Rudy Koch → Writing
Acquiring $55 Million of Sports Fan Engagement R&D
They say hindsight is 20/20. In startups, it often comes too late.
So what if you could acquire $55 million worth of hindsight? Would you do it?
That's how I've been thinking about our acquisition of GreenPark Sports.
When most people think about acquisitions, they think about customers, revenue, technology, or talent. I think the most valuable thing we acquired was something far more difficult to build: almost a decade of experimentation.
GreenPark invested years, and more than $55 million, exploring some of the biggest questions in sports fandom.
And it wasn't an ordinary startup. GreenPark was founded by Chad Hurley (co-founder of YouTube), Nick Swinmurn (founder of Zappos), and Ken Martin (BLITZ), people with decades of experience building products used by hundreds of millions of consumers. Together, they assembled a team to answer questions like:
What does the future of sports fandom look like?
How do you create reasons for fans to come back every day, not just on match day?
What role do identity, community, progression, and play have in the future of sports fandom?
Those aren't questions with simple answers. They require years of experimentation, partnerships, product launches, and iteration.
Most startups have to earn that knowledge one product launch, one partnership, and one mistake at a time.
We get to start with it.
Sports Organizations Aren't Built Like Consumer Product Companies
Coming from games, including co-founding Mythical Games, I assumed building great fan experiences was primarily a product challenge. What I came to appreciate is that sports organizations aren't built as consumer product companies; they're built as B2B businesses.
Game studios exist to build products. They ship, measure player behavior, iterate, and improve continuously. Product teams own the roadmap, learn directly from their communities, and make decisions based on how players actually engage.
Sports organizations have evolved around a very different business model. Their core business is media rights, sponsorships, licensing, hospitality, ticketing, and commercial partnerships. Fan engagement is important, but it requires a muscle that's still largely underdeveloped across the industry.
The result is an innovation model with its own unique challenges. Much of the industry's innovation comes from external teams that are expected to secure licenses, commit significant upfront capital, fund development, absorb the product risk, and prove consumer demand before they've had the chance to build meaningful momentum.
Instead of asking, "What's the most engaging experience we could build?" teams often find themselves asking, "How do we make this licensing deal work?" Product roadmaps become driven by commercial obligations instead of fan learning. Experiments become harder to justify. Risk tolerance declines. Innovation slows.
On top of that, rights are often divided across multiple agreements with narrowly defined scopes. While those structures make commercial sense, they can make it incredibly difficult to build cohesive fan experiences. You're constantly navigating what you can build, what you can't build, and which ideas belong somewhere else.
Looking back, I think one of GreenPark's greatest achievements is that they continued to innovate despite those constraints. But I also came away believing that the future of sports fan engagement depends on the industry's commercial model evolving. We need to rebalance risk.
It has to become easier to continuously build, evolve, and innovate.
Licensed Content Isn't Enough
One of the biggest assumptions in sports is that access to premium IP creates engagement.
GreenPark reinforced that it's only part of the equation.
The world's biggest leagues and teams are extraordinary assets. They create awareness, credibility, and emotional connection before a fan ever opens your product. But a logo isn't a product, and a license isn't a retention strategy.
Fans don't come back because an experience is officially licensed.
They come back because it continues to surprise them, reward them, and give them new reasons to participate.
That's where the value is created.
The license gets you through the front door. Product innovation is what keeps fans coming back, deepens loyalty, and ultimately creates long-term commercial value.
That's why I believe the balance is broken today.
The industry invests enormous effort into commercializing access to fans, but comparatively little into continuously improving the products that serve them. Those products are what create engagement. They're what create retention. And over time, they're what create the most value for everyone involved.
Context Matters More Than Content
Sports doesn't have a content problem.
Every organization already produces highlights, interviews, statistics, podcasts, documentaries, and social media. There's more content than any fan could ever consume.
The challenge is understanding what matters to fans right now.
Every event creates hundreds of narratives, but only a handful become meaningful to a particular community. An underdog breakthrough. A controversial referee decision. A rivalry renewed. A rookie exceeding expectations.
Those narratives aren't universal. They change by league, by team, by athlete, by country, by language, and sometimes even by individual fan communities.
Understanding that context is what transforms engagement from generic to genuinely personal.
Why This Matters Now
Looking across everything GreenPark explored, one conclusion stands above the rest.
The vision wasn't the constraint.
The industry has spent years proving that fans want richer, more participatory relationships with the teams and athletes they love.
The challenge has always been the operating model.
One thing that stood out to me after the acquisition was how GreenPark's thinking evolved over time. After partnering with organizations like the NBA, MLS, LaLiga, and the LCS, the team began talking less about individual features and more about 24/7 fandom. The goal wasn't simply to get fans coming back on game day, but to create experiences that gave them reasons to engage every day.
I think that's a subtle but important shift.
It reflects a lesson that's become increasingly clear across the industry. One-off experiences can create spikes in engagement. Building products that fans choose to come back to week after week is a completely different discipline.
Over the past year at JOA, we've seen the same pattern. Teams, leagues, athletes, and brands consistently tell us that activations generate excitement, but they're difficult to sustain. Once the campaign ends, engagement falls away and everyone starts planning the next one.
Looking back through GreenPark's journey, I think we now understand why.
The current commercial model naturally favors campaign-driven experiences that are relatively inexpensive to launch, easy to package around partnerships, and tied to specific events. They're good activations.
Building products that evolve continuously alongside their communities requires a completely different operating model. Historically, that meant product managers, designers, engineers, analysts, community managers, creatives, and live operations teams working together every day. That's an operating model the games industry spent decades refining, but one that's only been practical for the world's largest publishers and sports organizations.
That's why I believe AI is such an important inflection point.
Not because it replaces creativity.
Because it fundamentally changes the economics of operating fan engagement.
For the first time, organizations don't have to choose between one-off activations and enormous live operations teams. They can begin operating persistent fan experiences that evolve continuously alongside their communities.
That's what excites me most about bringing GreenPark together with JOA.
We're not starting with assumptions.
We're starting with years of hard-earned learning about where sports fandom is headed, and pairing it with a fundamentally new operating model for delivering those experiences.
To me, that's what we really acquired.
Not just products.
Not just technology.
But $55 million worth of hindsight.
Written by Rudy Koch, co-founder of Mythical Games and co-founder & CEO of JOA. More: Homepage · Mythical Games · Media.