Football is the Ultimate Community Ecosystem

As Published with Portugal Football Summit

Last week I published an article for the Portugal Football Summit: Football is the Ultimate Community Ecosystem

Let me start with a question that should keep every football executive up at night: when was the last time one of your fans visited your official club website just to read the news?

Go on. Be honest.

The reality is that they didn’t. They got their update from a WhatsApp group, a Twitter/X thread they follow, a YouTube breakdown they stumbled across at midnight, or — most likely — from some guy who runs a fan channel with 200,000 subscribers and zero formal relationship with your club. And yet, here we are: still measuring fan engagement by seats sold and checking whether the replica kit is moving in the club shop. Maybe you even look still look at your facebook followers…?

Football has a measurement problem. More precisely, it has a value-recognition problem. The industry has spent decades optimising around the matchday — a window of roughly 90 to 120 minutes — while the real opportunity stretches far beyond the final whistle, into every corner of the fan’s daily life.

That gap between where football looks and where the value actually lives? That is one of the most significant untapped commercial opportunities in sport today.

“The 90 minutes is the highlight of the fan’s week. But they will spend time, energy and money on football every single day.”

The Fan’s Real Economic Footprint

Here is something the industry understands intuitively but has never quite quantified properly (unless bidding for a Euro’s or World Cup!): football fans are not passive, occasional consumers. They are among the most committed, emotionally invested, and chronically open-walleted customers of any product category on earth.

Barclays recently published striking research on Premier League and Women’s Super League matchday spending during the 2024/25 season. Fans attending top-flight matches were found to spend an estimated total of £2.3 billion per season in local economies — not inside the stadium, but in the surrounding area: pubs, restaurants, shops, transport, hotels. Their data further showed that when the home side won, local spending in the vicinity spiked by nearly 6% compared to a draw or a defeat. Football does not just entertain communities. It literally moves money around them.

Now zoom out beyond the immediate matchday. A Premier League ticket among the Big Six averaged £74 in the 2024/25 season. Add travel (a return train for a family attending a major fixture can easily run £80–£150), food and drinks before and after, parking, a programme, and perhaps a new kit for the kids — England’s official Nike shirt currently retails at £104.99 for adults, with a full children’s kit at £122.98 — and the total day-out spend per person sits comfortably at £250–£400. Over a season, for a committed fan, that figure is substantial.

Someone Else is Building Your Ecosystem

This is where the real conversation begins — and where it ought to sting.

Football clubs have, for the most part, adopted a tenant mentality in a landlord’s world. The landlords are Meta, Google, TikTok, EA Sports, Spotify, and the major betting operators. These are the businesses that have built the platforms on which football’s cultural capital is converted into commercial value — and they are doing it without needing to own a stadium, carry a wage bill, or worry about what happens if the striker breaks his ankle in October.

Think about how Meta or Alibaba approach their business. They do not obsess over the transaction. They obsess over daily active users (DAU), monthly active users (MAU), and — perhaps most critically — time spent in the ecosystem. The longer a user is within their platform, the more data is generated, the more monetisation touchpoints exist, and the more powerfully the flywheel accelerates. The goal is not to sell once. It is to become the infrastructure of the user’s digital and social life.

Now apply that lens to football. How much time does your average fan spend inside your club’s own ecosystem in a given week? How many of those daily micro-interactions — checking the injury update, rewatching the goal, arguing about the formation, buying the shirt — are happening inside a space that your club controls, data-captures, or monetises?

PwC’s research on younger fans aged 18–34 is instructive here. Only 19% said they watch an entire game when tuning in at home. More than two-thirds used social media simultaneously. Nearly half were surfing the web. A quarter were playing video games at the same time. Only 1% — literally one in every hundred — did nothing but watch the football. These are not concentrated, captive audiences. They are highly distributed, multi-platform, attention-fragmented individuals for whom football is a passion layered across an enormous range of daily digital behaviours.

And yet the industry’s commercial model remains stubbornly anchored to the assumption that the club’s relationship with its fan begins with a ticket purchase and reaches its natural commercial conclusion somewhere around the final whistle.

“The fan is spending £300 getting to your ground. They’re spending hours inside EA FC managing your players. They’re arguing on Reddit at midnight about your manager. And you’re still counting seats.”

Thinking Like a Platform: The DAU Opportunity

The question for football’s next generation of leaders is not how to squeeze more yield per seat. Actually, that will lead only to frustration, an older clientele and keep new fans outside your gates. It is about how to become a destination that fans actively choose to spend time in — every day, not just matchday.

This is the platform question. And it is one that football is only beginning, tentatively, to grapple with.

The strategic leak is visible everywhere once you start looking. When a fan wants the latest injury news, they go to Sky Sports, BBC Sport, or a third-party app. When they want to argue tactics with strangers at 11pm, it’s happening on Reddit, X, or Discord — not in any space the club controls. When they watch a highlight compilation, it’s on a fan-run YouTube channel with production values the club’s official media team hasn’t quite matched. The club’s own social accounts are rarely the first stop for breaking news, and they are certainly not where the most authentic conversation lives.

All of that attention. All of that engagement. All of that time. It is football’s cultural capital — and it is being converted into commercial value for other people’s balance sheets.

The clubs and federations that will define the next decade are those who stop thinking of themselves as event businesses and start thinking of themselves as community platforms with an extraordinary live event at the centre.

It’s not about building an app that people live in either. That ship has sailed anyway, and you are not a tech company. BUT you can still build an ecosystem with fans at the heart of it.

What a Football Community Ecosystem Actually Looks Like

So what does this mean in practice? Let me be specific, because this is not an abstract strategic concept — it is an operational reorientation.

It means building content infrastructure that keeps fans engaged on Monday morning, not just Saturday afternoon. Raw, authentic, year-round content that respects the intelligence and passion of supporters. Not press releases dressed as social media posts. Not corporate-speak masquerading as community building – and I promise you 90% of the content a rightsholder is putting out is seen as drab compared to what others are creating.

It means creating travel and hospitality partnerships that capture a meaningful share of the £300 a fan is going to spend travelling to and from the game, rather than watching all of that money flow to Booking.com, Trainline and local pubs that have no formal relationship with the club. The fan is going to spend that money. The only question is whether any of it flows back to the ecosystem that inspired the trip – so when they buy a season ticket or game day ticket how can you get in the middle of that future transaction.

It means building genuine loyalty frameworks that recognise and reward the whole fan relationship. Not just the season ticket holder who sat in their seat for every home game, but the fan who bought three shirts this year, flew to an away game in another country, spent 400 hours on EA FC with their club’s crest front and centre (who most likely will never come to your stadium), placed bets on every match, and watched 50 hours of club-related content on YouTube. That fan’s total economic relationship with their club across a season may well exceed £2,000. They deserve to be valued accordingly.

It means thinking about gaming integrations. EA FC does not compete with the football clubs — it extends them. A fan who spends three hours per evening on Ultimate Team is spending three hours inside a world where your club’s brand, players and colours are the primary variables. That is extraordinary brand real estate, and it is almost entirely uncaptured by the clubs themselves. Typically you have sold that access on a rental, when really you should be looking to participate.

It means designing communities that actually work — spaces where supporters want to spend time, debate, create and connect. Not because they’ve been told to, but because the club has built something genuinely worth showing up for. PwC found that 62% of younger fans cite unique and memorable experiences as the primary driver for attending a live match. They are not just buying a ticket. They are buying belonging.

68% of consumers say sports personalisation significantly increases their brand satisfaction. The infrastructure is there. The question is whether clubs are building on it.

The Affiliate Principle: Football’s Hidden Commercial Model

Affiliate marketing has understood something for a long time that football is only beginning to appreciate: the value of a customer relationship is not in the first click. It is in the lifetime value that follows.

Football clubs are, in effect, sitting on the most powerful affiliate engine in the entertainment industry. Their fans do not just consume football — they consume everything around football. Travel, food, drink, media, gaming, betting, fashion, fitness, lifestyle products. And they do so with a level of emotional investment that no traditional advertising medium can come close to replicating.

The fan who buys your shirt will probably also buy the training top, the mug, the hat and the phone case. The fan who travelled to your stadium this season will travel again next year. The fan who plays EA FC with your club’s squad every night is probably also watching your official content, following your players on Instagram, and listening to your club’s podcast. These behaviours are not isolated. They are a web of interconnected consumption patterns, all radiating from the same emotional core.

The clubs and leagues that understand how to map that web — and build commercial structures around it — will generate revenue in ways that the traditional sponsorship and broadcast model has never come close to capturing.

It’s Tangible: The value is within your grasp

In 2018 I was at FIFA and I was tasked with a colleague to think through the above and imagine how for the Women’s World Cup in France we could bring that to life.

What we pulled together was the strategy including the companies we needed to integrate with to make it come to life.

Remarkably we discovered that with as few as five integrations we could cover off almost 80% of our dream scenario.

So what did we imagine?

That we make FIFA as the gateway for tickets and from there take them on the affiliate pathway.

If someone was booking two tickets for England v France in Paris, and entering their card details from the UK then that would trigger certain next steps:

§ Can we help with a EuroStar or Flight Reservation

§ Can we book you a hotel…using our preferred supplier or card payment solution

§ Would you like the England No.9 Shirt ordered and delivered to your Hotel Room

§ We see you are coming for 3 days, can we offer reservations to the Louvre, Eiffel Tower,

§ Here is the gateway to book restaurants, Lime Bike etc…

The list goes on but it didn’t stop post event. If you are tapped into Google, Microsoft and Apple, can we provide other elements post event like highlights to your phone, new ticket offers for your own FA’s games, opportunity to buy a football/clothing at a discount from Adidas etc.

All of these can create a 7-12% affiliate fee even on the most basic model. For Countries where its legal we can send you to our preferred betting supplier with perhaps a £10 free bet on a World Cup match (as we have your credit card details we can tell your age etc).

I can go on and on but none of this is rocket science because other industries are already building it. Our problem is that we believe content is king so the game is everything when the reality is that the game is the catalyst for everything else in the community.

I love it when my team wins, but what I love more is when my son talks to me about the game, mentions the player he now worships, the ad he saw him in and so it goes on. When you see sports as a community ecosystem it means you can finally tap into the latent value that exists and remove the constant friction we put between us and the fans.

The Bottom Line: The Untapped Opportunity is Hiding in Plain Sight

Football is not a sporting event with a commercial wrapper. It is a community — one of the most powerful, globally distributed, and emotionally charged communities on earth – bigger than most religions if we are being honest. And like any great community platform, its value is not measured in transactions per visit. It is measured in depth of relationship, breadth of daily engagement, and time spent together.

The data is unambiguous. Fans are already spending thousands of euros, pounds and dollars per year on football — the vast majority of it outside any ecosystem that clubs control. They are already spending hours per day engaged with football-adjacent content, games, communities and media. The passion is there. The spending is there. The time is there.

What is largely absent is the strategic ambition to build around it.

The clubs, federations, and investors who close that gap — who stop counting seats and start building ecosystems — will define what football looks like in 2035. Those who don’t will continue to be brilliant at producing 90 minutes of unmissable theatre, while the real commercial story plays out on other people’s platforms.

The most powerful community business in the world is right here, right now, waiting to be built.

The 90 minutes is just the beginning.