BEST USE OF TECHNOLOGY IN A FOOTBALL CLUB 2019
Birmingham City Football Club and Tappit
Birmingham City Football Club partners with Tappit to deliver Blues Fastpay, the cashless experience for Blues fans. BCFC endeavours to deliver a top-quality experience for their fans at each match. The Club wanted to reduce queues around the stadium – particularly at food and beverage kiosks – and tap into data to better understand customer behaviour and increase engagement.
With this implementation, season ticket holders can enter the stadium and make purchases at kiosks and at the Blues Store all with one card As a result, queues move more quickly and BCFC has a deeper understanding of what their fans want from their matchday experience.
Chelsea Football Club
Chelsea FC is one of the world’s top football clubs. With on-pitch success, it is important to provide our global fan base with equally successful cutting-edge digital solutions. When conceiving an app for Chelsea FC’s global audience, our rationale was to extend the fan experience beyond the immediate 41,000 fans who are able to join us on match days at Stamford Bridge and to better engage and communicate with the vast number of fans that we have around the world.
The purpose of The 5th Stand, Chelsea FC’s official app, was to give fans who couldn’t attend the match in person the opportunity to be part of the action, excitement and conversation even though they were not physically present at live games. That is, there are four stands at the stadium, and The 5th Stand was envisioned as an extension of this experience, both virtually and digitally.
The 5th Stand app successfully launched and has hit all Club targets through the season. At close of season we achieved 2.3M downloads and have engaged returning monthly users from all corners of the globe.
Manchester United Football Club
Manchester United is one of the most recognised football teams in the world, with over 659 Million followers and 150 Million+ social media connections.
We aimed to deliver a bespoke digital platform to connect fans, partners, players and the club whilst enhancing the business impact, plus serve as the foundation for future innovation.
Built in association with our technology partner HCL, we have “Reimagined Business in Digital” for the club. Planning and implementation followed the Agile methodology, including a range of internal and external stakeholders.
A core part of The Club’s official direct to consumer app is “Match Centre” which makes innovative use of Opta live performance data through unique visualisation and graphics. This truly unique feature allows fans to follow the ebb and flow of the game live, providing an unrivalled second-screen matchday experience.
Launched in over 220 global territories, it became the most downloaded football club app in the last 12 months, reaching no.1 in the UK, no.1 in Sports categories in 89 territories and top ten in a further 58. So far it has exceeded all KPI expectations.
The innovations made and results achieved have convinced the business that it is the cornerstone of our future success.
Norwich City Football Club
In October 2018, Norwich City Football Club became the first UK football club to launch an official and completely free-to-use private WhatsApp messaging service for supporters to enjoy.
The service allows our fans to get all the latest news from the Club sent directly to their phones, along with behind-the-scenes videos, team updates, press conference news, exclusive subscriber offers and ticket updates.
In a title-winning season where unity and togetherness were a key part of the whole campaign, the WhatsApp channel helped bring the Club closer to the fans, whilst being able to communicate important news and contribute towards driving commercial revenue.
Portsmouth Football Club
Portsmouth Football Club installed a 59.9 square ft screen to help engage with supporters inside the stadium and to improve supporters matchday experience.
Upon installation the following key project goals were identified:
– Identifying opportunities for fans to engage
– Improve supporters matchday experience
– Creating avenues for sponsors to gain brand exposure
– Build commercial packages for new sponsors
To deliver the project the club reached out to main club sponsors – The University of Portsmouth – to link up with lecturers and students on courses relevant to the project.
Fans were able to get closer to the action during the match with new activations brought in to allow supporters to engage with the screen including Fratton Live, pitchside presentations and instant replays.
New packages were created including corner and replay sponsors while existing sponsorships were enhanced such as our official goal sponsor.
The matchday media team of students and staff continue to deliver a pre-match, in-game, half-time and full-time production that has vastly improved our supporter’s matchday experience at Fratton Park.
Portsmouth FC, we have created all this and more by maximising the skill sets of students to give the fans another reason to flock to Fratton Park.
Swansea City Football Club and Other Media
Swansea City AFC is a digitally progressive football club currently competing in the English Football League Championship.
For the start of the 2017/18 season, the club launched an app that made them the first in the UK to enable their fans to hold matchday tickets and season tickets on their phones and that substantially increased ticket and retail sales.
The 2018/19 season saw the club relegated to the Championship, meaning money had to be very carefully and cleverly spent. Rather than cutting back on spending on their digital touchpoints, the club chose to continue to invest in how they engage their fans.
Personalisation of content in the app has tailored content to the audience, further increasing revenue.
The club have now also invested in a new, fully-responsive website to cater for the 80%+ of fans accessing the website on mobile devices.
Rather than try to run 2 disparate sources of content and functionality for fans, Swansea City chose to take advantage of Other Media’s Clubcast platform. This means they have one CMS through which they can publish content (including live video and audio) to both the website and app.
