From Fans to Family: How to Increase Fan Engagement in Sports

The global fan engagement market is booming, valued at $6.68 billion in 2024 and projected to skyrocket to $44.71 billion by 2034. With stakes this high, sports clubs and brands are racing to put fan engagement at the heart of their strategies.

Yet many companies find themselves puzzled by how to boost engagement and connect meaningfully with their fans. Even with the right knowledge, putting best practices into action for sports audiences can feel daunting. However, those clubs and brands that truly listen to their fans and invest in engagement see real rewards: higher ticket sales, packed stadiums, stronger brand reputations, and increased revenue.

In this guide, we outline what fan engagement involves, why it matters, and the ways to improve interactions with fans for sports clubs and brands.

What is Fan Engagement?

Let’s start with the definition. Fan engagement measures how much people interact with your sports brand or club. It combines engaging fans online and offering channels where supporters feel part of the club or brand.

Examples of sports fan engagement include personalising branded content and hosting live events where like-minded fans can socialise. These strategies influence retention, encourage fan participation, and build brand reputation.

Why is Fan Engagement Important?

Many clubs and brands have strategies in place to increase fans’ interest in the club’s or brand’s life, but they aren’t always optimised effectively. Additionally, many clubs fail to listen to their supporters’ true needs, which can lead to dire consequences.

Improving engagement can bring the following benefits:

●      A satisfied fan base
●      Sports brand loyalty
●      Heightened attendance and viewing figures
●      Strengthened reputation and brand reception
●      Improved team performance
●      Increased sales and revenue

Increase fan engagement, and your business will benefit through sales and support. For clubs, ticket sales will rise, and supporters will be happier on match days. They’ll chant loudly and give your team a competitive edge at home games. Sports brands will see higher merchandise sales and a stronger reputation. Recent reports on sports coverage trends show that clubs are working to engage more with their fan base. They are giving supporters more power and influence as part of a broader trend of decentralisation in sports.

Your sports brand or club can capitalise on this trend and prioritise engagement strategies. Below, we’ll show you how.

10 Ways to Improve Fan Engagement in Sports

How can sports clubs and brands increase their fan engagement? You can take several straightforward approaches, from building your social media presence to offering exclusive fan rewards and loyalty programs.

1. Create Personalised Content

Personalisation is a top trend in sports sales and marketing. It is also vital for sports community building. Tailored content encourages fans to engage more with your club or brand.

Deloitte recognised the need for personalisation with the International Olympic Committee. Together, they developed the Olympic Fan Data Platform, which combined behaviour and interest data to create fan profiles and tailored content. They launched it for Paris 2024 and saw record fan satisfaction and interactions.

Around 300 million people used the Olympics app or website. The Olympics' social media channels saw over 12 billion engagements during Paris 2024. These statistics from the Deloitte sports fan survey show the impact of personalised content on fan engagement.

2. Analyse First-Party Data to Predict Fan Needs

This year, at MWC, representatives of La Liga once again repeated that first-party data is something crucially needed for everybody who wants to understand their community. For this, La Liga, for instance, uses a second screen and community chats that unite fans from all over the globe. First-party data is everything your end-users share with you directly; it is not connected with personal data, it is just ideas, insights, thoughts, which are the most valuable things you can obtain if you work directly with your audience.

3. Establish Fan Communities

Club community building is a key strategy to boosting fan engagement. Sports teams and brands must establish these community spaces and actively involve them in decisions.

Brentford FC is a club that gets this right. To date, it’s the only English Premier League club with a fans’ representative on the board of directors. Its Fan Advisory Board (FAB), consisting of eight representatives from its core supporters’ groups, meets up to four times a year — more than the minimum of two required by the league.

The club’s 2024/25 engagement plan outlined that the FAB aimed to bring in people from other fan groups for wider representation.

By building these fan communities and actively involving them in club decision-making, Brentford FC has established league-leading fan engagement levels. The club achieved a score of 83.1 out of 100 in the Premier League’s match day fan experience survey for the 2023/24 season, with an average of 69.5.

4. Build Your Social Media Presence

Social media is valuable for any business. Sports marketing fan engagement strategies can be strengthened through Facebook, Instagram, Twitch, TikTok, where you can promote your brand and foster closer relationships with your supporters.

Interestingly, 36% of people now prefer social media for watching or following football. And this figure is growing. With such a large section of your fanbase interacting through social media, you must establish a digital presence across platforms like Instagram and TikTok.

Digital fan engagement for sports teams via social media will encourage supporters to interact with your brand. Your continued presence on their feeds will increase trust and brand awareness, too. If you try various content formats, you can not just retain your existing users, but attract new ones. 

5. Partner with Influencers

Influence marketing is a reliable way to boost digital fan engagement. Partnering with influencers lets you reach a wider audience and grow your fanbase through social media. Fans are more likely to engage with brands they trust. People who follow influencers online often hold some form of trust or admiration toward them, which can extend to the products and brands they endorse. If an influencer trusts your sports brand (by promoting it), their followers will trust you, too.

Fans are more likely to engage with content featuring personalities they know or relate to, such as influencers and celebrities. Offer live streaming with influencers or athletes on your website or app to encourage them to return.

6. Create Interactive Experiences

Interactive fan experiences in sports can enhance supporter engagement. Clubs and brands can create these via apps or using the big screens in stadiums on matchdays.

Some examples of interactive fan experiences include:

●      Real-time trivia and polls
●      Video calls and streaming
●      Mobile-powered light shows
●      Sponsored games
●      Displaying user-generated content (UGC)

Live video calls and streams are predicted to be the fastest-growing segment. They’re expected to increase rapidly until 2029 at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 24.69%.

Creating live and interactive experiences increases engagement metrics like app downloads, social media interactions, in-game purchases, and brand awareness.

7. Offer Exclusive Access

Exclusive rewards and loyalty schemes can boost your fans and make them more loyal. Giving supporters exclusive access to perks creates a sense of community and care, which elevates your brand’s perception and reputation.

Offering fan rewards through an app and email marketing enhances these feelings. In-app bonuses and deals can attract more supporters to your venue and boost fan activity in stadiums.

Loyalty programs support gamification by encouraging consistent and prolonged interaction from your supporters. For example, a sports club could reward fans with points for every game they attend, which they can use to buy discounted club merchandise or receive early ticket access for the most popular fixtures.

8. Host Fan Events

Sport is an inherently social activity, whether watching, playing, or buying merch. The TGM Global Euro Report 2024 revealed that 60% of fans planned to watch the 2024 UEFA European Championships with friends or family. By hosting live events, you can activate your fans and improve the overall matchday experience.

For example, sports clubs can show live games in their stadiums or affiliated bars, and sports brands can partner with local venues to host themed events. This gives your supporters space to socialise with friends and family, increasing overall loyalty.

9. Conduct Fan Surveys

This is perhaps the most important point. Sports brands and clubs must actively listen to what their fans want to increase engagement. The best way to do this is by conducting fan surveys. For example, the Tottenham Hotspur Supporters’ Trust conducted a survey in 2024 to gauge fan sentiment of the club. It found that 85% of fans opposed the changes to scrap concessions for senior season ticket holders.

Additionally, the Level Playing Field Annual Fan Survey 2024 reported that 71% of disabled sports fans decided when to arrive or leave sports events based on accessibility options. Two-thirds of these also emphasised crowds and queues as attendance concerns.

These issues show a clear disconnection between fans and clubs. Executives seem out of touch, leading to distrust and negative sentiment among supporters. Fan engagement has faltered because club executives lack understanding, highlighting how vital surveys are for increasing fan loyalty in football clubs.

10. Encourage co-creation

If you do something on your own, you feel connected to the results. People who buy even a small number of shares feel responsible for the company’s success because of the ownership effect. In fan communities, ownership already exists, but if fans are only passive observers, they feel their positive energy is wasted and react to the brand’s or team’s mistakes with greater disappointment. Allowing them to create content together, participate in the club's life through activities like co-watching, commenting on games, or surveys, or even contribute to app development through A/B testing, turns them into co-creators instead of critics. This benefits everyone involved.

There is No Sports Without Fans

A club is nothing without its fans, and a brand cannot survive without loyal customers. Businesses in the sports sector must prioritise fan engagement to improve brand perception, increase ticket and merchandise sales, boost customer retention, and strengthen their reputation. Enhancing it can also positively affect team performance and fan morale.

We’ve outlined ten key fan engagement strategies to help you achieve these benefits. Now, it’s up to you to integrate these into your sports club’s or brand’s approach to your audiences.

Get In Touch

Ready to increase fan engagement? Build your in-app fan community with Watchers. Book a call if you'd like to integrate in-app chats with the high-level moderation system into your website, app, or game. We'll be happy to help you find the best solution and turn casual users into engaged and loyal fans.

FAQs About Fan Engagement in Sports

What is fan engagement in sports?

It is the interaction of the audience with the team, tournament, or any sports brand. From the marketing point of view, it is a crucial metric that shows whether your audience is interested in involvement and communication. From the fans angle, it means emotional connections with the club culture.

How to increase fan engagement?

Strategically: uniting different instruments and approaches, such as personalisation, work with feedback, co-creation, and making fans influencers of the brand or team, uniting fans offline and online, and staging connected not just through social media but through the specific places offline or online platforms that are valuable for fans.

Why is fan engagement important?

Fans have many opportunities to watch sports online and to participate in different sports activities. So, if you want to gather users together and tie them with the brand or team, without losing them somewhere on Twitch, you need to show that they are important. As we texted further, no fans - no sports. Besides this, loyal fans are well-retained customers of your app.

How can organisations measure the success of their fan engagement strategy?

By following engagement metrics, such as CLV (Customer Lifetime Value), churn rate, amount of user-generated content, and by analysing the sentiment of messages, comments, and other outcomes users share about the brand or team.

Sources

• Fan Engagement Market Opportunities and Strategies to 2034 | Research and Markets
• Future of fan engagement in sports | Deloitte
• From data to drama | Deloitte
• Brentford's Premier League match day fan experience score revealed | Brentfort FC
• Euro 2024 Survey | TGM Global
• 2024 Fan Survey | Tottenham Hotspur
• Annual Fan Survey 2024 Summary | Level Playing Field
• A game plan for enhancing fan engagement | Deloitte
• Specific Features of Family Businesses: A Contribution to Literature | Financial Environment and Business Development
• How & Why Is Collecting Users' Insights Crucial for Your Business | Watchers Blog
• Global Fan Engagement | The business research company
• Main Trends in Sports Coverage, Viewership, and Fandoms 2025 | Watchers Blog