As the clock ticked in the 67th minute of the final of the 2025 Copa Libertadoros, South American football’s premier club competition, Flamengo midfielder Giorgian de Arrascaeta prepared to deliver a corner. With the match deadlocked at 0-0, more than 70,000 fans packed into Peru’s Estadio Monumental held their breath.

De Arrasceata sent in an outswinging cross that was met at the near post by Danilo, who rose unmarked to guide a header into the net via the inside of the post. Danilo, a veteran defender used to big occasions after a glittering career in Europe before returning to his native Brazil, wheeled away like a man possessed, pointing at the pitch and waving his arms wildly as he celebrated what turned out to be the only goal of the game. It helped Flamengo beat another Brazilian team, Palmeiras, 1-0, to secure a third Libertadores title in six years.

Such is the global nature of football, the world’s most popular spectator sport, that fans from all corners of the Earth rushed to share Danilo’s outpouring of joy. Though no official figures have been published, the viewing audience for the final was expected to reach 180 million, with many of them sharing, and creating, content relating to the match and its protagonists. A pitchside video showing the winning goal - and the subsequent celebrations - from an alternate camera angle received more than 550,000 likes on TikTok alone.

Online content is just one aspect of the supporter experience Conmebol, South American football’s governing body, is trying to harness in a new platform which aims to boost fan engagement. To develop the platform, it has turned to IT firm Atos for help, with a new innovation partnership signed to coincide with the Libertadores final. Danilo and Flamengo were not the only ones with something to celebrate that day.

A whole new ball game

Atos is a firm with a long track record of providing IT infrastructure for sporting organizations. The French company is technology partner to UEFA, the custodians of football in Europe, as well as working across other sporting events, including the Olympic Games. DCD reported on how the firm’s infrastructure was critical to the smooth running of the Paris 2024 Olympics in issue 54 of DCD>Magazine.

With so many clients in the sector, it has an entire business unit dedicated to sport, which it established more than 30 years ago. “This makes us pretty unique for a big IT company,” Nacho Moros, head of major events at Atos, tells DCD.

The partnership with Conmebol is at an early stage, but Moros explains that the first task is to create a platform that brings together all the stakeholders in South American football, from supporters and administrators to commercial partners. At present, Conmebol lacks a unifying presence online, with separate apps for different competitions, and functions such as buying match tickets. Atos wants to change this with a platform fit for 2026.

“Historically, Conmebol has never managed to have a unified digital fanbase,” Moros says. “What we’re doing is building the foundations for a new digital ecosystem connecting all the fans. Conmebol wants to know its supporters better so that it can personalize their experience and engage the younger generation. The way people consume football is changing; whereas I would watch a match on TV as a passive spectator, my children want to create and interact with content. It also wants to engage with fans in different parts of the world, not only in South America but in Europe and across the Middle East and Africa.”

The infrastructure behind this app will, unsurprisingly, be based in the cloud. Moros says the company is employing a hybrid strategy for the Conmebol platform, utilizing infrastructure from three public cloud hyperscalers that he declines to name. It is likely these include the usual suspects, Amazon’s AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud, and indeed Atos has publicly said it works with AWS to deliver systems for UEFA.

Using servers from three different providers is intended to make the platform more durable and able to cope with the inevitable spikes in demand that will occur when a big match is taking place. “Our experience in big sport ecosystems shows we need to be able to scale up and down depending on competitions but also so we have resources to continuously collect data so that we can personalize the user experience,” Moros says. “Having enough redundancy in place is important.”

Atos is using AI to manage network load, and the supporter journey, effectively. Moros says the company has a variety of off-the-shelf and in-house AI algorithms that it can deploy for sporting organizations such as Conmebol, running from its data centers. The firm has five of its own data centers, according to Data Center Platform, three in France and one each in Austria and Germany.

“We have a very pragmatic approach in Atos,” Moros says. “The company strategy is a mixed model because there are things totally specific to sports that we provide ourselves, but we also use existing solutions in the market.”

These models are fed with some data from across the company’s portfolio of sports contracts, but Moros says the amount of crossover between different disciplines is limited. “You have to understand sports from different angles, and appreciate fans come at things from very different perspectives,” he says. “We’ve delivered the last two editions of the Invictus Games [an international athletics tournament for injured service personnel] with the International Paralympic Committee and the people who follow that are totally different from the audience for football.”

We go again

With the Conmebol contract in the bag, Atos cannot afford to rest on its laurels. Its ongoing work with UEFA means it is already preparing for the Euro 2028 football tournament, which is being co-hosted by England, Scotland, Wales, and the Republic of Ireland in two years' time, as well as the organization’s ongoing club competitions, including the Champions League.

The company worked with UEFA at the last continental tournament, Euro 2024 in Germany, delivering 200 applications from 11 locations across the country, including IT infrastructure deployed at all 10 tournament stadiums.

Moros says Atos engineers have been able to boost network capacity at stadiums in Europe to ensure that fans can access information and upload clips of magic moments. The company has supplied a network overlay, a virtual network that sits on top of physical infrastructure to boost bandwidth. This “enhances what the stadiums have,” Moros says, explaining: “It allows us to secure all the critical services and also give spectators the experience they expect.”

For South America, such a system could be developed further down the track, Moros says. “At the moment we’re concentrating on the digital platform,” he says. “But we are talking about lots of projects like this to increase our presence in Conmebol.”

Moros himself is a keen football fan, and supports Atlético de Madrid, a club that has traditionally played second fiddle to its more glamorous neighbor Real Madrid. “I am the only Atléti supporter in my family,” he laughs. “It’s not always easy, but once you have your team, you stick with them for life.

“I’ve been able to do IT and sports my whole career, and because of this I feel like I’m a very lucky person.”