1. Introduction

For football fans across the globe, the release of the new Premier League season fixture is a highly anticipated event. It’s a chance for fans to plan their year ahead, lock in the blockbusters, mark down the rivalries, book weekends away, and reimagine hopes and dreams.

For ECAL, Premier League’s official ‘Digital calendar’ provider, the global release to millions of passionate football fans requires a sophisticated, well-co-ordinated strategy to on-board a flood of new subscribers on release whilst servicing the millions of connected users to update their calendar. Up until now, the Premier League schedule has only been available in English language only. ECAL set about solving this problem for Premier League.

2. Objectives

• DEVELOP a solution to provide the Premier League fixture and all its related event details, promotional ‘calls to action’ and direct-action links in languages other than English.
• LAUNCH this solution in time for the Premier League fixture release scheduled for the 19th of June 2024
• INTEGRATE the solution into ECAL’s existing ‘global displays’ that already have a smart language translation feature for the ‘sync to calendar’ user journey,
• ADOPT a platform approach to further revolutionise digital calendar communications using cutting edge technologies that would be relevant for other major global brands.

3. Strategy

Following months of investigation and testing, we partnered with Microsoft and OpenAI to develop an AI powered language
translation feature specific to the needs of calendar communications and our event-based client partner network.

4. Solution

ECAL unveiled it’s ‘Native Language Translations AI’ service, with the service officially launched by Premier League as part of their 2024/25 season fixture release in June ‘24.

In collaboration with Microsoft and OpenAI, and launched as part of ECAL’s expanding ‘Calendar AI’ toolbox, our ‘Native Language Translations AI’ feature delivers smart, personalised events content in the user’s preferred, detected, native language, directly into their calendar.

The service covers 248 countries, 49 languages including the top 10 dialects in India. All intelligently translated, with key nouns such as sporting team names, venue names, and brand names preserved and presented as they should in the user’s calendar.

5. Outcomes

ECAL has successfully developed the first mass language personalisation feature for Premier League, which will help inform its expansion and communications strategy going forward.

• 18% of Premier League ECAL subscribers are being served events content in a native language other than English.

• 33 of 49 available languages were served in the first week of the fixture release.

• 90% + of users have more than one language preference.

• Korean was the most popular native language, then French, Norwegian, Swedish, Arabic.