The Business of Sport - Zoe Burton

Zoe Burton is a Director in Deloitte’s Sports Business Group, with expertise in advising decision-makers on how best to use technology and digital to meet desired business outcomes.

She leads on Deloitte’s Sports Transformation Advisory Group, working with leading sports clubs and governing bodies to future-proof their businesses. Her expertise reaches across all aspects of sport, from strategy to planning, grassroots participation to fan engagement and data & digital transformation to culture.

 Zoe is one of the lead authors of Deloitte’s annual signpost document, the Future of Sport report, published recently.

 

Zoe on Deloitte’s report - “Future of Sport”:

“We went out to a group of global sports leaders beforehand, to understand their perspective of the future and one of the key things that came out was that they were a lot more optimistic about the future of sport and a lot of that stems from change, so we are seeing that sports leaders have already started to transform towards the future of sport and adapt their organisations to the trends and innovate within their organisations themselves, which I think is leading to them being positive about what change can do for their organisations, for example, the use of digital to drive commercial revenues and when you can start seeing that in action, you suddenly become more optimistic.”

 

Zoe on fan engagement: 

“I don’t think I fear for matchdays. If organisations really start focussing on their fan engagement strategy for Generation Z and Generation Alpha, then they will be able to get it right. There is a view at the moment that what Gen Z and Gen Alpha want is digital and content consumption. But as a collaborative view of the sport ecosystem, we need to keep on bringing those audiences into live sport and that has been a really great opportunity that Womens’ sport has done, so it is more accessible, both from a cost perspective, but also from an atmosphere perspective. It feels more family friendly and that’s where you are going to start pulling in those next generations into live sport and into matchday.“

 

Zoe on the demands of owners:

“The next generation is coming and it is real and that increased evolving market means that what is being demanded from new investors and new owners is a whole new level of professionalisation with things like management reports, all the way through to what they are expecting from a revenue perspective, because they haven’t all come from sport and we are seeing boards made up of people from different backgrounds to a sports organisation, which means you have just got that diversity of thought, which ultimately is going to drive growth.”