A non-traditional sports sponsorship model that might just work
Let's take a trip to Düsseldorf, Germany for free tickets??
Thanks for reading The Playbook from Katherine Rowe. If you are new this week, here’s why I started writing.
I promised to write more, but then I ran off to southeast Asia to take some much needed time off and came back to work and life - here we go again!
A Forbes article caught my eye this weekend that discussed Fortuna Düsseldorf, a 2.Bundesliga1 team, offering up to three free tickets per game to fans. Rather than charging for these tickets, they have offered up the opportunity to local sponsors as an asset. Fortuna’s leadership realized that the traditional sports revenue model2 needed to shift to allow them to compete at the highest level in Germany.
Sponsors have signed on to the concept already, with a plan to use the revenue for not only the men’s club, but also the women’s and youth programs. Fortuna believes that the club will be able to offset the €7-8 million ($7.7-8.8 million) per year ticketing revenue through these deals as well.
For Americans like me, European football, or soccer, can be a foreign concept. The transfer market and player wages are structured much differently than what we are used to. I won’t tackle the close to $10 billion dollar European football transfer market3 in this article. The key point is that it is very hard to get promoted in European football, attract the best players, and not go into extreme debt as a club. At the core of this, however, is how Fortuna has been able to upsell its sponsors into an additional asset in their deal. So, why would a sponsor sign on to this?
Goodwill, global and regional press, and alignment to a community driven mission as this have already surfaced across my news feed multiple times today in the middle of Central Texas. Fortuna’s signed on a few sponsors already to cover the cost to start this program, including Hewlett Packard enterprise, Provinzial, Targo Bank, and Common Goal. With more sponsors and potentially more funding, Fortuna can expand this cause.
For the club, a new buzz and energy has been created. While some fans might be upset by the changes, this is ultimately a fan-first move. The club has averaged 53% attendance over the last twelve seasons, with its highs coming during seasons in the top tier Bundesliga. This move will help out local fans who may have not been able to afford to attend a match, or reengage fans who may not have felt a connection with the team in recent years.
In addition, Fortuna, a club founded in 1895, is reinventing itself by coming up with something new, different, and engaging, while also providing the club with a sustainable revenue plan moving forward.
You can read all about this concept on the club’s homepage.
Best Thing I’ve Read Recently
I read this book by Ryan O’Hanlon over the last few months which covers the history of soccer analytics. Many people think that sports analytics were introduced with the concepts of Moneyball in the early 2000s, but that’s simply not true.
I also found this New York Times article about Brighton’s use of analytics in succession planning to be super interesting as well.
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Second tier of German soccer, or football if you’re not from the US.
Revenue produced from selling and transferring players, ticket sales, sponsorship sales, media rights, merchandising, etc.
https://www.goal.com/en-us/news/how-does-a-football-transfer-work/130og8e76770l1dcqbne3jntx7