PassaSports CEO: Why behavioral intelligence beats data hoarding

The sports industry has spent years talking about data. About wearables. About platforms. About artificial intelligence. But the louder the debate becomes, the more fundamental the real question gets: who is actually creating meaningful value from all this data – for athletes, brands and retail alike?

As RiminiWellness celebrates its 20th edition this May, that question suddenly feels far more strategic than theoretical. The Italian trade show has evolved far beyond its origins as a fitness and wellness event. RiminiWellness 2026 positions itself at the intersection of fitness, health, longevity, nutrition, physiotherapy, sports medicine and preventive wellbeing. The shift matters. Because it signals a broader transformation across the European sports market: movement is no longer just performance driven. It is increasingly linked to prevention, lifestyle, healthy aging and long-term physical resilience.

And once longevity becomes a business category, the role of sports retail changes with it. They are no longer selling products into categories, they are selling solutions into lifestyles.

Mindset, community and longevity are hardly new concepts for the sports and fitness industry. The difference today is that consumers are no longer merely aspiring to these ideas – they are actively reorganizing their lifestyles around them.

Across Europe, more athletes – both men and women – are no longer training purely for competition or performance. Sport has become deeply connected to healthy aging, physical appearance, recovery, prevention and overall wellbeing. What once lived primarily inside the fitness industry is now reshaping the broader sports market.

The American College of Sports Medicine (ACSM) recently named wearable technology the No. 1 global fitness trend for 2025, ahead of both mobile fitness apps and traditional fitness programs. At the same time, consumer research from Euromonitor identifies longevity as one of the defining global lifestyle trends, with 52 percent of consumers expecting to live healthier lives in the future.

Meanwhile, wearable usage is no longer concentrated around elite athletes or performance enthusiasts. Recent Garmin training data, published by Tom’s Guide, shows strong growth across adjacent activity categories including racket sports (+67%), HIIT (+45%), Pilates (+46%) and strength training (+29%).

The implication for retail is significant: consumers increasingly move fluidly across sports, training formats and health-oriented routines.

A hockey athlete plays padel to stay fit. Runners integrate strength, mobility and recovery into weekly training habits. Cycling, sleep tracking, nutrition and preventive health are becoming part of one connected lifestyle rather than isolated activities. This creates an entirely new strategic opportunity for sports retail.

Because wearable data, training apps and community ecosystems suddenly become commercially relevant far beyond elite performance. The real opportunity is no longer simply collecting more data points. It is understanding how these connected behaviors translate into product relevance, localized assortment decisions and long-term customer relationships.

For independent retailers, this creates a unique strategic position. That is precisely why the perspective shared by Dutch retailer PassaSports feels remarkably timely.

In conversation with SGI Europe, PassaSports CEO Willem Koopmans outlines a retail model that stands in sharp contrast to the industry’s traditional obsession with ownership, closed ecosystems and maximum data extraction. His argument is refreshingly pragmatic: relevance does not come from collecting every possible data point. It comes from understanding behavior.

“The real value lies in understanding context, not collecting everything”

SGI Europe: If data is the new gold, why are brands acting like traditional gold prospectors? How do we turn passive data into predictive sales models?

Koopmans: “Currently, we do not directly utilize wearable data, as it is often locked inside closed ecosystems or third-party platforms. However, we are already highly predictive in our approach. We view our customers primarily as multi-sporters whose activities are driven by seasonality. They might play field hockey or tennis during the season and run or play padel in the off-season to stay fit.

By communicating with them about their sports frequency, we can accurately predict product consumption. This ‘community and customer first’ targeted approach is highly effective: in 2025, our group of loyal customers – those who buy across multiple sports – grew by 16 percent. This means our loyal customer base is growing significantly faster than our total active customer base.”

How can brands and tool providers open their data silos to shift retail from “best guess” to “data-driven”?

“In an ideal world, all these data systems would be interconnected. Many brands historically pushed hard for direct-to-consumer sales, but the reality is that consumers prefer to mix and match. A customer cannot or doesn’t want to buy their entire gear setup within a single brand’s ecosystem. This is exactly where our value as an independent retailer lies.

Breaking open these silos, however, requires extreme caution regarding privacy. We all know examples of users or apps accidentally revealing sensitive locations. Customers must always provide explicit consent. In addition, we are not interested in all data that wearables can supply. PassaSports doesn’t necessarily need to track a runner’s exact heart rate, but knowing if they require extra ankle support is highly relevant data that helps us offer the right local assortment.

With our 9.3 percent growth in 2025 and 40 percent of our revenue now coming from outside the Netherlands, we are proving that this independent, combined approach resonates internationally.”

What does a cooperation model look like where the tool provider becomes the central customer relationship management (CRM) data feed?

“Even within a highly integrated data ecosystem, the human element remains absolutely essential. Hard facts, like a heart rate, the price of a shoe, or its color, do not inherently tell you if a product is the right fit for a specific athlete. But other contextual knowledge is critical, for example, under what conditions they train, what their running distance is, or whether they are male or female. PassaSports employs around 300 professionals, including many coaches and former top athletes, who curate our assortment based on real-world experience.

Technologies like large language models (LLMs) don’t invent knowledge; they simply structure the insights and reviews generated by human experts and the community. We connect this data to the real world through our close partnerships with sports federations and physical community events. We are currently migrating towards a single, unified PassaSports platform, which already accounted for 35 percent of our revenue by the end of last year. On this platform, we blend hard data with high-quality context and independent human advice, creating the ultimate value for both the brand and the end consumer.”

(Interview: Susa Schreiner)

Our SGIE take

The timing of this conversation feels highly relevant. As RiminiWellness 2026 places longevity and holistic wellbeing at the center of its vision, the sports industry faces a parallel transformation: the future may belong less to those controlling the largest amounts of data, and more to those capable of intelligently combining data, behavioral insight, trust and human interpretation.

The winners of the next retail cycle may not be the brands collecting the most data, but the retailers capable of translating behavior into trust.