The United Football League tackles game day support for fans with Agentforce.

With 200,000 yearly fan requests, a team of 20 reps needed tools to free time for building league-growing relationships.

The United Football League (UFL) is carving out a bold new chapter for spring football. With eight teams across the country and a fast-paced 12-week season, the league has already captured nationwide attention. Games are televised across major networks, and over 540,000 fans attended games in the 2025 season. Each game sparks a wave of inquiries from fans eager to engage with the league, from purchasing season tickets or finding game day details.

Around 20 representatives support all eight teams, managing both sales and service. These reps handle around 200,000 inquiries per year by phone, email, text, or in person on game days. Without centralized processes or data systems, it was nearly impossible to track trends or gain a clear view of fan needs across the league. On top of that, reps spent much of their time answering repetitive, transactional questions — leaving less room for higher-value work like building lasting fan relationships.

“The most important thing for the UFL is getting as many people to experience our product as possible. Our reps are critical to that,” said Jeroen van den Bergh, Senior Vice President of Business Intelligence and Strategy. “Answering questions, like ‘How do I download a ticket?’ or ‘How do I buy a parking pass?’ takes them away from the work that drives the league’s long-term success.”

That focus on long-term success is crucial. The UFL isn’t just selling tickets — they’re working to earn a permanent place for spring football on the sports calendar. Decades of short-lived leagues have left fans hesitant, but the UFL sees every interaction as a chance to deepen loyalty and build confidence in the product. By reducing the time reps spend on repetitive tasks, the league can free them to focus on strategic work that fills stadiums, strengthens connections, and sustains momentum.

Agentforce turns complex football data into clear, engaging insights for a next-level fan, coach, and player experience.

On game day, fans crave more than just touchdowns and highlight reels. They want context, insights, and deeper connections to the action. With Agentforce, the UFL can now turn massive amounts of football data into insights that enhance both the game day broadcast and the fan experience.

In partnership with Uptima, the UFL’s football operations developed a custom agent that taps into SportsRadar data via API, including box scores, player stats, and performance metrics like passing yards, rushing touchdowns, and even running speed. Traditionally, pulling and formatting this type of information for TV or social content would take hours of manual work. Now, Agentforce does it in seconds.

For example, ahead of a nationally televised game, the football operations group accesses Agentforce directly within the Salesforce Lightning Console, where it is embedded as an interactive panel. From here, users might ask Agentforce, “Which defense has the advantage this week?” or “How many touchdowns can we expect from this matchup?” Agentforce pulls the latest stats and historical data from SportsRadar via API, unifies it in Data Cloud, and applies the Atlas Reasoning Engine to compare players and teams, identify trends, and generate conversational insights. These insights are then shared with broadcast partners, who highlight them during FOX’s pregame show in a 30-second feature, or posted across the UFL’s social channels to spark fan engagement. “It’s never about using technology for technology’s sake,” said Brad Cheney, FOX Sports Vice President of Field Operations & Engineering. “When FOX Sports explores a new product or a new platform, we run it through the filter of, ‘Is it additive to our storytelling.’ Agentforce allows us to gather and reference AI-driven statistical information in real time, allowing our broadcasters to go into deeper detail on-air, either by introducing a new piece of information or adding context to an ongoing conversation.”

Agentforce isn’t just for fans watching at home. In the future, coaches and players will also use it internally to analyze performance and identify favorable matchups. For example, if an opposing player is known for high-speed sprints, Agentforce can surface that detail instantly, helping staff make smarter game-time decisions and adjust lineups accordingly.

That ability to move from raw data to meaningful insights so quickly is a huge leap forward. “We have a ton of data. Sifting through that, finding the right information, and delivering a message that resonates used to take an enormous amount of manpower. That’s not the case with an agent,” van den Bergh said. “It’s just incredible how quickly Agentforce can derive an insight.”

This kind of automation not only saves time, it also deepens engagement. Fans won’t just watch the game; they will learn why certain matchups matter, what stats to watch for, and how their favorite players stack up. That layer of storytelling makes broadcasts more engaging and keeps fans coming back for more.

“What we’re excited about is the fact that Agentforce can improve the fan experience. That’s by far the most critical thing for us,” said van den Bergh. “Salesforce provides something so smart, capable, and diverse and we’re able to move quickly with the technology.”

With Salesforce’s deeply unified platform, the UFL unifies ticketing and demographic data into a 360-degree fan view that drives personalized engagement.

Building lasting fan relationships means more than just knowing who bought tickets. It’s about understanding who those fans are and what matters to them. Salesforce helps the UFL create a complete picture of every fan by unifying ticketing, demographic, and psychographic data into a single view. 

All raw ticketing and purchasing data flows from TicketMaster into Google BigQuery, where it’s enriched with additional insights from LiveAnalytics, like age, household type, and engagement patterns. From there, Census, a reverse ETL tool, pushes that enriched data from Google BigQuery into Data Cloud using zero copy architecture. Data Cloud builds a comprehensive “Fan 360 story,” giving the UFL the power to accurately segment audiences, deliver targeted communications, and create experiences that resonate — like promoting a children’s fanfest to families or spotlighting a coach from a fan’s alma mater. “With all of our data in Salesforce, we can tell a comprehensive story, and more importantly, accurately segment it,” said van den Bergh.

That same fan data becomes even more powerful inside Sales Cloud, which forms the backbone of the UFL’s ticket sales and customer management efforts. With a complete view of each fan, reps can quickly access purchase history, demographics, and engagement trends to have more authentic, relevant conversations. Instead of just managing transactions, they can proactively reach out for season ticket renewals or suggest upsells, such as moving a one-game buyer to a premium package based on prior behavior. Looking ahead, the UFL plans to extend these capabilities with Agentforce, using agents to automate upsell opportunities, manage renewal outreach, and even coach reps to improve their conversations.

The UFL uses Data Cloud segmentation with Marketing Cloud to deliver personalized messaging that keeps fans engaged year-round, even in the off-season. Ticketing and merchandise purchase behavior, combined with demographic and psychographic data, are unified in Data Cloud and segmented into precise audience groups. Those segments then power highly targeted campaigns in Marketing Cloud. “We want to make sure that we’re providing customers with a message that resonates with them. And the only way we can do that effectively and efficiently is through the segmentation ability in Data Cloud and Marketing Cloud,” said van den Bergh.

Unifying  sales, service, and marketing data together with ticket and demographic data means the UFL can engage fans with the right message, at the right time, every time. They are transforming data into fan understanding and turning every interaction into an opportunity to strengthen the league.

One of Salesforce’s biggest advantages for the UFL is the speed and ease of building an AI agent. With Salesforce’s low-code, no-code tools in Agent Builder, the UFL discovered that what they expected to be a heavy, complex development project was actually straightforward. In just 60 days, they went from concept to deployment of a fully functional, insightful agent — a timeline that exceeded their own expectations. “We were truly impressed with how easy it actually was to build an agent. You say low code, no code, and that’s the truth,” said van den Bergh.

And with Salesforce, everything works seamlessly together. Agentforce isn’t a standalone tool — it connects directly with the UFL’s unified fan data, which means every fan question, every service handoff, and every marketing touchpoint flows through the same system. That integration eliminates silos across sales, service, and marketing teams and gives staff a complete picture in the moment, so whether a fan is asking about kickoff times or renewing season tickets, the experience is consistent, fast, and personal.

Salesforce doesn’t just help the UFL manage and activate customer data, it empowers the league to live its mission of expanding the game of football with opportunity, innovation, and lasting impact for fans.