EBAN Congress 2026 · SportsTech Forum · Launch of the SportTech Alliance · Vilnius, Lithuania

On 2 June, Sport Singularity Associate Founder Kamil Kazım Sarı joined the SportsTech Forum panel at EBAN Congress 2026 in Vilnius. The session also marked the official launch of the SportTech Alliance.

There is a word that surfaces more and more in European sport circles: coopetition. It sounds like a piece of management language, the kind that gets written on whiteboards and then forgotten. But at EBAN Congress this week, it meant something specific. It described a structural reality that practitioners in the room recognised immediately.

No single organisation can unlock the full potential of sport innovation alone. Not a federation, not a startup, not an investor, not a platform. The sport ecosystem is too fragmented, the funding landscape too competitive, and the challenges too systemic for any one actor to solve in isolation.

The ecosystems that will matter in five years are not being built through competition. They are being built through trust, shared infrastructure, and the willingness to collaborate across boundaries.

Why this matters now

European sport is in a moment of genuine transformation. AI, digital platforms, shifting fan demographics, EU funding frameworks, and new investor appetite are all converging at once. The organisations that navigate this well will not be the ones that move fastest on their own. They will be the ones that understand which relationships to build, which infrastructures to share, and which boundaries to redraw.

Coopetition, in this context, is not a soft concept. It is a strategic posture. It requires knowing what you are good at, being honest about where you are not, and building partnerships that fill the gap without losing your identity or your competitive position.

The launch of the SportTech Alliance at EBAN Congress is a concrete signal that the sector is ready to move from conversation to structure. That is encouraging. But structures only hold when the organisations inside them bring genuine strategic clarity to the table.

Where Sport Singularity sits

Sport Singularity's work sits at this intersection. We study where sport is heading, and we help organisations and investors act on that before the window closes. That means foresight work, not forecasting. It means reading the signals across policy, technology, and market behaviour, and translating them into decisions that organisations can actually take.

The panel in Vilnius reinforced something we see in our work every week. The demand for strategic clarity in European sport is real and growing. The question is not whether organisations want it. The question is whether they have the tools to develop it, and the partners to help them act on it.

We are building those tools. And we are looking for the organisations ready to use them.

Sport Singularity · Making European sport future-ready. sportsingularity.com