How Will Fans Win with Microsoft & Premier League Tech Deal?
Football’s global audience is expanding fast, and the Premier League is using AI technology to keep up.
As part of a five-year deal, Microsoft has become the league’s official cloud and AI partner, providing tools that reshape how fans engage with the game.
At the heart of this collaboration is the Premier League Companion, a new AI-driven platform designed to serve supporters with real-time data, historic insights and personalised content.
The system runs on Microsoft’s Azure OpenAI Service, a cloud-based platform that grants access to powerful natural language models, including OpenAI's GPT-4.
Natural language meets Premier League data
The Premier League Companion uses Microsoft Copilot to respond to fans’ questions in natural language. Built into Microsoft’s Azure AI infrastructure, it can process vast amounts of information, drawing from three decades of Premier League data. That means 30 seasons of statistics, 300,000 articles and 9,000 videos are now at a fan’s fingertips.
Supporters can type or speak questions like “How many times has my club been relegated?” or “What are the best five goals of all time?” and get immediate answers, often with video clips attached.
“We’re teaming up with the Premier League to bring one billion-plus fans closer than ever to the game they love,” says Satya Nadella, Chairman and CEO of Microsoft.
Will Brass, Chief Commercial Officer for the Premier League, explains the thinking behind the tool: “Our role is to create value for our clubs by engaging with as many fans as we can and bringing them into the Premier League ecosystem. Ultimately, a big part of that is making sure our channels are best equipped to engage with those fans and, more importantly, deliver to fans what they want.”
The Premier League now reaches 1.8 billion viewers in 189 countries, and according to Will, around one-third of the league’s global following has joined only in the past few years.
With that growth comes demand for smarter, more accessible content.
The Companion uses agentic architecture, a term that refers to AI models capable of independently gathering and processing data from various sources to provide context-aware responses. In practical terms, it means fans get more precise, more relevant answers to whatever they ask.
Cloud-based archives and smarter operations
The collaboration extends beyond public platforms. Microsoft’s Azure cloud services will host the Premier League’s historic content archive, improving how the league delivers clips and statistics to its global broadcast partners.
“Moving the historic Premier League archive onto Azure, that’s all part of our ability to both curate content for our own channels but also to better serve our broadcast licensees around the world,” says Will. “It ensures that content, which is rich and exciting and historic, is as readily available as can be, both to ourselves and our partners.”
Behind the scenes, Microsoft 365 will support daily workflows, while Power Platform and Dynamics 365 will be used for automation and enterprise resource planning. These tools aim to streamline internal operations and improve collaboration across Premier League departments.
Over time, the Companion will include more than 35,000 pre-set prompts, and future plans involve supporting open-ended questions, offering personalised club suggestions and integrating translation features across multiple languages. Audio match summaries are also in development.
Tailored football content for every supporter
Alexandra Willis, Director of Digital Media and Audience Development for the Premier League, believes the Companion’s biggest strength lies in its flexibility to serve both lifelong supporters and newcomers.
“What the clubs are excited about with this partnership is the ability of the Premier League to bring new fans in, encourage them to discover and learn more about the league, and then ultimately form a relationship with a club and develop that lifelong affinity with a club,” says Alexandra.
For Fantasy Premier League participants, the Companion will soon offer decision-making tools tailored to managing fantasy squads. While exact features are still being built, the aim is to make the Companion a second screen for everything from stats and goals to club loyalty and game analysis.
Alexandra explains the long-term vision: “We would hope that for, say, a Crystal Palace fan, that the app will help the fan to discover what’s happening right now, here’s where to go and watch, how to listen, how to engage and with a constant referral back to Crystal Palace’s platforms. But someone newer to the Premier League, who may not have identified a favourite club, we want to introduce them to the league at large with player-led storytelling.”
With launch set ahead of the 2025–26 season, the Companion will evolve further based on fan feedback, usage patterns and language needs.
“We have become attuned to wanting to complement the live experience with additional information – the concept of the second screen came about for that reason,” adds Alexandra. “So, making sure we’re able to provide that information so that it is contextual and it is relevant is really important.”
