The Fans You Can’t See

Sports betting and fantasy football didn’t take your fans. They just made most of them anonymous.

Kickoff weekend used to belong to the team. Now it belongs to a second screen. A fan checks their fantasy lineup during the national anthem, opens a betting app at the two-minute warning, and reacts to a bad beat on social media before your postgame email event sends. 

The American Gaming Association projects $29.5 billion in legal, regulated wagering on the 2026 NFL season, and expects prediction-market platforms like Kalshi to roughly double their NFL trading volume to $36.8 billion this year on top of that.¹ Roughly 40 million Americans will play fantasy football this season, and among fans 18 to 29, more than 60% will run a roster.² For that age group, fantasy isn’t a side activity. It’s a primary reason they’re watching at all. 

None of that money or attention flows through a team’s owned channels. It flows through a prediction market or a fantasy platform, none of which have any reason to tell a franchise who its most engaged fans are.

The engagement is real, the relationship isn’t 

This is the version of the “unknown fan” problem that betting and fantasy have made urgent. A team can see attendance climb, streams spike, and second-screen chatter explode during a game, and still have no addressable record of the person behind any of it. The excitement is real. It’s just happening on someone else’s platform, with someone else’s data.

The scale of the distraction is bigger than most teams assume. A PwC survey of roughly 2,000 sports fans found that fans rarely just watch: more than two-thirds check social media during a game, 47% browse the web, and 24% play video games at the same time.³ Only 1% said they do nothing but watch.

For a meaningful share of your audience, betting and fantasy aren’t a distraction from your broadcast. They’re a second, parallel relationship with the game that your team has no visibility into, and that relationship runs on different rules than the ones most fan segmentation still assumes. A fan checking whether their fantasy tight end scored, or whether their bet is still in play  in the fourth quarter, isn’t behaving like a season-ticket holder or a jersey buyer. They’re behaving like someone loyal to specific players and specific outcomes, not a market or a logo. Segmentation built around ZIP codes and ticket tiers has nothing to say to that fan. Segmentation built around real-time player and game-state signals does.

The fix isn’t reacting harder to any single one of these moments. It’s engaging thoughtfully, in real time, and consistently, so a fantasy check-in, a live bet, and an in-stadium moment feed the same fan profile instead of three disconnected guesses. That’s where Iterable comes in.

Where the value actually sits 

The teams that win this aren’t the ones fighting betting platforms for the fan’s attention. They’re the ones that treat betting and fantasy behavior as a signal instead of a threat, and use it to do the thing those apps structurally can’t: build a direct, lasting relationship with the person underneath the bet. That takes three things most legacy marketing stacks weren’t built for.

1. Speed that matches the moment. An injury, a game-changing play, a player breaking a record: these are all triggers with a shelf life measured in minutes, not the next scheduled send. Iterable lets teams fire a personalized push, text, or email the second one of these moments happens, on whichever channel that fan actually has open.

2. A profile built on affinity, not just attendance. The fan worth building a relationship with might never have bought a ticket. What they have is a favorite player, a recurring parlay pattern, or a fantasy roster spot, and that’s enough to personalize around if the data isn’t locked inside a season-ticket database. Without writing a line of code, teams can pull dynamic catalog data, like  a specific player’s jersey or a localized highlight, into a message based on what a fan actually follows.

3. A path from anonymous to known. In-app and in-stadium moments, second-screen betting activity, fantasy check-ins: these are all chances to capture a profile the moment engagement peaks, not weeks later in a generic newsletter. Iterable’s Unknown User Activation lets teams deploy in-stadium or in-app data capture, trivia, seat-upgrade offers, exclusive mobile perks, at exactly that moment, turning anonymous second-screen energy into a known, addressable profile before the game ends.

What this looks like in practice

Iterable’s sports customers are already working pieces of this problem. 

Melbourne Football Club built over 750 new memberships around this kind of personalization: emails that told a fan how many other members lived in their own postcode, which player they shared a birthday month with, and pulled highlights from the specific matches they’d attended.

The NHL took a similar real-time approach with a different mechanic. Working with Iterable and Movable Ink, the league moved off static campaigns and into ones that update as a game unfolds, starting with a pre-game email three hours before puck drop and following with live score updates during play. A single marketer can now build more than 30 versions of that content in a fraction of the time it used to take, and open rates are up 3x.

The PGA of America took a third route to a similar outcome: fewer messages, sent with more relevance. Fahad Zahid, the organization’s Head of Brand and Digital Marketing, described it at Iterable’s Activate conference as speaking to golfers individually instead of running mass marketing, with communication tailored to whether a golfer is competitive, casual, or wellness-driven. Instead of sorting golfers into broad buckets, the PGA built one-to-one relationships with each of them. Engagement is up 84%, with unique impressions doubling. 

Both sessions are available in full through Iterable’s on-demand Activate library.

The question worth asking your team 

Betting and fantasy platforms are not going to start handing teams their user data. But every bet placed and every fantasy lineup set is a fan telling you, in real time, exactly who they care about and how closely they’re watching. The teams that build the infrastructure to hear that signal, and act on it inside the moment it happens, will own a relationship betting never will. The teams that don’t will keep mistaking engagement for a relationship, right up until the platform in between decides to charge them for access to it.

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