AI Companies Are Buying Into Women's Sports. They're Really Buying Access To The Fan

Two teams from the same city. Roughly 10% overlap in their fan bases.

That's the number reportedly attached to the Portland Thorns and the Portland Fire, and it's the most interesting detail in the story of Treasure AI's partnerships with both clubs. It suggests that "the women's sports fan" isn't one group at all.

What the partnerships are about

Treasure AI has signed partnerships with the Thorns of the NWSL and the Fire of the WNBA. On the surface, it's a technology company pairing up with sports teams. Underneath, it's a deal about data and fan engagement.

Teams have always wanted to know more about the people who buy tickets, wear jerseys and follow them online. AI promises to make that knowledge more detailed and more actionable. For a technology company, a professional team is a live testbed with a passionate audience that generates plenty of signals.

That's why the phrase "buying access to the fan" fits. The team offers the audience. The company offers the tools. Both sides hope to learn something useful.

Why Portland is a good test

Portland is an unusual market. The Thorns have long been among the best-supported women's teams in the world, and they've won NWSL championships in 2013, 2017 and 2022. The Fire, meanwhile, are a returning name. The original Portland Fire played in the WNBA from 2000 to 2002 before folding, and the franchise came back in 2026.

Both teams share a city and a broad interest in women's sport, so you'd expect big overlap. The reported 10% figure suggests otherwise. Two fan bases in the same place, cheering for different sports, mostly aren't the same people.

That's a useful correction. The assumption that a fan of one women's sport is automatically a fan of another is common in marketing, and this data point, if it holds, challenges it directly.

What a fan actually wants

Here's where opinion comes in. A lot of team marketing treats fans as a bucket. Send the same email to everyone, offer the same discount, run the same promotion. If two teams in one city share only a sliver of supporters, that approach wastes money.

Better data could fix it. A team that knows what its supporters watch, when they buy and what they care about can talk to them in a way that feels relevant. That's a real benefit for fans as well as clubs, since nobody enjoys irrelevant marketing.

The catch is the trade. Better personalisation usually means collecting more information. Fans should know what's being collected, who sees it and how it's used. A team's relationship with supporters is built on trust, and a data scandal can undo years of goodwill quickly.

The risk of moving too fast

It's also worth staying sceptical about the technology itself. AI tools have a habit of promising more than they deliver, and the details of what Treasure AI does for these teams matter. A partnership announcement is a starting point, and the results will show whether it was worth it.

Women's sport is an interesting place for this kind of experiment. Audiences are growing fast, teams are often newer and more flexible, and fans tend to be active online. That makes it a natural testing ground.

But the fans themselves deserve a say. If a club uses AI to understand supporters better, supporters should feel the benefit in better experiences, not just more emails.

So as AI moves into sport, will it help teams understand fans as individuals, or will it turn them into more efficient targets? And who should decide where that line sits?