Building a Sports Nation, Part 8.
Building a Sports Nation, Part 8.
By Marc Esterer and Alexander Strulak
Sports systems are generating more data than ever.
Athletes wear sensors. Federations digitize registrations. Facilities process bookings online. Governments track participation and funding. Artificial intelligence is beginning to support coaching, administration, talent identification and performance analysis.
Yet technology does not strengthen a sports system simply because it has been introduced.
A federation can launch an athlete platform while its information remains disconnected from the ministry. A government can build a national database that nobody keeps updated. A facility-booking platform can process millions of transactions without changing how capacity is allocated. And an AI tool trained on incomplete data can automate a weak decision rather than improve it.
Technology can digitize fragmentation just as easily as it can solve it.
Different countries illustrate different stages of digital maturity. Colombia, Indonesia and Kenya all show how difficult and important it is to create common data foundations across fragmented sports systems. Ireland demonstrates how consistent evidence can move beyond reporting and begin influencing policy and investment. Singapore shows how digital services can improve the everyday experience of accessing public sport. And Australia is moving from mature national data infrastructure toward an explicit, responsible approach to artificial intelligence.
Four questions therefore matter:
Is sports data connected, reliable and governed well enough to create a trusted view of the system?
Does evidence routinely change policy, investment and operational decisions?
Do digital services measurably improve how people, athletes and organizations experience sport?
Can emerging technologies such as AI be tested and scaled responsibly across the ecosystem?
The sequence matters.
Connect the data. Turn it into evidence. Improve the experience. Then scale the technology.
The first digital challenge in many sports systems is not a lack of technology. It is fragmentation.
Ministries, federations, Olympic committees, local authorities, facilities and high-performance centers frequently collect similar information using different systems, definitions and identifiers. Individually, those databases may work. Collectively, they may still fail to answer surprisingly basic questions: How many active athletes and clubs are there? Which facilities exist and how heavily are they used? Where are participation gaps? Which athletes receive public support? Which organizations receive funding, and what do they deliver?
Colombia, Indonesia and Kenya illustrate three different stages of the same challenge.
Colombia has chosen to build a common national layer. In July 2025, the country formally established the Sistema Único de Información del Deporte, a centralized platform administered by the Ministry of Sport. Its intended scope includes sports organizations, athletes, facilities, recreation and physical activity, with the explicit purpose of improving public-policy decisions. The strategic idea is significant: rather than another stand-alone federation system, Colombia is attempting to create a common view of the national sports sector.
Indonesia already has more digital capability distributed across individual sports. In badminton, for example, PBSI introduced a Sport Science Analytics platform after athlete-performance information used during the Paris 2024 cycle had been dispersed across non-standardized sources. The broader challenge is now to connect such federation-level initiatives through common national standards and data integration rather than allowing each sport to develop another isolated system.
Kenya sits earlier in the journey. Its Draft National Sports Policy 2025 identifies fragmented information, weak inter-agency coordination and significant gaps in digital infrastructure across the sports system. Its strategic priority is consequently more fundamental: establish centralized information and strengthen national data-management capability before more advanced analytics can become meaningful.
Taken together, the three countries demonstrate an important progression:
Digitize the information → Standardize it → Connect it → Make it usable across the system
That progression requires more than software. Countries need common definitions, athlete and organization identifiers, data ownership rules, privacy and cybersecurity standards, interoperability requirements and accountability for keeping information current. That shared data spine becomes the foundation for everything that follows, from performance analytics to facility planning and eventually artificial intelligence. Otherwise, digitalization simply moves fragmented records from paper into fragmented databases.
Connected data is only the foundation. The harder question is what somebody actually does differently because the information exists.
Many organizations become good at reporting without becoming data-driven. A dashboard shows that participation has declined, but the program remains unchanged. Facility data identifies unused capacity, but operating hours stay the same. A funding report demonstrates persistent inequality, yet the same allocation is repeated the following year. The transition occurs when data becomes part of a feedback loop between evidence and action.
Ireland provides a useful example because national participation measurement has become an established part of its sports-system infrastructure. The Irish Sports Monitor has operated since 2007 and surveys approximately 8,500 adults each year, measuring participation, physical activity, club membership, volunteering and differences between population groups. In 2025, it estimated that approximately 2.12 million adults, 48% of the adult population, participated regularly in sport.
The national headline was positive. The more useful strategic insight was less comfortable. The participation gap between higher- and lower-socioeconomic groups reached 22 percentage points in 2025, compared with 19 points in 2024 and 16 in 2017. A national average alone would therefore suggest increasing success while masking a widening inequality underneath it.
That is precisely where data becomes valuable. It allows a sports authority to move beyond questions such as “Did participation increase?” towards more actionable ones:
Which groups are improving?
Which are falling behind?
Where are barriers persisting?
Which interventions are working?
Where should additional resources go?
Which programs should be redesigned or stopped?
Sport Ireland has increasingly complemented national monitoring with structured research and evaluation across governing bodies and local sports partnerships. That creates the operating loop a mature system needs:
Measure → Identify the gap → Intervene → Evaluate → Adapt
The same logic applies beyond participation. Facility utilization should influence operating models and infrastructure investment. Athlete data should influence training and medical decisions. Funding information should influence resource allocation. Fan and membership data should shape commercial products.
A mature digital sports system should therefore be able to produce concrete examples where evidence led to a different choice, and subsequently measure whether that choice improved the outcome.
Some of the highest-value sports technology is not particularly sophisticated. It simply removes friction. Finding a program. Booking a court. Paying. Entering a swimming pool. Registering a child. Discovering whether a facility actually has capacity. Every unnecessary step sits between someone’s intention to participate and their ability to do so.
Singapore’s ActiveSG ecosystem demonstrates what happens when a digital service becomes part of the public sports infrastructure itself. Launched in 2014, ActiveSG developed a membership base of approximately 2.5 million people within its first decade. Its scale allowed Singapore to integrate memberships, public facility access, programs and bookings through one national consumer-facing system.
Scale also exposed weaknesses. High-demand facilities faced automated booking scripts, multiple-account behavior and persistent competition for scarce peak-hour capacity. Rather than treating this merely as a technical problem, Sport Singapore redesigned how those public assets were allocated.
In 2024, the new MyActiveSG+ platform introduced verified user accounts, improved search and family functionality, as well as balloting for high-demand peak periods instead of relying entirely on first-come-first-served booking.
The important result is not the launch of another platform. It is that digital intervention changed access. By 2025, the number of unique users successfully obtaining ActiveSG facility bookings was about 60% higher than in 2023. Sport Singapore continues to monitor booking behavior and review the allocation algorithm where necessary.
That illustrates two different forms of value. For participants, technology can make access simpler, fairer and more transparent. For operators, every transaction produces information about real demand: which facilities are oversubscribed, when capacity sits unused, which users return, which activities are growing and where supply may no longer match demand.
Digital maturity should therefore be assessed from the user’s perspective as well as the operator’s. A platform can be technically sophisticated and still fail if people avoid it, processes remain cumbersome or organizations maintain parallel offline workflows.
The best sports platform does not merely digitize a service. It makes the service better.
Artificial intelligence has become the most visible symbol of innovation in sport. The opportunities are substantial: personalized training, injury-risk analysis, talent identification, automated administration, facility optimization, officiating support, content generation and more efficient volunteer management.
But AI sits at the end of a much longer capability chain. Without sufficiently reliable data, interoperable systems, clear ownership, digital skills and appropriate governance, advanced technology can simply produce more sophisticated versions of unreliable decisions.
Australia illustrates why sequencing matters. Its Athlete Management System already provides a shared digital foundation across high-performance sport. The AIS reports more than 17 million observations from over 32,000 athletes across 45 sporting organizations, combining information including training sessions, injury treatments and athlete monitoring. The platform provides alerts, reports and visualizations to athletes, coaches and support staff and is designed to reduce duplication across the national network.
That existing data capability is important because Australia is now deliberately building the next layer. The Australian Sports Commission and CSIRO have developed both a Roadmap for AI in Australian Sport and a Guide for Responsible AI in Sport, following consultation with more than 100 representatives from sport, government and technology.
The roadmap identifies four broad opportunity areas:
Athlete performance, safety and fair competition
Efficient and sustainable sports operations
Stronger engagement with sport
Greater diversity, inclusion and accessibility
Equally important is what accompanies the opportunity. Australia’s guidance explicitly addresses fairness, transparency, privacy, human oversight and the risks of relying too heavily on automated outputs, particularly where decisions affect athletes, participants or competition integrity.
That changes the definition of innovation maturity. It is no longer enough to ask whether a federation has tested AI. Governments should ask whether the underlying data is reliable, whether the use case is clearly defined, who is accountable for the output, whether users can challenge it, whether privacy and athlete rights are protected and whether a successful application can scale beyond one organization.
Australia’s progression provides a useful model:
Shared data → Analytical capability → Defined AI use cases → Responsible scaling
Skipping those stages may generate impressive pilots without creating a stronger sports system.
The question is not whether sport will use innovative tools leveraging AI. It is whether the sports system is ready to use it well.
Vinciamo Sports
Power Insight.
The article series and engagement is led by Marc Esterer, Director Business Development, and Alexander Strulak, Strategic Partnerships Advisor & Communications Manager.
A note on process: AI tools were used to support the research and visualisation of the data presented.
Sources: Government of Colombia (Decree 855 of 2025, establishing the Sistema Único de Información del Deporte); Indonesian Ministry of Youth and Sports (PBSI Sport Science Analytics and national sports-data integration initiatives); Kenya State Department for Sports (Draft National Sports Policy 2025); Sport Ireland (Irish Sports Monitor 2025); Sport Singapore (MyActiveSG+ membership and booking platform); Singapore Ministry of Culture, Community and Youth (MyActiveSG+ facility-booking outcomes); Australian Institute of Sport (Athlete Management System); Australian Sports Commission / CSIRO (Roadmap for AI in Australian Sport and Guide for Responsible AI in Sport).
A. Strulak writes on sports business, commercial strategy and the economics of rights. Vinciamo Sports, Sport. Reimagined.
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