It starts with the journey to the stadium because the biggest drop-off in fans occurs when, after being stuck in traffic, you find nowhere to park, and then you have to walk around the stadium—straight to an angry security guard who also insults you. If you can improve the road, make parking easier, ensure a close entrance, and convince the security guard to be at least polite, the club starts earning much more on tickets.
But tickets play a relatively small role in the revenue structure. About half of the club's income comes from sponsors.
Then come ticket sales (from two to five million per game), followed by merchandise sales: that's 28-40 million a year. And a small amount comes from broadcast fees and prize money.
The most valuable aspect of the club is not how well it plays, but how much attention its games, website, and social media attract. Sometimes this requires playing well, but sometimes it doesn't.
Sponsors care about full stadiums, and full stadiums require a very precise and deep approach to attracting people and knowing who to attract. Let's start with that.
Who Attends the Matches
Clubs rarely focus on "ultras," or die-hard fans. Yes, they make them happy, they might even secretly give out beer (which is banned at all stadiums in Russia), they might give them tickets to an away match, and so on. But this is a very small group of people. The main purpose of this group of fans is to create an atmosphere: they shout, they set the mood at any moment, they support the team even in very difficult situations.
The first part of the main core is the so-called "Kuzmichi." These are men over 40 who want to be part of both sports and their favorite team, as well as what is happening in the city. They relax this way, and for them, it is part of city life.
Friends are those who go together but never separately. For friends, communication is important, and they come to the match for each other. For them, it is an important occasion to meet, so they try to come to important matches but will skip "routine" ones.
A couple. A guy and a girl. The guy usually knows that he is going for the emotions for both of them, and the girl does not understand the first time, but she comes because she made a concession. This is almost like going to a restaurant or a movie, so this category of fans is very sensitive to ticket prices. The same amount of emotions can be obtained at other entertainment events, so they rarely come to matches with expensive tickets. What is most important to them is the kiss cam, and for the girl, the entertainment in the foyer before the match is also important.
Families. These are couples with children. In general, it doesn't matter much to them what kind of game it is, the main thing is that they can watch it live. The competitor for such entertainment is the cinema, so discounts for children are a must, otherwise, they simply will not come. This is the biggest leap from the club's loyalty program: as soon as you know that a family has come with a child, you must give them a discount and definitely tell them about the next games. Children love match day because it's loud, there’s cool music, emotions—it’s a big holiday for them! Plus, if you think about face painting, drawing, and other entertainment in the foyer before the match, it enhances the effect.
How Tickets Are Sold
You have a stadium, say, for six thousand people. Your task is to fill it at the optimal price because there is nothing worse for a club sponsor than empty stands. Some tickets will be reserved by the club that is playing against your team.
Everything then depends on what kind of match it is and how many active fans you have. Matches in the tournament are usually divided into home and away series. The club receives money from tickets only for home matches. Usually, a couple of interesting opponents come (high on the tournament table, historical rival, or just a team on the rise). These matches are marked as important, and the rest become "routine." People have a limited number of games per month that they are generally willing to attend. Each team has an "attraction power," that is, the club's weight gives a coefficient to sales: season favorites and well-known clubs bring more people. More fans come on weekends than on weekdays.
So you distribute the tickets like this: tickets for "routine" matches at a low price are sold to families with children, and if the tickets are not bought out, they can be literally given away for social tasks, gifts, and so on. For important matches, you may not even notify the family audience: you need to attract everyone who comes for the game itself, and such tickets can be sold for 5 to 50 thousand. The average price for regular tickets is 700-1,500 rubles in Moscow and St. Petersburg. In Chelyabinsk and Omsk—300 to 800 (this is without lounges and VIP). For matches with top teams—two to three times more expensive.
It's important to predict demand as accurately as possible depending on the price and conditions. Clubs try to start selling tickets as early as possible, ideally as soon as the match is announced through the app and ticket aggregators. Through the app—usually 100-200 rubles cheaper, so this also forms an audience. A big problem is those who come to the match just like that, hoping to buy tickets at the entrance. Sometimes, with incorrect forecasting, you have to turn them away. What can be slightly improved is keeping blocks of seats for the ticket offices so that companies and couples can sit together. Otherwise, you might end up with seats available but in different rows, and people just won't go.
How well everything went at the match affects the sale of the next tickets. The biggest loss of people is not because something happened in the bowl, but because something went wrong before the match started. All beautiful marketing can be shattered by a security guard who sends a nine-year-old girl to wash off face paint because the face scanner doesn't recognize her.
No IT will help if the family searched for parking for half an hour and then walked two kilometers around the stadium. It's very important that people arrive early and don't crowd, and for this, you need entertainment in the foyer. It's very important that the driver knows an hour in advance which specific parking lot to go to, that there are free spaces, and it's close to the right sector. A typical match: five o'clock on Friday, the whole road to the stadium is jammed, you're tired after work, behind you is a tired wife with a child who is already starting to whine. And you still have to find a place and then stand in line for half an hour.
Such an experience deters fans from returning—they'd rather go to a restaurant or cinema. Therefore, along with tickets, we send a driving scheme, show available parking spaces in the app, think a lot about navigation on site, quick screenings at the entrance, and, most importantly, try to invite people as early as possible to avoid queues. It's better to pay a local rock band and give free tickets to their concert in the foyer to some fans than to lose people because of a queue when they try to enter en masse in the last 15 minutes. That's why cheerleaders dance in the foyer, that's why the loyalty program offers a discount at the restaurant inside the perimeter, that's why we set up entertainment points like gaming consoles with "Mortal Kombat," face painting, puck throwing with prizes, and so on. If you create a festive atmosphere, people will arrive an hour early because they will enjoy being our guests.
What Influences Repeat Attendance
If you have solved all the problems before the match, then it all depends on emotions.
Key emotional moments include the festive atmosphere in the foyer. This decomposes into events like "Seeing beautiful girls," "The child took a photo with the club's mascot," "Strangers are happy to see me just because I'm in the club's colors," "Meeting acquaintances," and so on.
Then there are the emotions in the stadium bowl: music, DJ, host, interactive screens. The kiss cam is only there to make all the couples start kissing. If someone proposes at a match, it's a big event for us, and everyone loves it!
The game itself. Those who come for the first time think they need to get seats "like on TV," that is, higher up to see more. We see them in the system and try to seat them in the front rows because we know very well that once someone is slammed into the barrier right in front of them, they will no longer be able to watch games on TV. For them, hockey on TV will be like phone sex: why bother when you can see the real game at the stadium! Similarly, with seats behind the goals: yes, you can't see the whole field, but the pucks fly right at you. Then people start screaming, and you get lifted by a wave of emotions. These are the moments that make the match so desirable.
If a person bought tickets online, we have their email, and we can send invitations to the next matches, offer to install the app, and so on. If we don't have their email, after the match we send photos (you can take a picture in the foyer) and at the same time collect the emails of fans who are not in the loyalty program.
We care about rival fans because when the game is in another city, we invite them too.
By the way, it’s very important to know which team a person supports. There is even a special model that determines where to seat a resident of Kazan who has lived in Omsk for five years. It seems like the Omsk team is already native to him, but when Kazan scores, he jumps up and shouts in the wrong sector, and this is quite a dangerous pastime.
Who Pays for What
The average club budget is about three billion rubles a year. It can be 500 million or 10 billion, but the median is around three.
About one and a half billion comes from the main sponsor, whose logo the players wear on their uniforms. There are episodic sponsors like bookmakers: they pay for clicks to their site, not for overall image. For example, an annual contract with such a sponsor will bring about 100 million. Ticket sales for the season can bring another 100-200 million. Merchandise sales—50-60 million. There are broadcast royalties—they are very small, but pleasant. Prize money: you shouldn’t rely on it too much, but in case of a big victory, it will be nice. Player sales. This is a very small source of income in Russia in the KHL, but very large in the NHL.
NHL and KHL clubs earn money in completely different ways, so their marketing approaches differ significantly. The NHL is a high-budget league. The main sources of income for clubs are tickets to matches, broadcasts, merchandise, and sponsorship contracts. The marketing strategy is built around this with an emphasis on entertainment. The reason is a much greater focus on merchandise and very good earnings from player sales.
There, historically, the culture of attending matches is more developed. In the first half of the 2010s, the Vancouver Canucks sold 17,000 season tickets, leaving six thousand people on the waiting list, and were in the top 10 most attended NHL teams. For us, season tickets for a thousand people per club are already a great result.
Some clubs specialize solely in developing talent and making money from it. In Russia, this area is practically undeveloped, but large corporations are very interested in promoting sports. Here, everything is arranged a little differently: usually, a large club creates its own hockey academy, but almost does not sell players, but raises them for itself or, in fact, for foreign leagues.
The second systemic difference is more IT. In Russia, for example, many clubs have their own apps on different platforms. At Omsk Avangard, we even recorded who sat with whom at the match. For example, two 40-year-old men came and sat next to each other. At the next match, one of them buys a ticket, and a couple of days later, the second buys a ticket. And when determining seats, we sit him next to the first. They come to the match and are surprised: how did it happen to meet again? This gives emotions, and emotions bring people back to matches again and again.
Why Does a Sponsor Need a Hockey Club?
It's very simple! Sports are perceived positively, and this gives the company a good image. Accordingly, the main sponsor wants a well-recognizable logo on the players' uniforms, for this uniform to change every year (so the fans’ eyes don’t get used to it), and for fans to eventually convert into the company's customers. At Avangard, our sponsor was an oil and gas company, and we had a separate plan for how many fans would join the loyalty program of this company's gas station network. So, the sponsor buys an image and at the same time—customers. This is measured through fan surveys, usually simply by NPS.
Smaller sponsors just buy the audience. Converting fans is cheaper than attracting people "cold," for example, for bookmakers and everything that revolves around sports. Bookmakers simply reduce their customer acquisition costs this way.
What the Club Does Because of This Model
The club needs to build recognition not only in the sports world but also as a social phenomenon. When it arrives in another city, people should want to see the game. Their own fans should follow club news, considering it almost like family.
Social capital and a base are primarily built through newsworthy events. The task is to constantly do things that make the news and are quoted on social media. However, it’s important not to do something extreme just for hype: sponsors prefer good traditional calm things, not bright provocations.
For example, after the scandalous meme with Dzyuba, there was a serious investigation with the sponsor at one club. As a result, the club’s PR resembles that of Cirque du Soleil or an elderly rock star who has stopped being involved in scandals.
For the team itself, victories are very important, but for the sponsor—not so much. It is believed to be important, but financial performance is rarely linked to the league standings.
Highlights from matches, various backstage footage, and funny moments are very good. Here are some examples:
- Here Andrey Kuzmenko gives a stick to a fan, which is already a significant event, and many would want to watch it.
- This is material for social media, and the caption plays an important role here.
Collaborations with famous actors and bloggers work very well, and news about sports stars is also very effective. For example, in Omsk, Alexander Krylov, together with Avangard, built 50 street playgrounds. It was expensive, but it resonated in the media. Later, Bob Hartley and Jaromir Jagr came to these playgrounds to teach children how to play—it was cheap but very well-received by the whole city.
It's very effective when a hockey player who built a career far from the city speaks at the academy. We had one player who moved to Canada—such a news story might not be very significant for Moscow, but in Omsk, everyone was saying, "Our guy is in Canada!"
Stories about Avangard’s stadium becoming dilapidated also worked well. They and Zenit probably have the most transparent media. Whatever chaos was happening—they disclosed everything. They continued to write and comment. When the stadium was closed for major repairs, Omsk residents were given free tickets to go to matches in Balashikha—this also meant a lot to the city, and people talked about it. Avangard has always been popular in the city because it's a beacon of hope that everything is okay! In many regions, sports are a social elevator, and the whole city loves following athletes.
Of course, social media and the meta around it are crucial. The most popular announcement in our social networks: "Two girls looking for guys to go to the match together."
Conclusion
When I first joined the club, we mapped out the entire fan journey—from buying tickets and traveling to the stadium to entertainment in the foyer, the bowl, and discussions on social media. There was something to change or improve at each stage.
For each type of fan, we did our own things: promotions for children, improved entertainment in the foyer, seat management, better news in the app, push notifications for fans, exclusive backstage interviews, instant replays during the match, navigation to the stadium, proper work with ticket aggregators—all of this improved the customer journey and gave us more and more regular fans.
A year later, we knew that we had 60,000 active fans, and if we just called them, two thousand would come to any match, and five thousand to an important one. That's half a stadium and a full stadium, respectively. So, when you have something like this, the club will definitely be successful regardless of sports results!