LAFC Leveraging SAS to Scale Fan Experiences

At SAS Innovate 2026, Los Angeles Football Club (LAFC) discussed how the organization enabled it to streamline services and optimize its connection with its fans and community.

Ryan Bishara, EVP, Revenue & Strategy, LAFC, spoke about the organization’s rapid growth and operational complexity, as well as its partnership with SAS.

The evolution from new club to operational maturity

Bishara explained how LAFC built its culture and identity directly with fans through grassroots engagement, design thinking sessions, and fan collaboration.

“In those early days in 2015, 2016, we were at a point where you’re starting from scratch, every new fan you’re engaging, and we did that at bars and restaurants, watching the World Cup, and all kinds of different events that we could to get people together,” Bishara said.

Now, the organization has to manage over one million customer records across sports, concerts, and events, while transitioning from manual campaigns to personalized, automated engagement, which comes with its own set of challenges.

“You have a very wide diversity of audiences in demographics, which is super interesting,” said Bishara. “As a result, the personalization of that is really critical, and we need to level up our tools to be able to do so.”

Why football clubs need an integrated data infrastructure to manage communication

Bishara added that they have shifted away from isolated campaigns, one-off emails, and manually pulling lists every time. The organization has thousands of new records entering their database every single match and every single event.

Bishara spoke about how a combination of their partnership with SAS, APIs, and an integrated data infrastructure enabled streamlined reporting, audience segmentation, website optimization, and personalized communication.

“We needed a way to funnel [data] into our journey, our send, our campaigns, all of that process, but also think about how we can personalize, based on all the demographics, and social economics that we have on our fans,” said Bishara. 

“APIs are a giant part of our process, and also ultimately to see where our fans are going. What are their behaviors, what are their interests, what are the types of events, the days of the week, the players they follow, all of that helps us understand more about the behavior.”

Once they have that, Bishara says, they’re in a position to optimize and understand both anonymous and known users, and, as a result, serve different ads on the sites.

Customer engagement capabilities are now a business intelligence initiative

Customer engagement operations have shifted from marketing to the business intelligence and data teams, improving efficiency and collaboration across the organization.

Leadership buy-in, organization-wide KPI visibility, and continued investment in one-to-one fan personalization were key to handling the shifting customer engagement.

“As we think about the future with this, now we have the power to really take control of our audiences in a way that wasn’t possible. The future for us is thinking about: How can we focus on the one-to-one connection with each fan? How do we personalize their experience?” Bishara said.

How SAS brought organizational best practices to LAFC

Recently, LAFC rolled out all KPIs to the entire company and empowered every single person. 

They can see it in databases and in real time, and, as a result, if they have a good idea, they can integrate it into the LAFC journey process, which can help them differentiate from the competition. 

Fans are now empowered to be a part of the experience and what the organization is doing on a daily basis.

“We’re really proud of the fact that SAS has helped us create that and their collaboration, ideas, and how we actually implement it with all the best practices and use cases … has made this possible,” said Bishara. “We’re still just scratching the surface. There’s so much more to do, and we’re thrilled to see what needs to come in the next 10 years as we go.”

Catch up on all of our reporting from SAS Innovate 2026, including a conversation with SAS channel leader John Carey and news about the company’s ongoing AI initiatives.