I Went From Fintech to Football. Nothing Was the Same

The organization was running on institutional memory.

None of this is a criticism of the people involved. Football clubs are filled with talented professionals who work incredibly hard. But the system they operate inside is fragile. When knowledge lives in people rather than infrastructure, organizations become dependent on heroics.

Even the club’s annual plan reflected that.

We started the year with a business plan built in a sprawling Excel workbook with 15 sheets and almost no operational KPIs attached to it. Revenue targets existed, but there was little infrastructure for measuring the activities that would actually drive those numbers.

Everything was reactive.

So we started introducing some basic operational infrastructure. We used AI tools to document meetings, summarize decisions and build a central repository of knowledge across the organization. Processes that had previously lived in people’s heads began to get written down. Decisions were logged. Discussions became searchable.

At first, adoption was slow.

When you introduce structure into an environment that’s historically informal, the first reaction is skepticism. People naturally ask: How does this actually help me?

But over time the value became obvious. Teams could see what decisions had already been made. Meetings stopped reinventing conversations from scratch. Institutional knowledge began to accumulate rather than disappear.

After Southend, I assumed these issues were unique to one club. They weren’t. As I later began working with clubs like the Seattle Sounders, the Seattle Reign and San Diego FC, the same operational patterns appeared again and again.

The systems clubs rely on often don’t talk to each other. Ticketing platforms operate separately from marketing systems. Corporate partnership activations live in spreadsheets. Stadium operations planning sits in Excel files passed around by email.

Every department has tools. What’s missing is connective infrastructure.

Matchday planning is where this fragmentation becomes most visible. Preparing for a single home match requires coordination across ticketing, marketing, partnerships, stadium operations and fan experience teams. Ideally, key decisions—the match narrative, sponsor activations and the first ticket sales push—should be locked six to eight weeks before kickoff.

In practice, those decisions often get revisited in every meeting, slowly drifting until the calendar forces the club to commit. When that happens, clubs can build real campaigns. Sponsors have time to activate. Group sales teams can target audiences. The story of the match has time to build in the market.

In reality, many clubs finalize those decisions two or three weeks before kickoff. By that point, the window has narrowed dramatically.

Group sales teams don’t have time to activate. Marketing campaigns go out late. Operations teams scramble to execute plans that are still shifting. Departments end up working from slightly different assumptions about what the match is supposed to be.

And every time that happens, revenue opportunities quietly disappear.

What most clubs need isn’t another dashboard. They need operational systems that make it easy to align early, hard for decisions to drift and clear who owns what. When that structure exists, the organization stops reacting and starts operating strategically.

Coming from fintech, the contrast is striking.

Technology companies start with the customer outcome they want to achieve and build systems that make that outcome repeatable. Automation and product infrastructure scale processes across the organization. In sports, the default approach is often the opposite: When something needs to get done, we hire people to manually run the process.

Sports organizations don’t have a technology problem. They have an operating problem.

Sports remains one of the most emotionally powerful industries in the world. The drama is real. The stakes are real. The connection between clubs and their communities is incredibly deep. None of that should change. But the business infrastructure underneath that spectacle doesn’t need to run on scattered spreadsheets and institutional memory.

I became an owner because I love football.

I started Arkero because once you see how these organizations operate from the inside, you realize how much opportunity is left on the table. The gap between where sports operations are today and where they could be isn’t theoretical. Some tools exist. AI will help fill the gaps. And clubs increasingly want to modernize.

What’s been missing is the bridge between two worlds: the operational discipline of technology companies and the cultural traditions of professional sports. The clubs that figure out how to connect those two worlds won’t just run better operations, they’ll unlock entirely new economics for the business of sport.

Shivaas Gulati is the co-founder and CEO of Arkero Technologies, a sports-focused, AI-powered platform working with professional clubs including San Diego FC, Seattle Sounders and clubs in the EFL. He is also a co-owner of Southend United FC. Prior to Arkero, he was a cofounder of Remitly (Nasdaq: RELY).

Best of Sportico.com

• Top 50 Highest-Paid Athletes of All Time
• 50 Highest-Paid Coaches in U.S. Sports
• Highest-Paid Athletes in the World: Full List

Sign up for Sportico's Newsletter. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.