SportsPro London 2026: inside SSC Napoli’s digital playbook
On 29 and 30 April we were in London for SportsPro London, the annual gathering of the sports business community. On stage with Leonardo Giammarioli, Chief Business Officer of SSC Napoli, we presented the club’s new digital playbook.
SportsPro London took place at the Kia Oval, the cricket ground in Kennington. The organizers count more than 1,200 attendees: 70% are decision-makers and over 250 are C-level executives. The room included executives from almost every Premier League club and from many European teams, alongside leagues, federations, broadcasters and brands. Speakers included Newcastle United CEO David Hopkinson and senior leaders from PREM Rugby and HYROX.
This year’s theme was “The reality of sports, right now”. Fewer promises, more numbers: more selective sponsors, media rights shifting toward creators and platforms, and technology judged on results rather than on hype.
SSC Napoli’s digital playbook
The session was called “Inside SSC Napoli’s new digital playbook”. We presented the project we are building with the club: a single digital ecosystem in place of channels that had each grown on their own.
The starting point is one many clubs share. Website, app, store and ticketing were born at different times, with different vendors, logins and data. A fan who buys a ticket, watches a highlight and buys a shirt goes through three separate experiences, and none of them knows who the fan is.
Before
- website, app, store and ticketing from different vendors
- a different login for every service
- fan data split across several systems
- content published again and again, channel by channel
The new ecosystem
- one account for tickets, season tickets, store and content
- one platform for web and app
- ticketing, CRM and e-commerce connected through APIs
- content written once and distributed to every channel
We walked through the choices behind the project:
- Identity first. Each fan has a single account, on web and in the app. Every interaction enriches their profile, in line with their privacy preferences, so the club can talk to them more relevantly, in Italy and around the world.
- Headless content. News, videos and player profiles live in one CMS, Directus. The newsroom publishes once and the content reaches the website, the app and social channels.
- Built for matchday. On match days traffic multiplies within minutes. The front end is designed to handle kick-off without slowing down.
- The club at the center. Colors, typography and page rhythm start from Napoli’s identity. The interface stays clean, so the team is the star.
Regista, our football vertical
We also used the session to introduce Regista, the football operating system we built for the sporting side of clubs. The digital ecosystem looks at fans; Regista looks at what happens inside the club, and helps the people working on the sporting side make everyday decisions based on data.
They are two sides of the same work. A football club produces a huge amount of data, on and off the pitch. The value comes when someone puts it in order and makes it useful to the people who have to decide: marketing teams that want to know their fans, sporting departments that want to understand their squad. We’ll cover Regista in more depth in a future article.
What we take home
The theme of this edition suited our talk well. We didn’t talk about the future: we showed a project in progress, with its choices and constraints, alongside a club willing to put its name to it. And we brought an Italian project in front of the clubs the rest of Europe usually looks to.
Thanks to Leonardo Giammarioli and SSC Napoli for sharing the stage with us, and to SportsPro for making room for this story. If you work at a club, league or federation, here’s what we do in sport tech.