The Clubhouse
The Matchday Products Clubs Aren’t Selling Yet
For most sports clubs, matchday has a fairly familiar collection of products attached to it. There is the ticket, the programme, food and drink, merchandise and, for supporters willing to spend considerably more, hospitality. Clubs have spent decades getting better at selling each of them, but the basic commercial model has remained surprisingly consistent. Get somebody through the gate, then hope they buy something while they are there.
The strange thing is that almost every other part of the leisure industry has moved in the opposite direction. Airlines no longer regard the flight as the only product, nor do hotels do not simply sell rooms or theme parks stop once somebody has bought admission. Around the core purchase sits an increasingly sophisticated collection of additions designed around what the customer is going to need, want or experience anyway.
Sport has many of the same opportunities because a supporter attending a match is not simply buying 90 minutes of football. They have to travel somewhere, perhaps park a car, eat and drink, entertain their children, meet friends and, on certain occasions, find a way of making the day feel special. Some will want a shirt or scarf. Others will want to arrive early, stay afterwards or get closer to the players. A family attending for the first time might want something completely different from a season-ticket holder making their 300th visit.
Seen through that lens, the question isn't simply how clubs sell more tickets. It's how much of the economy created by somebody deciding to attend a match actually belongs to the club.
There is an obvious comparison with flying. Buy an airline ticket and the transaction rarely ends with the seat. You might choose where you sit, add luggage, pay for priority boarding, book lounge access, pre-order food, arrange airport parking or hire a car at the other end. Some of those products are operated by the airline and others by partners, but they all sit around the same journey.
Football’s version of that journey is often far more fragmented. A supporter buys their ticket from the club, pays somebody else to park, eats in a pub or restaurant nearby, buys something for their child outside the stadium and perhaps books a hotel independently if they have travelled any distance. The supporter might spend £80 or £100 because they decided to attend a £20 football match, while the club sees only a fraction of it.
That does not mean clubs should attempt to own every pound spent within a mile of the stadium. Independent pubs, restaurants and businesses are part of what makes football grounds and their communities interesting, and there is little appeal in turning matchday into a controlled shopping environment. It does suggest that clubs can think more expansively about what they are actually selling. In many cases, the opportunity is not to invent another product but to make something the supporter was already going to buy easier to purchase through the club.
Parking is perhaps the least glamorous example and one of the most obvious. Manchester City allow supporters to pre-book matchday parking at the Etihad Campus, turning one of the practical requirements of attending into something that can be sorted before the supporter arrives. It is hardly a revolutionary product, but that is partly the point. For somebody driving to the game, parking is not an impulse purchase invented by a clever commercial department. They need somewhere to put the car.
The same principle could apply to transport. A club located away from the centre of a city might partner with a local bus or coach operator. A club attracting supporters from further afield could connect tickets with hotel accommodation. For major sporting events, this already happens extensively through travel partners, with ticket-and-hotel packages turning the event itself into the centrepiece of a wider trip.
For smaller clubs, the opportunity may be even more practical. If parking is limited, selling spaces in advance gives the club revenue while removing uncertainty for the supporter. If a nearby business has an empty car park on Saturdays, a partnership can create inventory that did not previously exist. If supporters regularly arrive by train, a shuttle from the station could be both a service and a product. The commercial idea begins with observing the day from the supporter’s perspective rather than looking exclusively at what can be sold once they are inside the ground.
Food and drink provides perhaps the clearest example of a product clubs already sell but could sell differently. The problem is obvious to anybody who has spent half-time staring at a queue while wondering whether a pie is worth missing the restart for. The supporter wants to spend money and the club wants to take it, but both have roughly 15 minutes to complete the transaction.
Tottenham Hotspur allow supporters to pre-order beer for collection at half-time from the Goal Line Bar at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium. Chelsea have experimented with the same problem from another direction, using self-ordering technology and advance half-time ordering to reduce queues at Stamford Bridge. The interesting part is not particularly the technology. It is the recognition that convenience changes whether people buy at all.
A supporter who knows they will spend ten minutes queuing might decide not to bother. A supporter who can order at 2.35pm and collect at half-time has a much easier decision to make. That principle is accessible well below the Premier League and it's something our clubs at Fanbase are increasingly doing. A pie pre-ordered alongside a ticket does not need an enormous stadium app or a bank of touchscreens. It needs a club to know what it can reliably fulfil and a way for the supporter to buy it before the busiest 15 minutes of the afternoon. The product already exists but now so does the opportunity to sell it at the moment when the supporter has the time and inclination to buy.
Japanese baseball offers a more playful version of the same idea. At Tokyo Dome, the Yomiuri Giants have sold bento boxes associated with individual players and their manager, alongside food presented in collectible Giants helmet-shaped containers. At Es Con Field, home of the Hokkaido Nippon-Ham Fighters, the concept stretches across the venue, with player-themed food, beer brewed inside the stadium and other activities designed to make eating and drinking feel like part of the baseball experience rather than something happening around it.
There is a useful distinction here. The Giants are not necessarily persuading somebody who had no intention of eating lunch that they suddenly require a bento box. They are taking a purchase the supporter was likely to make anyway and making it specific to the team and the occasion. The food becomes part merchandise, part memory and part meal. British clubs do versions of this already, but there is room to go much further than putting a club badge on a disposable pint cup.
There's a broader point here about timing here too. The moment somebody buys a ticket is one of the clearest expressions of intent a supporter can give a club. They have decided they are coming, chosen the fixture and entered their payment details. Yet for many organisations, the transaction ends immediately after the ticket is purchased.
That is a missed opportunity, provided clubs resist the temptation to turn checkout into an assault course of irrelevant extras. A supporter attending with a child might reasonably be interested in a junior pack or scarf. Someone buying four tickets for a birthday might value an experience attached to the occasion. A supporter travelling from another city may need parking, while a regular individual ticket buyer might find membership relevant. Someone purchasing hospitality might want an overnight stay.
The important word is relevant. Airlines have occasionally pushed ancillary selling so far that purchasing a flight can feel like declining a dozen things before being allowed to pay. Sport should not copy the worst version of that model. The opportunity is to understand enough about the purchase to offer one or two additions that genuinely make the day better.
Merchandise is an obvious place to start. A supporter buying a ticket might want to add a scarf or shirt and collect it at the stadium rather than pay for delivery. A child attending their first game could have a pre-purchased welcome pack waiting for them. A limited product tied specifically to a fixture could be ordered with the ticket and collected on arrival. Merchandise then becomes part of matchday rather than a completely separate trip to the club shop.
Digital ticketing has created another, slightly unexpected opportunity. As physical tickets disappear, so does something supporters once routinely kept as a souvenir. The crumpled ticket stub from your first game, a derby, a cup final or a promotion season might have spent 20 years in a drawer, but it was nevertheless a physical record that you were there.
Albirex Niigata have effectively turned that disappearance into a product. The Japanese club have sold commemorative Matchday Tickets for individual home fixtures. The product resembles a physical match ticket and is accompanied by a ticket-shaped acrylic keyring, but it does not actually provide entry to the stadium. Supporters still need a genuine match ticket for that. The entire purpose of this one is remembering the occasion.
There is something rather smart about selling supporters a physical version of something technology has made obsolete. More importantly, the product changes with the fixture, which makes attendance itself collectible. A first match, a derby, a promotion-winning afternoon or simply a memorable game can become something tangible again. For British clubs increasingly moving towards entirely digital entry, there is an obvious idea in that. The old ticket stub disappeared because supporters no longer needed it, but that does not necessarily mean they stopped wanting one.
It is the sort of product that could work particularly well lower down the pyramid because it does not require expensive infrastructure or scarce stadium inventory. A beautifully designed physical ticket, match print or fixture-specific object can be relatively inexpensive to produce while still carrying emotional value. The more significant the occasion, the stronger that value potentially becomes.
The most interesting matchday inventory is often not physical at all. A club owns access that cannot be bought from anybody else: the tunnel, the dressing room, the pitch, the dugout and, within sensible limits, proximity to players and staff. These are ordinary working environments to people inside football and extraordinary places to many of the people paying to watch it.
Woking provide a good example of how that access can be packaged without Premier League scale. Their mascot products combine match tickets with elements including a stadium tour, food and drink, a pitchside kickabout, programme recognition, interaction with players and walking out with the team. Higher tiers add further merchandise and experiences. None of those ingredients requires Woking to build something new. The value comes from packaging access the club already controls into an experience a child and their family might remember for years.
West Ham take the same principle to the premium end of the market. Their All Access hospitality has included premium match tickets, dining with a club legend, parking, watching the players warm up from pitchside, half-time pitch access, player interaction and signed memorabilia. At that point, the club is no longer simply selling a better seat and nicer food. It is selling proximity to the parts of football supporters normally experience from a distance.
There is plenty of room between a standard match ticket and that level of access. Stadium tours before kick-off, birthday announcements, pitchside warm-up experiences, group packages for junior teams, post-match photographs or occasional opportunities to meet former players can all turn existing club assets into products. The constraint is protecting the sporting operation and ensuring that access remains special. If everything becomes VIP, very little feels VIP.
American baseball offers another way of thinking about matchday inventory. Rather than assuming everybody attending a game is buying exactly the same product, MLB teams increasingly build special ticket packages around individual fixtures. The Cleveland Guardians, for example, sell packages that can combine admission with limited-edition merchandise or access to additional experiences. The baseball game hasn't changed; what changes is the reason somebody might choose to attend it.
The model becomes particularly interesting when teams use culture outside sport to attract audiences who might not otherwise have selected that fixture. MLB clubs have run theme days and ticket packages around brands and characters including Hello Kitty and Barbie, with exclusive merchandise and experiences attached to the game. Reuters reported in September 2026 that MLB said 56% of buyers for these sorts of events during the previous season were new buyers, while the Toronto Blue Jays reported a 40% increase in ticket sales for a Hello Kitty event.
There is an obvious warning against importing American promotional culture wholesale into British football, where supporters tend to have a fairly sensitive radar for manufactured entertainment. A National League club does not need Barbie Night because it worked in Toronto. The underlying commercial idea is much more transferable: the same seat, at the same fixture, can form part of several different products depending on who is buying it.
For one supporter, a Saturday fixture might simply be a match ticket. For another it could be a ticket and junior first-match pack, while somebody else might buy a ticket with a limited-edition match print, a pre-match event or food and drink included. A collector might want the commemorative physical ticket. A family celebrating a birthday could want something that makes an otherwise ordinary league fixture feel like an occasion. The club has not created another game or added another seat. It has created different reasons to buy the same underlying inventory.
Of course, there is a point at which the search for new products becomes slightly more inventive.
Manchester United have recently discovered that even the ground beneath the players’ feet can become inventory. After Old Trafford’s playing surface was completely dug up and stripped back during its replacement, sections of the old pitch were preserved inside acrylic cubes. A 7cm version containing genuine Old Trafford turf has been offered through the official United Store for £125.
There is something wonderfully football about the whole proposition. United’s product description calls the cube a “priceless memento”, before the website rather helpfully settles the matter by pricing it at exactly £125. For that, supporters receive a small piece of genuine Old Trafford turf preserved inside acrylic, suitable for displaying alongside other memorabilia. The company involved in producing the pieces has also shown larger blocks and versions designed around particular parts of the pitch.
It is very easy to make fun of selling a small square of grass for three figures, so we probably should. Somewhere along the process, after all, somebody had to sit in a meeting and suggest monetising the lawn. The irritating thing is that the underlying idea is actually rather clever. The old pitch had to come up anyway and, in purely material terms, the turf itself had very little value. Add provenance, presentation and the emotional significance of Old Trafford, and something that was being removed becomes a premium collectible.
Manchester United are not alone in discovering the strange economics of grass. FIFA offered authenticated pieces of the MetLife Stadium pitch following the 2025 Club World Cup final between Chelsea and Paris Saint-Germain. Once again, the physical material itself is almost worthless. The story attached to it is the product.
Most clubs probably should not respond by sending somebody outside with a spade. The more useful lesson is that the boundaries of what constitutes sporting inventory are considerably wider than ticket, pie, pint and programme.
Sport is particularly well suited to products of this kind because supporters attach meaning to objects that would have little value outside their context. A plastic seat from an old stand is just a plastic chair until somebody remembers sitting in that stand with their dad. A square of turf is grass until a promotion was won on it. A piece of net, an old sign, a brick from a demolished terrace or a match-used ball can all acquire value because of what happened around them.
Clubs undergoing redevelopment are sitting on particularly interesting forms of this inventory. Stadium seats, signage, dressing-room fittings and pieces of the playing surface can become authenticated memorabilia rather than simply waste. Even smaller changes can create opportunities. A net used during an important season can be divided into pieces, old signage can be auctioned, while fixtures and fittings from a historic stand can become objects supporters genuinely want to own.
There are limits, obviously, and clubs need to understand the line between giving supporters access to their history and putting a price tag on absolutely everything. The Manchester United cube is funny partly because £125 for grass tests that boundary rather enthusiastically. There is nevertheless a useful commercial principle underneath it. Clubs spend enormous amounts of time creating new merchandise when some of the most meaningful things they can offer already exist. Authenticity is difficult to manufacture, and sport produces it constantly.
There is another part of the supporter journey that remains relatively underdeveloped: what happens after the match. Clubs understandably concentrate their commercial effort before kick-off because that is when anticipation is highest and everybody is guaranteed to be in roughly the same place. At full-time, thousands of people leave at once and the matchday economy largely disperses back into surrounding pubs, restaurants, stations and car parks.
Not everybody necessarily wants to leave immediately. Depending on the club, venue and kick-off time, there may be opportunities for bars to remain open, club shops to continue trading, post-match entertainment to take place or experiences to be scheduled once the stadium begins emptying. Es Con Field in Japan is particularly interesting in this regard because the venue is conceived as somewhere supporters can spend far more time than the duration of the baseball game itself. Food, drink, activities and post-game experiences form part of the wider visit rather than being treated simply as things available while the sport is taking place.
Smaller clubs should not try to imitate enormous modern stadium developments, but the underlying question still applies. If several hundred supporters would happily stay for another drink after the match, is there somewhere for them to do it? If families have travelled for a special occasion, could a post-match element make the experience more valuable? If the club has a bar or clubhouse, does its commercial planning treat the final whistle as closing time or simply another moment in the day?
The answer will depend entirely on the venue and supporter base. There is no universal product waiting to be copied by every club. The opportunity comes from looking at what supporters already do before, during and after the match and asking where the club can improve it.
One danger with conversations about matchday revenue is that every square metre of a stadium begins to look like something waiting to be monetised. That is not particularly healthy, and supporters will notice quickly if every interaction with their club begins with an invitation to spend more money.
Some products are valuable precisely because they improve the experience first and generate revenue second. Pre-ordering a half-time drink saves somebody from a queue. Parking removes uncertainty before they arrive. A child’s first-match pack can turn an ordinary afternoon into a memory. A commemorative ticket restores something supporters lost when entry became digital. A stadium tour provides access that supporters genuinely value, while merchandise collection can save delivery costs and inconvenience. The club benefits financially because it has solved something useful.
That is a much better starting point than asking how another £5 can be extracted from everybody who walks through the gate. The strongest additional products tend to sit naturally inside the day rather than feeling bolted onto it. They recognise something a supporter was already going to do, buy or feel and make the experience easier or more memorable.
There is also a data benefit. A club that knows somebody regularly pre-orders food, attends with children, books parking or buys particular experiences understands more about how that supporter uses matchday. Used carefully, that should allow future communication to become more relevant rather than simply more frequent. A family who regularly buys junior products should not necessarily receive the same matchday offer as a group of four adults who routinely pre-order drinks, just as somebody travelling from 100 miles away may have very different needs from a supporter who walks to the ground.
The biggest shift is therefore conceptual. Clubs have traditionally built their matchday commercial operation around inventory inside the stadium: seats, hospitality spaces, advertising boards, food outlets and retail. Supporters experience the event much more broadly. Their matchday can begin hours before kick-off and finish hours afterwards, with transport, parking, food, friends, family, collecting and ritual all sitting around the match itself.
Some of that spending should remain outside the club. The pub around the corner, the café near the station and the independent businesses surrounding grounds are part of football culture and local economies, not leakage that needs to be captured. There may even be more value in partnering with those businesses than trying to compete with them. A club does not need to own the hotel to offer supporters a useful hotel deal, just as it does not necessarily need to operate a car park or coach service itself.
The more useful exercise is to map the entire day and ask where the club can genuinely make something easier, better or more memorable. Perhaps that is a parking space, a pie waiting at half-time or a scarf ready for collection. Perhaps it is walking onto the pitch with the team, meeting a former player, buying a beautifully designed physical reminder of the game or taking home a piece of a stadium that has mattered to your family for generations. Apparently, it might even be £125 worth of grass.
Clubs have spent decades trying to sell more tickets, and there is still enormous value in doing that. But once a supporter has decided to come, another commercial opportunity begins. The most interesting question is not what else the club can persuade them to buy. It is what else they already want from the day, and whether the club can provide it.
Selling the ticket is only one part of the supporter journey. Fanbase connects ticketing, attendance, memberships, supporter data and communications, helping clubs understand who is coming through the gate and build stronger relationships beyond a single fixture.
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