The Clubhouse
The £20 Supporter Who Could Be Worth £2,000
There is a supporter somewhere in your database who has spent £20 with you. Perhaps they bought a ticket for the first time last Saturday, came with a friend, brought their child or simply decided, after years of following results from a distance, that they fancied watching a game. From a revenue perspective, their value to the club is currently straightforward. Twenty pounds came in, one ticket went out and one more person walked through the turnstile. The problem is that £20 tells you almost nothing about what that supporter could eventually be worth.
If they come back five times this season, become a member next year and eventually buy a season ticket, the economics of that original transaction change completely. Add food and drink, merchandise, cup games, hospitality, donations or the children they might eventually bring with them, and a relationship that began with a relatively insignificant transaction can become worth thousands of pounds over time. There is no guarantee any of those things will happen, but that uncertainty is precisely why measuring the first transaction alone gives clubs such an incomplete picture of value.
This is hardly a revolutionary idea in most industries. Businesses have spent decades thinking about Customer Lifetime Value because the amount somebody spends today is only one measure of their importance to an organisation. Increasingly, the same thinking is entering sport. Goldman Sachs has explicitly discussed the lifetime value of a fan as a significant opportunity in sport and entertainment, while researchers and consultants are developing models designed around the unusual economics of fandom. The terminology varies, but the underlying principle is straightforward. Rather than asking only what a supporter has spent, clubs can begin thinking about the value of the relationship they might build over years or even decades.
There is a story from Grimsby Town that illustrates the idea better than a spreadsheet could. In 2022, the club profiled a young supporter called Alfie as part of its Where All Mariners Belong series. His relationship with Grimsby began in 2013, when his dad took him to Blundell Park using a Kids for a Quid offer. Years later, Alfie described Grimsby Town as a huge part of his childhood and talked about effectively growing up at Blundell Park.
Think about that first transaction from the club’s perspective. The junior ticket generated £1, which measured on the afternoon it was sold was almost commercially irrelevant. Measured as the beginning of a relationship with somebody who would still identify strongly with the club years later, it looks rather different. That is the fundamental limitation of judging supporters by individual transactions. The value of bringing a child into a stadium for £1 cannot sensibly be measured by the pound the club collected, just as the value of an inexpensive first-time ticket cannot necessarily be understood by comparing its yield with the full-priced seat next to it.
What matters is what happens afterwards. Does the child come back, does their parent return with them, do they begin asking for a shirt for Christmas, and do they eventually become a junior member, an adult member or a season-ticket holder? Twenty years later, are they the parent bringing somebody else for the first time? There are very few industries where a relationship with an organisation can realistically last for 60, 70 or 80 years. Sport is one of them, which makes judging that relationship by the value of its first transaction particularly short-sighted.
The language around this is changing. Goldman Sachs has asked explicitly about the lifetime value of a fan, with Dave Dase, the bank’s global co-head of its sports franchise, arguing that sports organisations will increasingly consider the lifetime value of fans, customers and entire families. The underlying reason is straightforward. As teams develop more direct relationships with supporters, the number of ways those relationships can create value is expanding.
The idea is already moving beyond theory. Premiership Rugby commissioned PTI Digital to develop a Customer Lifetime Value model for the league, incorporating demographics, interests, behaviours, media consumption, engagement and purchase history to build a broader picture of individual supporters. Rather than treating each purchase as an isolated event, the model was designed to help understand how the value and behaviour of a supporter developed over time.
Academic work is moving in a similar direction. Professor Peter Fader’s research at the Wharton School has long focused on Customer Lifetime Value, and that thinking has increasingly been applied to sport through Fan Lifetime Value. At its simplest, the approach asks how long a relationship is likely to last, how frequently somebody will engage and what value they might generate during that relationship, while other behaviours such as app usage and digital engagement can provide additional signals about how that relationship is developing.
For most sports clubs, particularly further down the pyramid, building a sophisticated predictive model is neither realistic nor necessary. The useful part is the change in perspective. A supporter is not simply the transaction sitting beside their name in a database. They are a relationship moving through time, and the commercial decisions a club makes today can influence what that relationship looks like several years from now.
Thinking about lifetime value changes the way clubs can view affordability. In 2013, West Ham were running Kids for a Quid at selected matches while preparing for their eventual move to the Olympic Stadium. They were far from alone. The BBC’s Price of Football study that year highlighted similar promotions elsewhere, with Aston Villa distributing free tickets to primary-school children for home matches, Southampton allowing under-11s in free with paying adults and several Premier League clubs offering heavily reduced junior season tickets. West Ham’s approach was explicitly connected to attracting a new generation of supporters rather than simply shifting unsold seats for one afternoon.
The immediate economics of those schemes can look strange if every seat is judged solely on yield. If an adult ticket can be sold for £25 or £30, why make a seat available to a child for £1? Supporter Lifetime Value provides part of the answer. The club is accepting a smaller amount of revenue today because there is potentially much greater value in creating the conditions for a long relationship tomorrow. That does not mean every cheap ticket produces a lifelong supporter, and it certainly does not mean clubs should indiscriminately discount inventory. Many children attending a promotional fixture will never return, some free tickets will go unused and some families will simply decide live sport is not for them.
The more useful question is what happens to the people who do come. Kidderminster Harriers provide a smaller-scale example. More than 800 under-16s attended a Kids for a Quid fixture against Aldershot Town in January 2024, helping take the crowd beyond 3,000, and the response was strong enough for the club to repeat the initiative. The immediate numbers are encouraging, but the more interesting measurement comes later. How many of those young supporters attended again without the promotion, how many became regulars, how many joined junior programmes and how many remained connected to Kidderminster several years later? Answer those questions and a discounted ticket starts becoming an audience-development strategy rather than simply a ticket promotion.
Lifetime value also exposes one of the peculiarities of sports fandom: supporters frequently create other supporters. A satisfied customer might recommend a restaurant or clothing brand to a friend, but a football supporter can introduce their children to a club and begin a relationship that continues across generations. The value of the original supporter can therefore extend well beyond what they personally purchase, which is why the growing conversation around the lifetime value of an entire family is particularly interesting.
A parent bringing a six-year-old to a game is not simply purchasing two seats. Potentially, they are transferring an affinity. Clubs have understood this intuitively for generations, but they have not always measured it particularly well. Databases naturally divide people into categories such as adult ticket buyers, juniors, members and season-ticket holders, while real supporter relationships are much messier. The adult buying two junior tickets may be responsible for three future supporter relationships. The season-ticket holder who brings different friends several times a year is performing a small acquisition role for the club. A child attending through a school initiative might later persuade a parent who previously had little interest to begin attending too.
Once you begin thinking in relationships rather than transactions, the boundaries between acquisition, retention and revenue become less distinct. Bringing a child into the ground might be an acquisition decision today, a retention challenge over the next few seasons and a meaningful source of revenue much later. The commercial value does not arrive neatly within the financial year in which the original ticket was sold.
This also changes how clubs should think about first-time attendance. Consider the amount of effort that might go into persuading somebody to attend for the first time. They see an advert, receive an email, notice a promotion, hear about the club through their child’s school or are persuaded by a friend. Eventually they buy a ticket and arrive at the ground, at which point the club has achieved something important by converting interest into a transaction. If the relationship ends there, however, almost all of that work has to be repeated the next time the club wants to fill the same seat.
The more interesting objective is the second visit. Once somebody chooses to return, a pattern has begun. A third and fourth visit strengthen it further, and eventually the supporter may stop requiring much persuasion at all because attending has become part of their routine. This is why acquisition numbers alone can give an incomplete picture of growth. A club might attract thousands of new attendees during a season without materially strengthening its supporter base if very few of them ever return.
The experience surrounding a first visit therefore matters disproportionately. Was buying the ticket easy, did the supporter know where to go, did they feel welcome, could they get food without spending most of half-time in a queue, and if they brought children did those children actually enjoy being there? What happened after the game matters too. Did the club recognise that this had been somebody’s first visit, and was there a relevant reason for them to come back? None of those things appear in the revenue figure for the original ticket, but all of them can influence what that supporter eventually becomes worth.
Lifetime-value thinking also explains why retaining supporters can be commercially more important than continually replacing them. Imagine a club attracts 1,000 new attendees during a season. If almost none return, the club has acquired an audience without really building one, and the following year it needs to find another thousand people simply to stand still. If a meaningful proportion return, the economics begin to compound. Some become occasional attendees, some become regulars, a smaller number become members or season-ticket holders, and a few may eventually become among the club’s most committed supporters.
The difference between those outcomes cannot be understood by measuring acquisition alone. This is where the sports industry’s understandable obsession with attendance can occasionally hide more than it reveals. Two clubs might both average 4,000 people, but one could be continually replacing occasional visitors while the other is steadily turning first-time attendees into regular supporters. The headline attendance is identical, but the health and future value of the underlying supporter bases may be very different.
Looking at supporter relationships over time introduces a better question: are those relationships getting stronger? A supporter moving from one match a year to four is behaving differently, even if they have not yet bought a season ticket. Someone who attended ten times last season and twice this season is sending another signal entirely. Understanding those movements gives clubs a much richer view of growth than a single attendance figure can provide.
There is a danger in all of this language. Start talking about the financial value of supporters and it can quickly sound as though the objective is to calculate precisely how much money can be extracted from every person in the ground. That would misunderstand both the idea and the nature of sport. The supporter spending the most money today is not automatically the club’s most important supporter, just as the cheapest ticket buyer is not necessarily the least valuable.
Somebody might purchase a £500 hospitality package for one game and never return. Another person might spend £20 every few weeks for decades, volunteer at the club, bring their children, persuade friends to attend and eventually become involved in the organisation itself. Which relationship ultimately creates more value depends partly on what the club means by value, and that distinction becomes particularly important lower down the pyramid, where the boundary between supporter and participant in the organisation can become remarkably thin.
Supporters become volunteers, volunteers become directors, parents become coaches and junior supporters become employees. People who initially contribute relatively little financially can become central to a club’s existence. Supporter Lifetime Value therefore should not simply become another calculation of projected ticket revenue. At its most useful, it is a way of recognising that relationships accumulate value in different forms, some of which are easy to put on a spreadsheet and some of which are not.
This is where the concept becomes useful for actual decision-making. A club considering a £5 junior ticket might ask how much revenue it is giving away compared with charging £10. A club considering free tickets through schools might worry about devaluing its product, while a commercial team deciding whether to spend time improving the first-time supporter experience might struggle to attach immediate revenue to the work. Those are reasonable concerns because clubs have bills to pay now, not in twenty years.
The other side of the calculation matters too. If lowering the barrier to entry creates more first visits and a proportion of those visits become long-term relationships, the return cannot be measured entirely on the afternoon of the promotion. The same principle applies at the other end of the relationship. Making renewal easier, recognising loyal supporters, communicating appropriately when attendance begins to decline and removing unnecessary friction might not generate an obvious spike on a sales graph, but those actions can still protect significant amounts of future value.
Short-term revenue and long-term supporter value are not opposites. Healthy clubs need both, and there will always be occasions when maximising revenue from a high-demand fixture makes commercial sense. The point is that optimising relentlessly for the immediate transaction can sometimes make a club less valuable over the long term if it comes at the expense of creating, developing or retaining supporter relationships.
Most sports clubs do not need a team of data scientists to begin thinking about Supporter Lifetime Value. They can start by asking what happens to people after their first transaction. Of the supporters who attended for the first time last season, how many came back? Of those who returned, how many attended three times, five times or ten? How many eventually became members or season-ticket holders? Which types of fixtures produce the most first-time attendees, and which produce the supporters most likely to return?
The same thinking can be applied further into the relationship. Do junior ticket holders remain connected as they get older? What proportion of regular individual match buyers eventually become season-ticket holders? How does the behaviour of a supporter change in the years before they stop renewing? Which membership products appear to strengthen retention rather than simply create another annual transaction? Even approximate answers to questions like these begin to change the conversation because they allow clubs to see movement rather than simply totals.
A marketing campaign can then be judged partly by the quality of the relationships it creates rather than simply how many tickets it sells. A junior initiative can be measured through return attendance as well as the revenue generated by children’s tickets, while membership can be understood as one stage within a much longer supporter journey rather than an isolated annual product. The technology and modelling can become more sophisticated later. The important thing is deciding that the relationship is worth measuring in the first place.
The title of this article is deliberately imperfect because there is no guarantee that a £20 supporter will become worth £2,000. They could ultimately be worth £200, £20,000 or precisely the £20 they spent on their first and only visit. Without understanding what happens to supporters over time, a club cannot know, and that uncertainty is exactly why the initial transaction is such a poor measure of the potential value of the relationship.
Sport has an advantage most businesses would pay enormous amounts to acquire. People do not simply consume clubs. They inherit them, introduce them to other people, organise weekends around them and, in some cases, maintain the relationship for almost their entire lives. A child entering a ground for £1 can become an adult buying a season ticket decades later, just as somebody arriving for a £20 match on a whim can eventually become part of the fabric of the organisation.
The industry has become exceptionally good at measuring the price of a ticket. The more interesting challenge is becoming better at understanding the lifetime value of the person who bought 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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