How Manchester Basketball Are Building the Audience They Need to Scale

Manchester Basketball are still early in their journey, but that is exactly what makes their story interesting. In only their second season, the club have been trying to build something that goes beyond simply putting a team on the floor and selling tickets game by game. The ambition is to create a stronger basketball brand for Manchester, grow a sustainable fanbase around it and eventually reach the point where bigger venues and larger crowds become realistic rather than aspirational.

That process is already beginning to show in the numbers. Year on year, gross and net ticketing revenue increased by around 13%, while average occupancy rose from 35% to 43%. At the same time, complimentary tickets fell by 46%, a deliberate move away from relying on free admission to fill seats. The club also sold out its opening home game, helped by a £5 ticket offer and a local fixture against Cheshire, giving Manchester an early example of what a fuller venue could look and feel like.

For Liam Hesketh, who joined Manchester Basketball in the summer of 2025, the starting point was relatively simple. Fanbase was already in place, but the club had largely been using it as a ticketing provider rather than as a broader tool for understanding and communicating with supporters.

“When I joined, I know that essentially it was just Dom and everything, and Fanbase, I think it was just a very, very basics and Fanbase that they were using,” he says. “It was literally just a ticketing provider. They’d not gone into anything like the push notifications, audiences, segmented audiences or anything like that.”

One of the first areas Hesketh focused on was Fanbase Audiences. Rather than treating every supporter in the same way, Manchester could begin identifying groups based on previous behaviour and using that information to inform the next conversation. The season ticket upsell audience quickly stood out.

“The audience’s feature was something that I wanted to utilize,” Hesketh says. “For instance the season ticket upsell audience was something that I just locked eyes on straight away and thought, right, let’s utilize this. And that gave us a handful of fans that had been to, you know, six, seven, eight games during the season. And I thought, right, well that’s a low hanging fruit. Let’s use that.”

Push notifications also became part of the club’s early approach, particularly around the opening game of the season. For a team still building awareness and routine among supporters, simply having another direct route to communicate represented progress. “The push notifications was something that was really useful at the start when we were sort of leading up to the start, the opening game and trying to build that excitement,” Hesketh says.

The challenge, however, is not simply producing one sellout. Manchester’s home capacity is around 2,000 and the club can have two or three home games in a week. That changes the economics of marketing significantly. There is neither the budget nor the attention available to treat every fixture as a major event, and the team are now moving towards a clearer strategy built around a smaller number of tent-pole games.

Claire, who joined Manchester Basketball after working in rugby, sees that as one of the most important changes ahead of the new season. “The strategy for ticketing is make the big games bigger because the cadence of games is such that we can’t, we can’t treat every game in the same way in terms of budget predominantly in terms of paid media because we’d be always on with a paid campaign if we did that,” she says. “We obviously don’t have the budget to do and it wouldn’t cut through if we did that anyway.”

That means Manchester will increasingly organise its season around different levels of marketing activity. At the top sits a broad awareness campaign designed to introduce the club to more people across Manchester and the wider North West. Below that, organic content and CRM activity will focus more heavily on selected tent-pole fixtures, while paid conversion campaigns and retargeting will aim to turn interest into ticket purchases.

For Claire, the biggest issue is not that Manchester have failed to market tickets. It is that too much of the club’s previous activity has been lower down the funnel, repeatedly asking the same relatively small group of people to buy again.

“One of the big barriers we’ve got at the moment is people don’t know here,” she says. “If we bring in more people in at the top we’ve got more a bigger pool to convert and we’re not really bringing anyone in at the top. We’ve just done lower funnel stuff over and over and over to the same people.”

That distinction matters because Manchester Basketball are currently working from a comparatively small base. Hesketh estimates the regular audience at around 700 to 800 supporters. The next phase is therefore not simply about improving conversion among the people already attending. It is also about widening the pool of people who know the club exists, understand what a Manchester Basketball game offers and can then be brought into a longer-term relationship.

The club’s first full season under the current structure produced encouraging results. Revenue increased, occupancy improved and the number of complimentary tickets dropped significantly. Yet both Hesketh and Claire are realistic that those figures represent a foundation rather than an end point. The club are still learning how demand behaves across different competitions, different points in the season and different types of fixtures.

“Gross revenue and net revenues were up about 13%,” Claire says. “Occupancy was up 35% to 43%. So everything basically was up apart from comps, obviously. They were down 46%, but that was purposeful.”

The reduction in complimentary tickets is particularly important. Giving tickets away can help create an atmosphere or introduce people to a new sport, but it can also make it harder to understand genuine demand and build a sustainable audience over time. Manchester have not eliminated complimentary tickets entirely, with allocations still available for charity partners and other specific cases, but the overall direction is clear.

The next challenge is understanding the people behind those numbers. Manchester can see the overall movement in revenue and occupancy, but Claire is clear that the club still has a long way to go before it has a detailed picture of who its fans are, how frequently they attend and what drives their decisions.

“We don’t really know our fans,” she says. “We don’t really know where they live. We don’t really know what the spend per head is. We don’t really know how many games that come into the season. Like, we haven’t mind the data that we do have.”

That is where the club sees the next stage of its work with Fanbase becoming increasingly important. As deeper CRM and analytics capabilities come into use, Manchester want to move from broad, generic communications towards segmentation and greater personalisation. Rather than every supporter receiving the same ticketing message, the aim is to build a better understanding of behaviours and use that to make communication more relevant.

“I think we’ll win a lot more in terms of personalizing communications, in terms of fan feeling like we know them and we care about them,” Claire says. “At the moment, it’s generic. It’s like, here’s your ticket in mail or here’s… And it’s not personal.”

The club are taking the same approach to content. Manchester are expanding their commercial team and adding more dedicated creative resource, but the objective is not simply to produce more. They want to understand what actually works. Do graphics drive more clicks than photography? Do action shots outperform other creative? Which players attract attention and, crucially, does that attention translate into ticket sales?

That level of analysis has not been possible in a meaningful way so far. Much of the club’s decision-making has been based on intuition, experience and what the team can observe on game day. The new structure is intended to create a feedback loop in which content and campaigns can be measured, compared and improved throughout the season.

“We don’t really know a graphic work better than a photography? Does a action… we haven’t really got the insight,” Claire says. “We kinda need to get to which players drive… what we kind of intuitively know the fan favorites. We don’t know by putting them in content if they’re gonna drive more ticket sales for us.”

That thinking connects directly to Manchester Basketball’s wider brand strategy. One of the club’s priorities for the coming season is to make its players “locally famous”. Manchester are not expecting them to become global stars, but they do believe the personalities within the team should be much more visible across the city.

“Our players should be famous in Manchester,” Claire says. “They’re not NBA players. Of course, they’re not global superstars, but they should be local superstars. Like, they should be in a bar in Manchester and recognizable and their personalities.”

There were already examples last season of players arriving with significant followings and strong basketball pedigrees, but Manchester did not always capitalise on those stories. The new approach is about connecting the basketball product to the personalities within it, giving supporters more reasons to care about the people they are watching and creating stronger recognition beyond game day.

The women’s programme is another area of focus. Claire openly acknowledges that attendances there have been much weaker, and part of the club’s new content resource will be specifically dedicated to growing that side of Manchester Basketball. It is another example of the club moving away from a purely reactive model and towards a more deliberate strategy built around specific audiences and objectives.

All of this feeds into a much larger ambition. Manchester Basketball do not see their current venue or audience size as the finished version of the club. Claire talks about reaching a point where Manchester could play at least half of its fixtures in a larger arena, but only once the underlying demand is strong enough to make that move sustainable.

That will not happen through one campaign or one successful season. The club see 2026/27 as another year of learning, but crucially one with a clearer framework around it. By 2027/28, the aim is to have a much stronger understanding of audience behaviour, segmentation, timing, creative performance and personalisation.

“I’d like to think ‘27, ‘28, that’s when we should be flying in terms of know what works, what doesn’t work,” Claire says. “We know timings. We know our audience behaviors. We know our crowd. We know segmentation starts, like, all of that stuff.”

There is a useful honesty in that. Manchester Basketball are not presenting fan growth as something that can be solved quickly. They are building the foundations, testing what works and gradually connecting ticketing, marketing, brand, content and data into one system.

For Fanbase, that journey is exactly where the platform is designed to sit. The first phase was straightforward ticketing. Then came audiences and push notifications. The next phase is deeper analytics, CRM, segmentation and personalisation, all of which can help Manchester understand not only how many people are buying tickets, but who those people are, how often they return and what might bring them back again.

Manchester Basketball’s early results show that the foundations are beginning to work. Revenue is up. Occupancy is up. Complimentary tickets are down. The bigger opportunity now is turning those improvements into something repeatable and scalable.

If the club can continue widening the top of the funnel while getting better at understanding and serving the supporters already inside it, the next stage of growth should become much clearer. The long-term ambition may be bigger arenas and bigger crowds, but the immediate job is more fundamental: build a fanbase that makes that future possible.

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The Clubhouse

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