Unifying fan data across 50+ sports organisations

Twistag built the customer data platform behind Datatalks, which unifies more than 6 million fan profiles across 50-plus sports organisations, over a six-year continuous engineering partnership. A single fan existed as separate records in ticketing, e-commerce, CRM, POS and social systems, so marketing teams made decisions on incomplete profiles and revenue teams missed cross-sell opportunities nobody could see. Twistag built an extensible integration layer speaking 50-plus protocols, an identity-resolution engine that reconciles one person across sources recording them differently, a visual segment builder for non-technical marketers, and Dattie, a natural-language assistant that answers questions about the data without SQL.

Sports organisations operate across fragmented data silos. A single fan might hold a season ticket, buy merchandise, attend events, use the mobile app, subscribe to newsletters, engage on social media and spend at the stadium concourse — each touchpoint scattered across ticketing systems, e-commerce platforms, CRMs, POS systems and social networks. A fan who bought a ticket, bought merchandise and attended an event exists as three different records. Marketing teams make decisions on incomplete profiles, revenue teams miss cross-sell opportunities, and broadcasters and sponsors have no unified view of audience overlap. When Datatalks started, the industry had no answer: every organisation built custom integrations and manual reconciliation workflows that repeated with every new customer.

Twistag built Datatalks as a unified data backbone for sports organisations rather than as a series of custom integrations. The architecture starts with an extensible integration layer speaking more than 50 protocols — ticketing APIs, POS terminals, social media webhooks — where each connector handles the source's native format and normalises into a shared schema without forcing sources to change. Raw events flow into an identity-resolution engine that matches a fan across data sources even when systems record them differently, by email in one, phone in another, social handle in a third, producing a single unified profile per person.

On top of unified profiles sits a visual segment builder where non-technical marketers define audiences by point and click. The Segmentation Assistant reads natural-language segment goals such as "high-value lapsed fans likely to renew" and suggests segment logic from the available data, with multi-provider model orchestration keeping cost proportional to complexity. Dattie, the autonomous AI assistant, lets analysts ask natural-language questions without writing SQL.

The platform runs on .NET Core with a Blazor WebAssembly frontend on AWS, with PostgreSQL and Snowflake underneath and role-based access control enforcing multi-tenant boundaries so individual clubs, national federations and entire leagues operate simultaneously with complete data isolation. Identity resolution is the engineering; the segment builder is the product — when non-technical people can ask in their own language, analytics becomes a daily operating tool rather than locked specialist work.

Stack: .NET Core, Blazor WebAssembly, AWS, PostgreSQL, Snowflake. Services: AI-ready data platforms, cloud modernisation, AI agents and assistants, AI-native product engineering.

The Datatalks platform now serves more than 50 sports organisations across multiple countries, unifying over 6 million fan profiles, with more than 50 integrations across ticketing, e-commerce, mobile, POS, CRM and social. Adoption expanded from football into rugby, hockey and golf without architectural change, because Twistag solved the data unification problem generically rather than sport-specifically. Datatalks itself shifted from custom consulting to a repeatable platform product. The Twistag engagement has run for six years of continuous development. Onboarding a new sport is now a configuration exercise rather than an engineering project.

Identity resolution that worked for football transferred to rugby and golf without modification.