The challenge
The owner of a football sponsorship activation agency needed to stay on top of every new brand and club partnership announcement across the Premier League, Championship, League One, League Two, and Europe's top five leagues. Every single day.
Our approach
A two-workflow n8n automation system that scrapes multiple news sources daily, filters for relevant announcements using AI, and delivers a branded email digest to the owner's inbox at 8am every morning.
What we built
Main pipeline
Pulls from RSS feeds covering major sports-business publications, and queries Google News with targeted search strings to surface announcements not covered by specialist outlets. Filters all articles from the previous 24 hours, then passes the merged data to OpenAI, which applies chain-of-thought reasoning to each item, identifying the brand, the club, and the commercial action. Only items that explicitly announce or update a qualifying commercial partnership are kept, then formatted into a branded HTML email and sent via Gmail as The Football Partnership Brief.
Lower league scraper
Scrapes a dedicated news aggregator four times daily, since it updates frequently enough that running once a day would miss earlier stories. Extracts article content and passes it through the same AI filtering logic as the main workflow. Results are aggregated and fed into the main workflow at 8am, where they're merged with the RSS data before the final email is generated.
Daily partnership intelligence: sample day
Championship club extends kit partner for 2026–27
A Championship club has renewed its training kit agreement with its principal partner ahead of next season.
Read full report →Premier League club renews stadium naming rights
A top-flight club has renewed its stadium naming rights partnership and confirmed the ground will be renamed accordingly.
Read full report →League One club announces new wellbeing partner
A League One club has appointed a new official wellbeing partner.
Read full report →Example format, anonymised. Not real client data or actual deals
The client has specifically noted the system has surfaced partnership news they'd have otherwise missed entirely. Announcements that would never have crossed their radar without it. The system has been live and in use since January 2026.
"Before this I was spending 6–8 hours weekly looking for partnership news. Now I receive a daily email informing me of the activity going on within the sponsorship market, allowing me to capture high-intent leads looking to activate sponsorships."
Founder, Sports Sponsorship Agency
The results
6–8 hours a week saved on manual news monitoring, confirmed directly by the client as their prior weekly time spent on this task. Every relevant partnership announcement across English professional football and Europe's top five leagues now surfaces automatically. Nothing is missed, and the system flags explicitly when no new activity has occurred that day.