"All Red": How Liverpool Football Club overhauled its media stack and ditched spinning discs

“All Red” is the code name for Liverpool Football Club (LFC)’s digital media transformation programme. And if there is a day to interview Drew Crisp, LFC’s SVP, Digital about it, it’s the day after five strikes against a supine Tottenham Hotspurs team sends LFC into the history books with a 20th English title and 61,000+ fans in Anfield into paroxysms of joy. Outside the stadium, the air is sulfuric and crimson as riotous supporters spark flares in every direction; All Red indeed. 

Crisp, an affable former IBM Partner, “looks after our media function and our marketing team and our product and technology teams” as he explains in an interview with The Stack; around 180 people. It’s a job that involves both the front-end and back-end stacks that support the storage, editing and distribution of a staggering wealth of content: LFC creates up to 10 terabytes every match he says.

He is pleased as punch with the win of course. He’s also pleased with how All Red is going.

12 subscription products collapsed to 3

Pushed to describe the project in terms befitting a mildly hungover journalist, he explains: “We are collapsing 12 subscription products into three; we’re collapsing separate media into one set of products; we’re creating an application environment where we squash two apps into one (potentially in future three into one) and creating a single source of fan information…”

Understanding that fan base properly is crucial not just to commercial success (targeted adverts and offers) but also serving them with the content they want, Crisp says.

(LFC has a substantial global fanbase: 200 million social media followers; 4.5 million monthly average users across Liverpoolfc.com and the official club app; 1.5 billion fan engagements last season and a Premier League high of 11.9 billion views across its extensive social media estate. There's a relentless hunger for fresh and original content about the club.)

Collapsing LFC's applications down and providing a more streamlined membership proposition across them (rather than pointing fans to different websites; e.g. for archives, for retail, for TV, for tickets etc.) has involved a lot of work behind the scenes.

Getting data consistency (and single sign-on!)

 Crisp explains that just six or so years ago LFC had “50 different websites and didn't have any ability to understand fans that were coming onto our sites and platforms; no ability to build profiles of those fans… We didn't have a single sign-on capability, because there were products all with their own data environment” he adds (including the likes of its third-party ticketing platform SeatGeek.)

“We've spent a lot of time bringing all that together.”

That started with data consistency  (which included getting rid of free form fields: “It always triggers errors”) Crisp says.

“We now have a single marketing data environment. It's got 15 different data sources plumbed into it from platforms within our ecosystem, but also some external feeds from the Premier League and things like that; then we have PowerBI and Datorama etc. That means our Insights teams can really understand, where are fans going? Where are the main touch points? When do they drop off?”

Improved fan data

The overhauled primary LFC application is now plumbed into a profiling and fan data capability called MXO “that actually allows us to do personalized pop-ups and messages, that’s connected to our Google Ad Manager… All of our platforms are connected; most of them now sit on a cloud environment,” Crisp adds.

“We’ve also replatformed our OTT [over-the-top] for streaming all of the video content that's connected across our websites and our mobile apps, we use a product called Monterosa.”

“Because of the environments that we've built [we can now do] headless commerce, which means that, from a fan's perspective, I should be able to buy a shirt wherever I go on our digital real estate.”

Off discs, onto Wasabi

A lot of this programme starts and ends with the ability to serve fans exclusive content, whether that is behind-the-scenes videos, or material from its deep archives. Until Covid, the vast majority of that was sitting on “spinning disks” in Anfield. Accessing it, timestamping it, searching it; all were complicated, slow, and expensive.

To modernise that system LFC turned to cloud “hot storage” specialist Wasabi* – lured, in no small part, by the company’s promise of rapid data retrieval without the kind of data egress fees that the cloud hyperscalers have increasingly, and controversially, grown fat on. 

See also: How a $300 million cloud bill triggered a rethink - and a shopping spree on modular hardware at insurance firm GEICO

As Crisp emphasises: “There's a huge value in archives, because a lot of fans want to also see archive content. We create a lot of content that takes people through the years. Fans love all that stuff, but the time it takes for editors to go and search for this was just really hard. We had three rooms just full of archives…”

The manual metadata tagging of video (e.g. to flag particular moments or players) was also error-prone (“not everyone is spelling ‘Dominik Szoboszlai’ right the first time round”) he admits. 

LFC turned to AI to help it and started using a company called Curio AI to search its libraries – it uses AI to generate what Curio AI described last year as “rich metadata for media libraries… to instantly search and retrieve specific media segments based on people, places, events, emotions, logos, landmarks, background audio and more.”

As its partnership with Wasabi also grew closer, that resulted in an unexpected acquisition by the technology company. Wasabi’s Chief Marketing Officer Michael Welts explains that he heard from LFC that it was looking to do more with AI and decided to move fast.

As Crisp explains:“ I'm going, ‘Michael, how do we plug that into Wasabi?’ Because then all of the content we've got, that's what takes us to the next level. I didn't know then that they were going to pick up the phone and go ‘we need that!’” 

Wasabi subsequently acquired Curio AI in 2024 and has baked its capabilities into what it’s now calling Wasabi AiR. 

AI trained on 180 players faces

The combination of having all LFC’s archives (as well as the terabytes being created every weekend) in cloud-based, easily accessible storage without data egress fees, and a natural language-powered search engine is proving invaluable, Crisp says, allowing LFC to sweat its media assets much more effectively and deliver far more to fans via these newly joined up “All Red” channels. 

That’s taken some training through. As Crisp’s colleague Matthew Quinn, VP, Media at LFC explains: “We've trained it [Wasabi AiR] on 180 players faces… the guys have literally been feeding it player identification, logo identification, and match event identification.

"That's the really tricky thing: How do you get AI to recognize what a free kick looks like, or a throw-in looks like? There’s lots of AI out there that will do speech to text and so on, but actually creating something that’s sports-focussed for us? That's the bit that really makes it work for our teams. 

“We’ve trained the AI on [data about the] men's team to the 1962-63 season; the women's team back to this 2015-2016 season, and the Academy back to 2017-2018 at this current time.”

As Crisp sums up: “If you can take [what was] three days worth of work and you start to turn that into 30 seconds, that's phenomenally powerful. Wasabi AiR is changing the game for how we look for content, curate content and put it in front of fans.”

“Music, entertainment, sport, they all thrive on passion. Our fuel is our content. The quicker that we can take those moments and get them in front of fans, the better.”

It’s the kind of soundbite that would make an CMO roll on the grass with delight and a little later, that’s where Wasabi’s Welts can be found, lying on the hallowed Anfield turf next to the firm’s logo, looking rather like the happiest man in the world. 

*Due disclosure: Wasabi sponsored a media trip to LFC of which The Stack was part.