Sports journalism (and content) is one of the most consumed, emotional, and commercially important content domains in the world. It drives loyalty, subscriptions, engagement, and daily habits for news publishers, of course.

But, it also does the same for sports brands and teams serving their communities with content about their sports teams, championships, or leagues.

And yet, until very recently, sports coverage has never had its own user needs model.

To develop the first version of the model (the User Needs Model for Sport News Coverage), our smartocto team worked with Dmitry Shishkin to ascertain what the foundation looked like. We also needed to determine how the framework was likely to differ from the user needs for news model.

To do that, we:

• Analysed almost 35,000 sports articles from 13 different European outlets.
• Worked with publishers covering sports across multiple countries and markets.
• Built and tested a large language model (LLM) that recognises user needs in sports content automatically.
• Got first-person feedback on the model and first results from some large sports brands.

From these findings, we built a model around the same four fundamental axes as news coverage. Within those axes, we identified 11 distinct user needs specific to sports coverage (compared to the eight we have for the user needs for news framework). In a recent Webinar, Shishkin and Rutger Verhoeven explained the newly formulated needs.

• Know (update me/show me live): Fans want to stay informed in real time: scores, results, transfers, line-ups, injuries, live moments. This is the backbone of sports coverage. But when it dominates output, coverage becomes interchangeable and loyalty erodes.
• Understand (introduce me to/explain it to me/take me backstage): Fans want context and insight. Who is this player? Why did this happen? What goes on behind the scenes? When this is under-produced, audiences stay informed but never invested.
• Feel (entertain me/fire me up/relive it with me): Fans want emotion: pride, anger, nostalgia, joy, belonging. Human stories, passion, history. When emotion is neglected, sport is reduced to data. Fans follow events but stop identifying with teams or athletes.
• Do (let me join in/test me/help me): Fans want to participate: share opinions, feel connected to others, make predictions, test knowledge, get practical guidance. When participation is missing, engagement moves elsewhere. Publishers lose the relationship even if they retain reach.

What we learned after launching the model

Sometimes you do something and think, why didn’t we do this sooner? I’ve distilled a misconception we encounter quite often from the newsletter of media consultant Thomas Baekdal. He puts it this way:

“What I really like about this is that it illustrates that the user need model is not something that is fixed in stone. It’s a tool, and the first step to using this tool is to adjust it to your publication, your focus, and your audience. And this is exactly what publishers need to know. Don’t get stuck on the definition or the labels. Make it so that it fits your audience’s focus.

“And the same is also true for this ‘sports’ model. I like it because it illustrates how you need to adjust the model, but if I was working with a specific sports site, I wouldn’t use these labels. I would define different labels that better reflected that specific sports site and its audience. And this is the whole point.”

Many clients and prospective news media organisations that have approached us over the years have also arrived with the attitude of “we want your model” — as if it were a magic box that, once opened, will automatically boost engagement.

From the very start, we have encouraged people to look for a balance of user needs that fit their specific journalistic mission, and brand-specific user needs that best express that mission.

Sections reveal what’s possible: making it more distinctive

The user needs for sports model seems to be what finally makes the true character of the framework click. Because, what is it really about? Understanding at a deep level why people come to your Web site and at what times they tune in to which topics — and, therefore, which sections.

For each section, you can think about what makes certain content uniquely valuable. “Show me the impact on my wallet” could be a strong user need for an economics section. The goal is for an editor to say, “We still need a good wallet story for the site on Saturday morning.”

And that way, over time, every section or editorial team ends up with its own mini content strategy.

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