meaningful when it delivers real outcomes.
Within just a few months of going live, the PGA European Tour Group began to see tangible results:
These capabilities represent a significant shift from static campaigns to dynamic, data-driven engagement. Perhaps most importantly, these improvements were delivered without disrupting ongoing operations, even during active tournament seasons and while preparing for future Ryder Cup events.
While the foundation is in place, the PGA European Tour Group is beginning to explore the potential of AI. Early use cases include:
Looking ahead, the opportunity is even greater. With unified data and integrated AI, the organization can:
The Ryder Cup represents one of the most watched and emotionally charged events in golf. It is also a proving ground for what modern fan engagement can look like.
By building their foundation now, the PGA European Tour Group is preparing not just for the next Ryder Cup but for the future of fan engagement.
Because the foundation is already in place, the transition from event engagement to lifelong fan loyalty is seamless. What was once a one-time interaction becomes the start of a long-term relationship.
The 2026 World Cup will be one of the largest engagement opportunities brands have ever seen. But scale alone doesn’t guarantee impact. The organizations that succeed will be those that prepare before the moment, engage in real time, and continue the relationship long after it ends.
With unified data, AI-driven engagement, and the right foundation, brands can transform a surge of global attention into lasting customer loyalty.
And that’s how you win—long after the final whistle, put, or buzzer.
Megan Hostetler is Global Head of Content Marketing at SAP Engagement Cloud and has spent 10+ years in the SaaS industry across the martech and sales enablement tech landscape. With a product marketing background, she understands features and functionality inside and out to help customers realize the full value of their purchase and translate those learnings to content that resonates. Formerly, she hosted The Marketing Cloudcast podcast, where she interviewed hundreds of experts to discuss trends, innovative tactics, and relevant insights in today’s marketing landscape.
Megan Hostetler
Global Head of Content
