Fanbase Announcement
The New Fanbase Is Here: More Than a Ticket
Today, the new Fanbase goes live for more than 800,000 sports fans and the clubs they follow, with a completely rebuilt experience designed to make discovering live sport, buying tickets and staying close to your club easier than before.
This has been a significant build. Not simply a visual refresh or a handful of new features, but a new version of Fanbase built around a simple idea: buying a ticket is only one part of the relationship between a supporter and a club. Fans want to find matches worth going to, follow the teams they care about, buy tickets quickly and know those tickets will be ready when they reach the gate. Clubs want to reach more supporters, make matchday easier and stay connected with fans long after a transaction has been completed. The new Fanbase has been built around both.
Fanbase began as a sports ticketing platform. Its primary job was simple: help clubs sell tickets and make it easy for supporters to buy them. That remains fundamental, but the relationship between a fan and a club is much bigger than a transaction.
Supporters don’t only think about their club when they need a ticket. They follow fixtures throughout the week, look for something to do at the weekend, discover new teams, keep up with club news and decide, sometimes at short notice, that they want to go to a game. The old experience was centred heavily around the point of purchase. Once somebody had bought their ticket, there was less reason for them to return until the next time they wanted to attend.
The new Fanbase is designed to be useful before, during and after matchday. It gives supporters a place to discover live sport near them, follow clubs, buy tickets quickly and access those tickets even when mobile signal disappears at the gate. For clubs, it creates more opportunities to be discovered and more ways to maintain a relationship with supporters between fixtures.
One of the biggest additions is Fanbase Discover. There’s more live sport happening around people than most of them realise. Football, basketball, rugby, hockey and other live sporting events take place every week, often within a short journey of where people live. The problem has often been finding them.
Fanbase Discover brings fixtures and clubs from across the Fanbase network into one place, making it easier for supporters to browse live sport, find something worth attending and buy a ticket directly through the platform. For a supporter, that could mean discovering a club they didn’t previously follow or finding a match to attend on a free Saturday afternoon.
For clubs, the opportunity is just as significant. Fixtures can now be placed in front of more than 800,000 match-going sports fans using Fanbase, creating another route for clubs to reach people beyond their existing supporter base. Discoverability no longer has to rely entirely on somebody already knowing who you are and actively searching for your next fixture.
Supporters can now follow the clubs they care about inside Fanbase, which means upcoming fixtures, club content, news and updates sit together in one place, giving fans a reason to return throughout the week rather than only when they need to buy a ticket.
For clubs, this creates a more continuous relationship. A supporter who follows a club is no longer simply someone who bought a ticket once. They can stay connected to upcoming games and club activity, making it easier for the relationship to continue between matchdays. The strongest sports organisations are increasingly thinking beyond individual transactions, with ticketing, memberships, premium, content and communication all forming part of the same fan relationship. The new Fanbase has been designed with that in mind.
Buying a ticket should be one of the easiest parts of deciding to attend live sport. The new Fanbase checkout has been rebuilt to reduce the distance between finding a fixture and having a ticket ready to use. Fans can move from fixture to ticket in seconds, with support for Apple Pay and Google Pay making payment quicker on mobile.
That matters commercially for clubs too. Every unnecessary step in a ticket-buying journey introduces another opportunity for someone to abandon the purchase. A faster checkout experience means less friction between somebody deciding they want to attend and completing the transaction. Once the decision has been made, Fanbase is designed to get them through quickly.
Matchday mobile signal is not always reliable. Thousands of supporters arriving at the same venue at the same time can put pressure on local networks, which is exactly when a fan needs their ticket to load without delay. Tickets purchased through Fanbase are now stored automatically inside the Fanbase Wallet and remain available offline, so supporters can get their ticket ready before reaching the turnstile and access it whether they have signal or not.
For supporters, it removes one of the most common points of friction on matchday. For clubs, it helps create a smoother arrival experience and keeps queues moving.
Club pages inside Fanbase now have more space for clubs to express who they are, share relevant content and promote the things that matter most to their supporters. That could be the next fixture, a membership, premium, club news or another part of the wider matchday experience. The aim is to make the club page feel less like a place somebody visits purely to complete a transaction and more like a useful digital home within Fanbase.
Every part of the new experience has been built around two goals: helping more supporters get to live sport and helping clubs build stronger relationships with those supporters. Discover gives clubs another route to reach new audiences. Following gives existing supporters a reason to stay connected. Faster checkout removes friction from the buying journey. Offline tickets make matchday easier.
A supporter may discover a club through Fanbase, follow them, buy a first ticket, return for another fixture and gradually build a relationship with that organisation. That journey is much more valuable than a single transaction, and it’s the journey the new Fanbase has been built around.
For supporters, the proposition is simpler. More live sport worth going to, less effort finding it, faster access to tickets and a smoother experience when you reach the ground. Technology should make going to live sport easier, not become the thing supporters notice most. The destination is still the ground, the arena, the court, the people you go with and the game you went to see. We’ve simply made it easier to get there.
For club executives, the significance of the new Fanbase is not simply that supporters have a better app. It is that more of the fan relationship can now sit in one connected environment. Discovery, ticketing, following, memberships, premium, content and communication can all contribute to a clearer picture of who supporters are, what they are interested in and how the club can serve them better over time.
That matters because growth is not only about finding completely new supporters. It is also about deepening the relationship with the people already there. A supporter who attends once can become someone who follows the club, returns for another fixture, joins as a member, upgrades their matchday, buys hospitality or engages with the club throughout the week. The more connected that journey becomes, the more opportunities there are to improve both fan experience and commercial performance.
The new Fanbase has been built to give clubs the infrastructure to do more with that relationship. Better discovery can bring new people in. Faster checkout can improve conversion. Offline access can make matchday smoother. Following can create more regular engagement. Over time, the data created by those interactions can help clubs understand which supporters are most valuable, which audiences are growing and where the next commercial opportunity might be.
For clubs already using Fanbase, this launch is the beginning of a much broader fan experience. For clubs looking at how ticketing, fan data, CRM and matchday can work more closely together, it is also a glimpse of where the platform is heading.
If you want to see what the new Fanbase could look like for your club, speak to our team.