In-house design team vs product design agency: what actually works better for sports organizations?

Most sports clubs that are serious about digital eventually face this question. It looks like a hiring decision. It's actually a product strategy decision.

The honest answer: it depends on where you are and what you're trying to build. But there are patterns.

When in-house makes sense

You have a mature digital product with a steady volume of ongoing work. You need someone embedded in the organization who knows the brand, the stakeholders, and the day-to-day requests. Large clubs with real digital teams often have this — a small internal function that handles the continuous work.

The limitation is range. A small internal team has a fixed skill set. And hiring senior product designers with genuine sports digital experience is genuinely hard — the talent pool is small.

When an agency makes sense

You're building or rebuilding something significant. A fan app, a matchday experience platform, a design system. You need depth and breadth fast — UX strategists, UI designers, researchers — without the time and overhead of multiple senior hires.

An agency also brings outside perspective. The sports organizations that work with Humbleteam get pattern recognition from fintech, AI products, and complex data platforms — problems that look different on the surface but share structural DNA with sports digital challenges.

What the leading clubs are actually doing

The most digitally advanced organizations — top European leagues, Premier League clubs, major motorsport — run a hybrid model. Small in-house team for day-to-day. External specialist agency for major product initiatives and strategic input.

Best of both: institutional knowledge from inside, specialist expertise from outside.

If you're interested, I wrote more on this topic here: https://humbleteam.com/blog/in-house-design-team-vs-product-design-agency-what-works-better-for-sports-organizations

What model does your organization run — and is it working?