The Clubhouse
What the Fastest-Growing Sports Clubs Do Differently
Growth in sport is easy to notice after it has happened. The stand is fuller, season-ticket numbers are up, memberships have grown and fixtures that once needed promoting begin selling themselves. What is harder to see is the collection of decisions that got the club there. There is rarely a single campaign to point towards, and even more rarely a clever piece of marketing that suddenly changed everything.
Look closely at sports organisations that are building their audiences and a more interesting pattern emerges. They tend to make attending easier, create low-risk ways for new supporters to begin a relationship, understand what those supporters do next and keep experimenting with relatively small changes. They are also unusually good at protecting the culture and loyalty that made people care about the club in the first place.
There are obvious external forces that influence growth. Promotion helps. Winning helps. Investment helps enormously, and a global documentary can certainly accelerate things. No amount of clever audience development makes those advantages irrelevant. But there are clubs growing without all of them, and others using periods of sporting success to build something that might survive when results inevitably become less favourable. The interesting question is what they do differently.
Every established supporter has already learned how their club works. They know where to park, which turnstile to use, where to stand, when tickets go on sale and whether arriving twenty minutes before kick-off is plenty of time or a terrible idea. None of that knowledge should be taken for granted when somebody attends for the first time.
Growing clubs tend to remove barriers at the beginning of the relationship. Sometimes that means price. Brentford’s Gen10 initiative subsidised junior away tickets to £10, with the club reporting that junior away attendance increased by 35 per cent and more than 100 young supporters attended an away fixture for the first time. The important number is not necessarily the additional revenue those tickets generated. It is the number of children for whom following Brentford away became something they had actually experienced rather than something their family could not justify financially.
Kidderminster Harriers have pursued a similar principle at a different level, continuing to offer under-12 tickets for £1 when purchased with an accompanying older supporter. Chester FC sell under-12 season tickets for £23, roughly £1 per league fixture. Chester’s General Manager Albert Davies sees those children not simply as cheap tickets today, but as potential future supporters, volunteers, employees and directors. Over the same broader period, Chester’s average attendance has risen from 1,688 in 2021/22 to 2,319 last season.
Affordability alone does not create loyalty, but it creates opportunity. The first job of audience growth is making it possible for somebody to begin.
Getting somebody through the gate once is acquisition. Getting them to decide that attending is something they want to do again is where audience growth becomes more interesting.
That distinction matters because headline attendance figures can disguise very different supporter bases. Two clubs might both attract 4,000 people on a Saturday, but one could be continually replacing occasional visitors while the other is gradually converting first-time attendees into people who come three, five or ten times a season. The crowd looks the same. The underlying audience does not.
This is where clubs can learn much more by looking at supporter behaviour over time. Who attended for the first time last season and came back? Which fixtures are particularly effective at bringing new people into the ground? How many junior supporters return without the original promotion that attracted them? At what point does an occasional ticket buyer become a member or season-ticket holder? The answers allow clubs to think beyond selling the next fixture and start understanding the journey between curiosity and habit.
Como 1907 provide an extreme example of what can happen when sporting progress and audience development reinforce one another. Average league attendance rose from just over 6,000 in their 2023/24 Serie B promotion season to more than 10,500 during their first year back in Serie A. The club reported a 97.15 per cent average occupancy rate during that season, while supporters travelled from 162 countries to attend matches at the Stadio Giuseppe Sinigaglia. Promotion and significant investment plainly matter here, but Como have also built deliberately around place, identity, community programmes and an experience that extends well beyond the football itself.
The lesson is not that every club should try to become Como. It is that attracting attention and building an audience are different jobs. The clubs that make growth last understand that the second one begins once the first has succeeded.
For decades, one number dominated the understanding of a football audience: attendance. It remains important, but it tells a club remarkably little by itself. Knowing 4,000 people came through the gate does not tell you whether they were the same 4,000 as last week, how many brought children, who was attending for the first time, which supporters are gradually coming more frequently or which regulars have quietly disappeared.
Growing clubs increasingly have the ability to see those differences. The interesting shift is from counting supporters to understanding movement within the supporter base. Someone moving from one game a season to five is evidence of growth even before they become a season-ticket holder. A regular attendee whose visits fall from ten to two is giving the club an equally useful signal in the opposite direction.
Chester are an interesting example because the club has already experienced substantial growth but openly acknowledges that there is more to learn. Membership has increased from approximately 1,100 to more than 1,400, membership income has more than doubled and attendances have risen, yet Davies describes the next stage as understanding how to use the information the club now has more effectively. “You get all this data and information in front of you, but how do you use it effectively?” he told us.
That is a healthier question than simply asking how much data a club possesses. The value comes from noticing that a supporter has attended three times in six weeks, that a family has started coming regularly or that somebody who attended almost every game last season has suddenly stopped. Growth becomes easier to influence when clubs can see it happening at supporter level rather than waiting for it to appear in the season’s average attendance.
Sports clubs have traditionally been very good at serving the two ends of the commitment spectrum. At one end is the individual match ticket. At the other is the season ticket, asking somebody to commit to almost every home game months before the season begins. There is a large group of supporters living somewhere between the two.
Rochdale AFC’s Fan Card is a deliberately simple attempt to serve them. For £5, supporters who cannot justify a season ticket receive £5 off their league match tickets. During its first season on Fanbase, 585 people joined, generating nearly £3,000 directly from a product whose real purpose was not membership revenue at all. It gave occasional supporters a reason to identify themselves, stay connected and return without requiring the commitment of a season ticket. Rochdale have retained the £5 model for 2026/27.
The broader principle matters more than the precise mechanic. Growth becomes difficult when every supporter is expected to fit neatly into either “season-ticket holder” or “everyone else”. Memberships, flexi-tickets, mini-season packages, junior schemes and other intermediate products allow relationships to develop gradually.
They also create belonging. Somebody can feel part of a club without attending 23 home league games, and recognising that reality opens the door to supporters whose lives, finances or geography make a season ticket unrealistic. Growing a supporter base is not necessarily about pushing everyone towards the most expensive product. Sometimes it means creating another rung on the ladder.
There is a temptation in sport to look for the campaign that changes everything. A new brand, a major advertising push, a celebrity partnership or a dramatic ticketing initiative feels more significant than dozens of small operational improvements. In practice, sustainable growth often looks considerably less glamorous.
Detroit City FC provide a particularly good illustration. The American club began life in the lower reaches of US soccer and built much of its early growth around supporter culture and community participation. When it moved into Keyworth Stadium in 2016 after a community-backed renovation, average attendance increased by 48 per cent compared with the previous year. A later survey of 750 supporters found that 83 per cent said they had recruited a friend or family member to attend their first Detroit City match during the previous year. In February 2026, the club announced another record for season-ticket membership, 20 per cent above its previous high.
There was no single growth hack in that story. Supporters helped restore the stadium, introduced other people to the club and became financially and emotionally invested in what was being built. The organisation kept giving that community reasons to deepen its involvement.
The same principle can operate much more quietly. A club tries a junior-ticket initiative. It changes the way membership renews. It tests a different ticket bundle, improves an email journey, opens a bar for longer, works with a school, changes how first-time visitors are welcomed or creates a product for supporters who cannot justify a season ticket. Some ideas will barely move the numbers and others will unexpectedly take off. The advantage belongs to organisations willing to learn from both.
That is perhaps the most consistent characteristic of clubs building stronger audiences. Growth is not treated as something marketing does when there are empty seats to fill. It becomes an operating habit across ticketing, communications, membership, community, matchday and supporter service.
There is an important final point because an obsession with growth can easily turn into an obsession with newness. New supporters, new audiences and new revenue matter, but a club that continually acquires people while allowing existing relationships to weaken is filling a bucket with a hole in the bottom.
The strongest version of growth does both jobs at once. It makes the first visit easier without taking the 300th for granted. It gives children a cheap way into the ground while recognising the people who have occupied the same seat for decades. It creates new membership products without forgetting why people wanted to belong in the first place.
There is no single formula connecting Brentford, Chester, Rochdale, Como and Detroit. Their resources, leagues, histories and audiences are completely different, and their growth cannot be separated entirely from what happens on the pitch. What connects them is something more useful than a particular tactic. Each has found ways to reduce barriers, strengthen relationships and give supporters opportunities to become more involved over time.
That is why the most interesting lesson from growing sports clubs is not a marketing trick that can be copied tomorrow. Growth is rarely one campaign. More often, it is the cumulative result of making it easier to begin a relationship with the club, paying attention to how that relationship develops and then making hundreds of small decisions that give people reasons to keep coming back.
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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