sports journalism has a blind spot - so we built a model to fix it

For nearly a decade, User Needs have been reshaping how digital journalism thinks about audiences. Now it’s going to do the same for sports.

Since the launch of the BBC’s original User Needs Model in 2017 - and especially after the release of User Needs Model 2.0 by smartocto and Dmitry Shishkin - audience-centric journalism has moved from theory to practice.

Today, User Needs are embedded in newsrooms across the world, referenced by leading publishers, platforms, and researchers, and even formed a dedicated chapter in the Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2024.

The conclusion is clear:

User needs tools (& proof it works)

Over the past few years, smartocto and Dmitry Shishkin have focused not just on refining the thinking behind User Needs, but on building technology that actively supports it:

• Smart notifications that flag opportunities and blind spots
• Data visualisations that make audience needs tangible
• AI support for headlines and content recommendations
• A free tool to analyse and experiment with User Needs
• And most recently: Decisions, our AI newsroom assistant connecting User Needs to business outcomes

This work has delivered hard proof, or, as Dmitry Shishkin says, “the smoking gun”. In 2025, an extensive analysis of Ringier Media International brands showed that focused User Needs articles outperformed non-focused articles on every relevant metric.

So far, so good.

But, if it works so emphatically for news, there’s a logical follow up question we had to ask:

Can user needs be useful for sports?

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 also for sports brands and teams that serve their communities with content about their sports team or championship or league.

And yet - until now - sports coverage has never had its own User Needs Model.

That’s why smartocto and Dmitry Shishkin are proud to introduce the first-ever User Needs model for sports coverage.

A new model, built on data - not assumptions

This is not a theoretical exercise.

To develop the first version of the model, we needed to ascertain what the foundation looked like - and how the framework was likely to differ from the user needs for news model.

To do that we

• Analysed almost 35k sports articles from 13 different European outlets
• Worked with publishers covering sports across multiple countries and markets
• Built and tested an 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:

Know · Understand · Feel · Do

But within those axes, we identified 11 distinct User Needs specific to sports coverage (compared to the 8 we have for the user needs for news framework).

For each User Need, we:

• Defined clear characteristics and common formats
• Translated those definitions into prompts for automated recognition
• Tested the model on untrained content

What did the results of that analysis reveal?

The model consistently recognised the correct User Needs - confirming not only the quality of the definitions, but also that these 11 User Needs genuinely exist (and matter) in sports journalism.

To validate the thinking beyond data, we also consulted some leading sports brands and platforms in Europe. Their reactions confirmed what the analysis already suggested:

This model reflects how sports journalists actually think - and how audiences actually consume sports content.

The first insights are eye-opening

Even in this first phase, the results reveal enormous potential - and not just because they are, as our CMO put it, “ smashingly accurate”

Just like in general news coverage, we see a significant misalignment between:

• what sports audiences desire, and
• what publishers most frequently produce
  

But one insight stood out above all others, and reveals a significant opportunity:

The highest engagement is driven by content types that are published the least

In other words: any sports publishers are leaving impact, loyalty, and growth on the table - simply because they don’t yet see their coverage through a User Needs lens.

And the industry understands that this is something they need to address better, hence the quote from Simon Meehan, former Head of Content for Premier League Football Club, Newcastle United:

This is just the beginning

The User Needs Model for Sports is a first release - and we want to build it together with the industry.

We’re actively looking to collaborate with:

• Sports brands
• Media platforms and publishers
• Sports desks and editorial teams
• Content creators and innovators

Together, we want to:

1. Further optimise and refine the model
2. Uncover deeper insights into sports coverage and performance
3. Build new smartocto notifications and visualisations for sports User Needs
4. Publish shared research to help the industry create more audience-centric sports journalism

Sports coverage deserves the same audience-first thinking that transformed digital news.

This is the next step.