How Microsoft is Powering the Premier League with AI

Sport is embracing new technology to bring fans closer to the action.

At Wimbledon, IBM’s digital tools are powering fresh ways for spectators to follow the tournament, while the Premier League has teamed up with Microsoft in a five-year deal to develop platforms that make following matches and clubs more interactive and personalised than ever before.

Microsoft will become the league’s official cloud and AI partner under the agreement announced in July 2025.

The partnership centres on the Premier League Companion, a new AI tool powered by Microsoft Copilot that provides fans with instant access to football statistics and content.

The tool operates through Azure Open AI Service, Microsoft’s cloud-based AI platform that provides access to large language models including GPT-4.

What are the Premier League Companion’s capabilities?

The Premier League operates as England’s top football division, comprising 20 clubs that compete annually.

The league reaches 1.8 billion viewers across 189 countries, making it the world’s most-watched football competition.

One-third of the league’s current following has joined within recent years, according to Will Brass, Chief Commercial Officer for the Premier League.

Considering the Premier League’s global reach, the Premier League Companion can access information from 30 seasons of Premier League statistics, 300,000 articles and 9,000 videos.

Fans can query the system through natural language prompts to receive immediate answers about players, teams and historical data. 

“Our role is to create value for our clubs by engaging with as many fans as we can and bringing them into the Premier League ecosystem,” says Will Brass, Chief Commercial Officer for the Premier League.

“Ultimately, a big part of that is making sure our channels are best equipped to engage with those fans and, more importantly, deliver to fans what they want.”

How Microsoft’s Azure infrastructure powers premier league archives

Azure AI Foundry Services underpins the technical infrastructure.

While the platform includes Azure OpenAI in Foundry Models, which provides access to AI models for natural language processing, the system uses agentic architecture, allowing the AI to autonomously gather information from multiple data sources to provide contextual responses.

The partnership also extends to internal operations.

Microsoft will provide Azure cloud services to host the Premier League’s historic archive, enabling better content distribution to broadcast licensees worldwide.

“Moving the historic Premier League archive onto Azure, that’s all part of our ability to both curate content for our own channels but also to better serve our broadcast licensees around the world,” Will says.

“It ensures that content, which is rich and exciting and historic, is as readily available as can be, both to ourselves and our partners.”

Microsoft 365, the company’s productivity software suite, will also support internal workflows alongside Power Platform for business process automation and Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations for enterprise resource planning.

These tools aim to enhance collaboration and enable data-driven decision making across Premier League departments.

The Companion will eventually support 35,000-plus pre-programmed prompts covering various football scenarios.

Users will be able to ask questions such as ‘What are the best five goals of all time?’ or ’How many times has my club been relegated?’ and receive immediate responses with relevant video content.

Alexandra Willis, Director of Digital Media and Audience Development for the Premier League, says: “What the clubs are excited about with this partnership is the ability of the Premier League to bring new fans in, encourage them to discover and learn more about the league and then ultimately form a relationship with a club and develop that lifelong affinity with a club.”

The system will provide personalised recommendations based on user preferences and nationality, helping newcomers identify clubs and players of interest.

For established fans, the platform will offer direct connections to their chosen club’s content and platforms.

Premier League Companion’s integration with fantasy football

The partnership will also integrate with Fantasy Premier League, the league’s online fantasy football game that attracts millions of participants annually.

The Companion will provide supporting features for fantasy team managers, though specific functionalities remain under development.

“We would hope that for, say, a Crystal Palace fan, that the app will help the fan to discover what’s happening right now, here’s where to go and watch, how to listen, how to engage and with a constant referral back to Crystal Palace’s platforms,” Alexandra says.

“But someone newer to the Premier League, who may not have identified a favourite club, we want to introduce them to the league at large with player-led storytelling.”

Future development plans include open-ended natural language queries beyond the pre-programmed prompts, increased translation and subtitling capabilities across multiple languages and audio summaries of match weekends.

The system launches ahead of the 2025-26 Premier League season, which begins in August.

“We have become attuned to wanting to complement the live experience with additional information – the concept of the second screen came about for that reason. So, making sure we’re able to provide that information so that it is contextual and it is relevant is really important,” Alexandra says.

“The Premier League is a football competition proudly staged in England but globally loved and admired. So, we want to make sure that we’re providing something for everyone.” 

“We’re teaming up with the Premier League to bring one billion-plus fans closer than ever to the game they love,” says Satya Nadella, Chairman and CEO of Microsoft.