The Ultimate CRM Buyers Guide for Football Clubs
Reading time:
12 mins
As Co-Founder and Head of Growth at Vokol, Chris Shreeve is building the first AI-powered audio creation platform made for sports. After more than a decade in digital marketing, sports tech, and media, he’s helping teams, leagues, and publishers move beyond static text to create dynamic, personalized audio experiences at scale.
Vokol’s mission: make every update, insight, and narrative heard and transforming how fans connect with their teams and how brands engage their audiences.
In this interview, Chris shares:
The content landscape has completely changed. Teams and leagues are churning out more material than ever before, but most AI generated content used in sports is still text-based. Newsletters, articles, blogs, even in-app user experiences. And while that content has its place, we’re seeing the market get saturated with AI-generated text and channels like email marketing are paying the price. What we’re seeing instead is a massive shift toward audio and video, especially with younger audiences. They’re spending far more time listening than reading. That’s where AI audio becomes really powerful. Instead of just pushing out another article that might get skimmed or ignored, we can transform that same information into something dynamic and conversational. It meets fans where they actually are, in their cars, at the gym, on their commute. We’re talking about personalized, engaging audio content delivered at scale. Real-time updates, deeper insights, narratives that actually resonate. The real opportunity isn’t just converting text to speech. It’s about creating immersive audio experiences that fundamentally change how fans connect with their teams. That’s what gets me excited about where this is heading.
Authenticity. That’s the big one. And look, I completely understand the concern. We’ve all seen deepfakes and automated content that just feels off or gets things wrong. It’s a legitimate worry. But here’s how we need to think about it differently. AI isn’t replacing your voice, it’s amplifying it. With a platform like Vokol, you’re not handing over control to some black box algorithm. Your data, your insights, your perspective… that’s what shapes everything. You maintain full editorial control from start to finish, which means the output stays credible and authentic because you’re guiding the entire process. Just because it’s automated doesn’t mean it’s inauthentic, just like human-generated content isn’t always authentic either. Influencer posts, scripted promos, corporate messaging… plenty of that lacks authenticity too. AI is just a means to automate and scale the creation and distribution of that content. What matters is whether the content itself is meaningful and credible, regardless of how it was produced. The real question isn’t “Is this AI or human?” It’s “Does this provide value to our fans?” That’s where our focus should be. We help organizations understand that distinction and use AI thoughtfully to create content that genuinely connects in a medium fans want.
The numbers tell the story. Sports fans in the U.S. listened to 52 billion hours of audio content last year. Billion. That’s an absolutely massive opportunity for brands, and we’re barely scratching the surface. Right now, digital sponsorships feel like an afterthought. A logo slapped on a social post. A banner in an email. There’s so much more potential here, and AI audio is the key to unlocking it. What if instead of every fan getting the same generic podcast, you’re creating personalized audio content based on what each fan actually cares about. Their favorite players, their fantasy lineup, their betting interests, the specific matchups they’re tracking. And the sponsorships within that content? Also personalized and relevant. We’re sitting on mountains of first-party data, and AI audio lets us turn that into something fans actually want to listen to. That’s when sponsorships stop being intrusive and start being valuable. The untapped potential is moving from broad, impersonal brand activations to highly personalized audio experiences that feel like they were made specifically for each fan. Because they were. That’s a completely different level of engagement, and it opens up monetization opportunities we haven’t even fully explored yet. This is where sports content is headed, and the teams that figure it out first are going to have a serious competitive advantage.
There’s something quietly powerful in how Chris talks about AI—not as a flashy gimmick, but as a new layer in how clubs connect with fans.
Audio is often overlooked in football marketing. We think CRM, we think email, maybe a video or two. But we rarely think about what happens when fans aren’t looking at screens. What about the gym, the car, the morning commute?
That’s the white space Vokol steps into.
From a RevOps and CRM lens, there’s real potential here. If a fan listens to five clips about one player and none about another, that’s a signal. If they interact with post-match breakdowns but skip pre-match hype, that’s behavior data you can feed into your CDP. And when you combine that with AI content automation and fan segmentation, you’re not just broadcasting—you’re building relationships at scale.
And for sponsors, this opens up a new frontier. Audio is intimate. It’s habitual. A sponsor message in a personalized audio stream doesn’t just get seen, it gets heard—and remembered. That’s a very different value proposition compared to a logo on a static banner.
Chris and the Vokol team are ahead of the curve here. If you’re working in CRM, fan marketing, or commercial innovation and you haven’t looked into AI audio yet, this is your wake-up call.
Bonus: Here's a real example of what Vokol can do for your club.
