Premier League and Adobe make personal pitch to soccer fans as their deal gives football followers access to creative tools and provides insight.
The Premier League and Adobe want AI-fueled creativity to make the 1.8 billion global fans of top-tier English soccer an increasingly active part of the game.
At Adobe Summit London, the Premier League followed up the announcement earlier this month of its "digital transformation"-which includes a new app, website, and cloud and AI partnership with Microsoft-with news of a multiyear deal with Adobe giving the league increased access to creativity, marketing, and AI technology.
With Adobe Express and Firefly AI built into the Premier League's app and website for the upcoming 2025/26 Fantasy Premier League season, fans will be able to design badges and kits for their teams and make video clips and social media content throughout the season with Generate Video, Clip Maker, Remove Object, and AI enhancements.
"Bringing the power of Adobe to the most watched football league in the world, fans have new AI-powered ways to engage and experience the moments that matter, and the creative capabilities to express their love of the game," said Rachel Thornton, CMO of enterprise at Adobe.
But with fans in 900 million households in 189 countries, the Premier League sees its digital reboot and its partnership with Adobe as an opportunity to get to know its followers better. Adobe's analytics tools, for example, can give the league some idea of how fans use the website, app, and league email channels, helping it deliver more personalized content.
Adobe customer data platforms, meanwhile, can help the league target fans with relevant news stories about matchday scoring or sudden transfers through push notifications tailored to their preferences.
"No Liverpool fan is the same. They’re all very different," said Alexandra Willis, director of digital media and audience development at The Premier League. "When you then take a Liverpool fan who also follows a number of Manchester City players, plays Fantasy Premier League, and lives in Brazil, the combination of those factors creates who they are, and we will be able to see them as people when they use the new tools and express their creativity."
From the Premier League's perspective, a partnership with Adobe and its accompanying data also makes those nearly 2 billion fans a far easier marketing pitch. By providing tools to help the Premier League's digital marketing teams ramp up personalised marketing campaigns now and create personalized content based on fan data, behavior, and even location later, Adobe will eventually help the league keep fans up to date on everything from fantasy league player performance to matchday lineup changes when they've entered a stadium.
As an example, the Premier League's Chelsea FC just made the finals of this year's FIFA Club World Cup. If that had happened during the Adobe partnership, Willis noted that the Premier League could have targeted content toward U.S. fans, telling them how the team performed in the league last season, how they're looking going into the latest season, how their favorite players performed, and which players they should watch next.
Through the Adobe partnership, Willis said the Premier League is looking to create "an infinite loop of engagement, based on each individual fan's needs and wants."
"Let’s just take first day of the season that’s coming [August 15]: Traditionally, we’ve only had the capability to deliver a one-to-many communication where we’re saying to everyone ‘The Premier League season is about to kick off, make sure you don’t miss it, here are the major storylines,'" Willis said. "Adobe will enable us to move towards a world where that first email campaign or message delivered within the Premier League app and website is one-to-one, and so whichever players you’re interested in, whichever clubs you’re interested in, whichever country you live in, whichever community you feel part of … that communication is absolutely tailored to you."
The Premier League is just the latest-if largest-member of Adobe's growing sports team. Coming into 2025, Adobe had already partnered with Major League Baseball, the National Women's Soccer League (NWSL), the PGA Tour, the Adobe Women's Football Association Cup, and teams including the NBA's Golden State Warriors and Bundesliga's Bayern Munich. This year, however, Adobe added the Unrivaled 3-on-3 women's basketball league and the NFL to its roster.
Category: General Sports
