Chat_UP Live @ FUSE: The Race to Build SportsBizGPT
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For Chat_UP Live we partnered with FUSE and Twenty First Group to carry out an experiment.
What if, we created an AI event that had a live co-pilot built in to the experience?
A custom made second brain designed specifically for the evening’s event.
Not a chatbot spewing wallpaper responses. Not a useless summariser (that’s my job).
Something that could take in audience questions in real time, interrogate proprietary data, and push the conversation in non-obvious directions.
Hear the full podcast here:
Now access that model yourself. For a limited time, we’re making the TFG Labs co-pilot available via the link at the bottom of this newsletter.
Go in, ask it questions about football club valuations, test its reasoning, see what happens when you plug genuine expertise into the machine.
It won’t be live forever. This is a window into what’s possible—and what isn’t.
Why Football Acquisition?
The system needed a subject to chew on - something with enough complexity and data depth to properly stress-test what an LLM can do when it’s plugged into real expertise. Football club valuation gave us that. It’s a question with genuine commercial stakes, multiple variables, and no single right answer. Investor motivations vary wildly: financial return, ego, reputation, sports-washing, community regeneration. Cash, control, and certainty can all be dialled up or down depending on the thesis.
TFG Labs has years of proprietary data on this exact question - club valuations, performance models, strategic frameworks for advising owners and investors. So we pointed the co-pilot at that archive and let the audience loose on it. The result is a system that doesn’t just parrot back generic advice, but draws on codified processes and real-world case studies. Ask it about sleeping giants in League One or fluctuating Premier League valuations and you’ll get something grounded in actual football intelligence. This was always an experiment in public - the interesting failures are as instructive as the successes.
The Clippy Problem
Andy Shora, who built the system, put it bluntly:
“Without proprietary data, anyone providing a system that can react to a live event is essentially a glorified Microsoft Clippy. And that’s what not to aim for.”
That’s the crux of it. The race happening right now isn’t about who has the best chatbot interface. It’s about who controls the data underneath. And in sports, that question is wide open.
Twenty First Group has years of football intelligence - club valuations, performance models, strategic frameworks. Feed that into an LLM and you get something useful. Feed in nothing and you get... Clippy.
The billion-dollar question for sports organisations: what data do you actually have? And who are you giving it to?
Rational Irrationality
One of the audience questions that came through the system cut to the heart of sports investment:
“Can you quantify the level of irrationality in a given football club valuation relating to an owner’s ego?”
The honest answer is: probably, to a degree. But here’s the thing, some irrationality is rational. As Maggie Murphy pointed out, an investor might look at the data, see that Plymouth Argyle is the optimal buy, and then say: actually, I don’t want to fly to Plymouth every week.
That’s not a bug. That’s human decision-making. And any AI system that ignores it is missing the point.
What’s Coming Friday
This newsletter accompanies part one of the Chat_UP Live podcast. Part two drops Friday, and it goes deeper - into the race to build what we might call Sportsbiz GPT. Who wins? What are the characteristics of the winners?
Sean Betts from Omnicom, Craig Hepburn, Richard Ayers and others dig into the strategic implications. The data licensing traps. The API economy. The question of whether sports organisations even know they’re in a race.
It’s the conversation the industry needs to have as the big foundation models come knocking with sponsorship deals.
Access the Model
The TFG Labs co-pilot is live for a short period. Use it. Break it. See what it can and can’t do.
And a huge thank you to our speakers on the night.
