At a time of the year when football clubs delve into the transfer market to strengthen their outlook for the new season, the summer has offered a fruitful window of opportunity for Ticketmaster.
Ticketmaster is now the ticket agent of choice for the English Premier League. Brentford, Crystal Palace, Everton and Wolverhampton Wanderers have all come on board for the new campaign, joining existing clients Arsenal, Nottingham Forest, Tottenham Hotspur, West Ham United and Luton Town, with the latter having been promoted to the top tier.
Ticketmaster believes that several factors have contributed towards its burgeoning client base in football’s richest league, including its ability to adapt its technological offering to meet the needs of clubs.
Service at scale
However, as a starting point, the provider cites its ability to service at scale. This is not only illustrated by the fact that three of Ticketmaster’s most established Premier League partnerships – with Arsenal, Tottenham and West Ham – have three of the top four average home attendances in the division. It is also evidenced by the fact that so many lower-league clubs are partners of the platform, proving it is capable of supporting the needs of clubs with smaller, as well as larger fan bases.
Luton is a prime example. Ticketmaster was a partner of the club when it was competing in League Two – the fourth tier of English football – and it is still driving sales now the team has reached the top table.
One-third of English second-tier Championship clubs – eight in total – have gone into the new season with Ticketmaster by their side: Birmingham City, Blackburn Rovers, Coventry City, Huddersfield Town, Plymouth Argyle, Queens Park Rangers, Sunderland and Swansea City. In League One, the third tier, Ticketmaster is a partner of 10 of the 24 clubs, including Barnsley, Blackpool, Bolton Wanderers, Oxford United, Peterborough United and Portsmouth – six of the top 10 in terms of average home attendances.
Meanwhile in League Two, a quarter of the 24 clubs are clients of Ticketmaster, including Notts County and Wrexham, which are two of the top three for home crowds in the division.
Ticketmaster’s expanding client base in football also extends outside the top four divisions in England. Five of the Scottish Premiership’s 12 clubs – Celtic, Heart of Midlothian, Hibernian, Livingston and Motherwell – are signed up to Ticketmaster. The provider’s network also extends to clubs in the second-tier Scottish Championship, the League of Ireland First Division and the English National League, as well as the Football Association of Wales in a broader partnership.
Further afield, Ticketmaster’s white-label solution for football clubs is currently being rolled out across Germany, the Netherlands and the Nordics, with new clients already onboarded.
“Our platform is scalable for all different sizes of organisations and clubs throughout the leagues, and across a variety of different sports. All our clients are on the same platform, which means that they have the choice of which features they use,” says Lee Tutill, sales director, Ticketmaster Sport UK.
Women’s football opportunity
Furthermore, Ticketmaster believes women’s football offers enormous potential for the platform. This is partly due to the spike in interest following the success of the Lionesses – England’s national team – at recent major tournaments, as well as the steady growth of the Women’s Super League in the country, but also following real-life evidence of existing interest.
Indeed, Ticketmaster is already supporting clients through sales and marketing efforts to help attract impressive crowds to women’s football matches, with Arsenal being an obvious example. More than 60,000 fans attended the club’s Uefa Women’s Champions League semi-final second leg match against Germany’s VfL Wolfsburg in May at Emirates Stadium, setting a new record for the club.
“We’re extremely optimistic about the growth of the women’s football market going forward,” Ticketmaster Sport UK managing director Chris Gratton says.
“We have already supported several of our clients with marketing to help increase attendances at their women’s fixtures and we believe this will continue to go from strength to strength over the coming years.”
To enable the provider to continue on its upward trajectory, though, maintaining close working relationships with clubs will be vital. For example, it is through such collaborations – and direct discussions with clubs – that Ticketmaster’s Away Ticketing solution has emerged as a key tool to boost attendances.
The tool provides a platform for digital fulfilment for away fans – even if they support a club that is not yet a Ticketmaster client. For hosts, which have traditionally been forced to produce and courier tickets to the visiting team’s front office, digital fulfilment delivers significant cost savings. Simultaneously, for the visiting club, a cumbersome and cost-heavy sales process is replaced by a digital platform that allows fans to receive their tickets instantly, rather than wait for the post.
Crucially, the Away Ticketing solution – which was tested out at numerous clubs last season before being rolled out more widely for the current campaign – is giving Ticketmaster an opportunity to prove the capabilities of the platform to clubs that are not yet among its client base. The technology won ‘Best Use of Technology in Football’ at the Sport Business Awards 2023 and ‘Silver’ in the ‘Sports Technology of the Year’ category at the Sports Business Awards 2023.
Technological integrations
Convenience for fans – and clubs – drives the development of the Ticketmaster platform, helping to enhance the fan experience whilst optimising gate receipts. The platform has embraced fintech, for example, by pushing through Apple Pay and Google Pay capabilities this year, building on numerous technological integrations over the years.
The Virtual Venue tool, for instance, has enabled fans to get a realistic view from their selected seat before they complete a purchase. This has helped to dispel misconceptions about certain seats or areas within a stadium, helping to drive more sales. Additionally, it has allowed clubs to tailor fan journeys and push individuals into the sales funnel for premium ticketing packages since its launch in 2017.
Daniel Ryan, Ticketmaster Sport UK’s head of client solutions, adds: “Our Virtual Venue technology has had an immediate impact for us and our clients since we brought it to the market. It is a piece of market leading technology and, since its introduction, several key clients have chosen to have their virtual venue built to be able to provide their customers with the best-in-class experience when purchasing tickets.”
Five years earlier, the Ticket Exchange functionality was adopted by Arsenal. The tool enables clubs to make use of every seat in the stadium by allowing season-ticket holders to list and resell their tickets to other fans – and reducing so-called ‘no-shows’ in the process. The solution is integrated into the same seat map as all other tickets, providing fans with a single destination for all ticket purchases.
With a healthy footprint in UK football, and plans to expand on the continent, Ticketmaster has a resilient technological platform that is designed to meet the demands of fans who are notoriously unforgiving if something goes wrong in their ticket-buying journey.
Most importantly, though, whilst Ticketmaster’s account management team is plugged into the day-to-day requirements of clubs to offer support and discuss development opportunities, the platform’s white-label technology is designed to give clubs full control over their ticketing inventories. This offers them the flexibility to cater to different fan bases across different matches, sports and events as they seek to boost ticket sales – and their bottom-line prospects – in a highly competitive space.