How would one describe the 2024/2025 football season for Premier League club Arsenal? On one level, the London club performed solidly, coming second to the total surprise package of Liverpool in the league and posting genuinely impressive performances in the Champions League with a semi-final exit at the hands of eventual winners Paris Saint-Germain. Yet a sense of failure on the pitch lingers, with the salt in the wounds of the lack of expected silverware coming from the unexpected source of bitter North London rivals Tottenham Hotspur winning their first trophy since 2008.

Yet off the pitch, Arsenal have been busy putting together the foundations of what the club believes will be a winning formula to address the needs of fans, including the implementation of a network infrastructure bolstered by AI that scores in terms of both sound and vision.

Despite the loud claims to the contrary by other football fans in the UK’s capital, Arsenal are big. They are England’s third most successful football team, behind only Liverpool and Manchester United, having won 49 major domestic and European trophies. As befits a team of this status, Arsenal have a very large global fanbase, most of whom cannot travel to the impressive home base of the Emirates Stadium.

Like all leading football clubs, Arsenal’s online video offer is comprehensive. It includes on-demand clips, highlights and full coverage of games involving the men’s and women’s first teams, reserves and academy sides. There are also comprehensive reels such as behind-the-scenes clips, current player profiles and interviews with former players.

“Sports teams are often relatively medium-sized enterprises, and they often find themselves with an ecosystem of partners, data infrastructure and compute infrastructure that is just simply not fit for that transformation journey that they want”

Outlining the club’s fundamental commercial strategy and how it wished to connect with supporters across the world, Arsenal FC chief commercial officer Juliet Slot said in April 2025 that the club’s underlying offer was basically “really simple”, rooted in serving supporters with content such as video and that technology had opened up new possibilities.

“If you have a global club and you have a global supporter base, you need a digital transformation to enable you to reach them and serve them in a way that practically could not have been done 10-15 years ago,” she added. “That strategy helps us to understand the supporters, to understand what their needs are, and therefore to define what we need to build to ensure that we can give them what they want, when they want, where they want.”

In practical terms, that means Arsenal would like to serve more digital content, product and experiences to allow fans to feel closer to the club. Through segmentation of the data that it has on fans, it wants to build products very much including video content experiences. It has also built its creative studio to be able to develop relevant content that allows the club to tell stories to supporters.

To ensure that it had the required technological platform to achieve these aims, in September 2024 the club struck a partnership with information technology service and consulting company NTT Data. Outlining what he feels the job at hand is, NTT Data’s UK and Ireland CTO Tom Winstanley said his company’s role would be to change the way Arsenal fans were being supported across all of the club’s channels. This would include providing a full stack of support from consulting and software engineering platforms all the way through to core infrastructure. It has also taken advice from its own creative agency.

“Sports teams are often relatively medium-sized enterprises, and they often find themselves with an ecosystem of partners, data infrastructure and compute infrastructure that is just simply not fit for that transformation journey that they want. Our work in general is to create the next generation foundations, the data and the network infrastructure to create those new experiences. Arsenal are recognising that there are opportunities for them to hugely expand their supporter base and build much more engaging experiences that then drive on for the business. And in a way that they’ve not done before. So internationalisation, media and personalised and targeted content suddenly creates new streams for them beyond their core traditional business of sponsorship.”

One of the key tasks that NTT Data has undertaken is to prevent flooding of video data at the network edge. And in this the company has made use of AI models, deploying a small language model called Tsuzumi principally to support edge use cases while also addressing privacy and sustainability concerns.

“Examples of [AI use] can be in video analytics, media analytics, but also in capturing banter in real time, locally, and not deploying it out to flood the network,” Winstanley noted. “You need to find out more about what’s the right network background, and what’s the right balance of your network infrastructure for sports media. We’re a 5G provider and we deploy it in stadiums in different geographies. But it’s about the balance. If you want to do real-time media streaming from a stadium and do all of the edits on-site, or remotely, so that you don’t have to deploy facilities to every single location, then you need a different backbone too.”

One of the reasons that NTT Data felt that Arsenal were an interesting partner was because of the global reach of the football club and that its own network and ICT infrastructure – including advance photonics – was deployed globally. Winstanley revealed that in the initial discussions with Arsenal, the company also showed the work that other parts of the NTT Group had been doing in the esports space, including R&D work with audio solutions.

“NTT is also a provider of hyper-directional sound systems, which is looking like a really interesting area of technology relevant for supporter experiences in the stadium, dampening sound, targeting,” he added. “And then we’re back to the connection to the edge and the AI story. And that’s exciting for us, but that is the frontier. I think it’s fair to say that nobody out there has yet done this at the scale [to deliver on] the promise of this. At the Olympics in Tokyo, we did some of the first examples of that process with digital experiences and holographic experiences as well. The direction of where this stuff can go is so exciting.”

Ultimately Winstanley says that there is still a journey to go on as regards transforming Arsenal’s digital assets. “There are bits that are not ready yet in the network space, in the infrastructure space, to really make it happen. If we could deploy all of that today, you would have the most incredible multi-channel, immersive experiences on site, at home, around the world. I think it will be incredible.”