Global digital sports platform Fanatics has announced a long-term connected inventory partnership with leading sports retailer Sprinter, to significantly improve access to licensed sports merchandise for fans across Europe.
Through this partnership, sports fans and fashion enthusiasts across Spain and Portugal initially, and later expanding to the Netherlands in 2024, will have access to Fanatics’ industry-leading range of licensed sports merchandise, directly through www.sprintersports.com. The partnership, set to go live later this year, will feature more than 5,000 licensed sports products, such as apparel, headwear, accessories and hard goods, from many of the top leagues and sporting organisations across the world.
Sprinter will continue to power the front-end online experience to customers, whilst utilising Fanatics’ expertise in licensed sports merchandise and its world-leading assortment of licensed sports products, significantly building upon the 10,000+ strong product assortment previously available.
Fanatics partners with more than 900 of the largest sporting organisations, teams and leagues in the world including Manchester United, Chelsea, Paris Saint-Germain, LALIGA, Atletico Madrid, UEFA, The FA, The French Football Federation (FFF), A.C. Milan, Inter Milan, The International Olympic Committee (IOC), NFL, NBA, NHL, MLB and Formula 1.
Speaking on the partnership Sam Barker, vice-president, International Business Development at Fanatics, said: “We are delighted to be working with Sprinter, a trusted brand and destination loved across Europe, to offer fans across Iberia and beyond access to our world-leading assortment of licensed sports merchandise.
“Through partnering with Fanatics in this way, retailers across the globe have been able to expand their depth of assortment while mitigating a great deal of the risk that would usually come with such a move, leveraging Fanatics’ industry expertise and experience to place thousands of licensed sports products – quite literally – at their customers’ fingertips. It has been a pleasure to work with Sprinter so far and we look forward to building on our collective offering to fans in the months and years to come.”
Carlos Bertran, head of ecommerce at Sprinter, also said: “We pride ourselves of having our finger on the pulse of the latest sports trends, and being able to innovate and pivot to meet evolving customer needs. This partnership with Fanatics empowers us to do just that, allowing us to better serve our customers while significantly expanding our product assortment, more quickly and easily than would have previously been the case.”
This deal is the latest in a series of similar connected inventory partnerships for Fanatics with retailers across the UK, USA and Asia, powering licensed sports merchandise online for the likes of NEXT, which marked Fanatics’ first connected inventory partnership in Europe, Foot Locker, Walmart, Kohls, Nordstrom and Rakuten Ichiba.
