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Sports sponsorship agency

A daily brief that catches partnership news before anyone else does

How we replaced hours of manual news-tracking with an AI-filtered digest delivered to the owner's inbox every morning at 8am.

6–8 hrsBack every week
Nothing missedLower-league deals included
More leadsHigh-intent sponsors to follow up

Client overview

Sports sponsorship agency

A football sponsorship activation agency needed to track every new brand and club partnership announcement across six leagues, every single day, without spending the morning doing it by hand.

Industry
Sports sponsorship
Automation type
Daily intelligence digest
Tools used
n8n, OpenAI, Gmail

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.

Announcements are scattered across sports publications, club press releases, Google News, and niche lower-league outlets
Manually tracking all of this would take hours every morning and was essentially impossible to do comprehensively
The owner had higher-leverage work to focus on and couldn't afford to spend the morning reading sports news
Lower league clubs rarely appear in mainstream sports publications, making them especially hard to track manually

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.

01Main pipeline scrapes RSS and Google News, filters with AI, sends at 8am
02Lower-league scraper runs four times a day to catch what the main pass misses
TriggerSchedule

Every day at 8am

Connected
FetchRSS + Google News

Sports-business feeds and targeted searches

Connected
TriggerSchedule

6am, 12pm, 6pm and midnight

Connected
FetchLower-league scrape

A news aggregator, four times a day

Connected
MergeMerge sources

Everything from the last 24 hours

Connected
AIOpenAI filter

Keeps qualifying partnership deals only

Connected
SendGmail

The Football Partnership Brief at 8am

Connected
The main workflow runs at 8am: it fetches RSS feeds and Google News. A second workflow scrapes a lower-league news aggregator at 6am, 12pm, 6pm and midnight. Both feed a merge step, then an OpenAI filter keeps only qualifying partnership deals, and Gmail sends the brief at 8am.

What we built

01

Triggers at 8am

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.

02

Runs 6am, 12pm, 6pm, midnight

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.

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.

"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.

6–8 hrsBack every week
Nothing missedLower-league deals included
More leadsHigh-intent sponsors to follow up

Drowning in manual research too?

If your team spends hours every day tracking information across scattered sources, we'll tell you honestly whether automation is the right fix.

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Technology stack

Built with the tools already in use

n8n OpenAI Gmail

Before vs after

Every morning, before and after the brief

Doing it by hand

  • Announcements scattered across dozens of outlets
  • Hours spent manually reading sports news each morning
  • Lower-league deals routinely missed

With the automation

  • 6–8 hours back every week
  • Every relevant deal in one email, lower leagues included
  • Time spent on high-intent sponsorship leads instead of searching

Key takeaway

The bottleneck was never finding out about a deal. It was finding the time to look. Once reading the news became automatic, spotting the opportunity stayed a human call.

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