Across the three free matches offered last season, the club received a staggering 350,000 ticket requests, far exceeding expectations and proving both the demand and interest in the initiative.

When becoming CEO of Fortuna Düsseldorf, Alexander Jobst was presented with a unique problem.

The club’s impressive Merkur Spielarena, which was home to matches during this summer’s European Championships, boasted a capacity of 54,600. Yet, as a club in the second division of German football, Bundesliga 2, Fortuna’s average attendance hovered just under 30,000—a respectable figure, but one that left room for improvement. Literally.

Faced with this challenge, Fortuna Düsseldorf and Jobst ideated and then unveiled ‘Fortuna For All’ at the end of the 2022/23 season - a plan which would upend one of the most sacrosanct pillars of football revenue: ticketing.

This ambitious project, which offers free admission to all spectators, isn’t a one-off gesture of goodwill but a calculated tactic designed to make the club more competitive and to boost its overall revenue streams, as Jobst explained recently on the Sports Pundit Podcast.

"We are a member-driven football club. We are in a highly competitive market with investor-driven football clubs... We had to think about how can we still be competitive for the future, maintaining the chance and even heightening our chance to be a first-division football club... That's the reason behind Fortuna for All," Jobst explained.

On the first match of the project, Fortuna pulled off a stunning 4-3 comeback against rivals Kaiserslautern in front of a packed stadium—a game for which there were over 120,000 ticket requests.

Across the three free matches offered last season, the club received a staggering 350,000 ticket requests, far exceeding expectations and proving both the demand and interest in the initiative.

But the benefits of ‘Fortuna For All’ went far beyond just filling seats. The initiative also played a crucial role in the club’s digitalisation strategy.

“Before that, we did not have any registered members in our fan database as a second division football club. Now we are a huge step forward and we want to enlarge this also for the future, which brings us more community, more engagement, and more connection with our fans.”

This digital platform, as Jobst explained, is “the heart and the brain of the business model behind it.”

By lowering the barrier to entry, Fortuna not only filled their stadium but created a vast new pool of engaged fans, many of whom became season ticket holders, club members, returned for other paid matches, or bought club merchandise.

The results so far are impressive: a 28% increase in ticket income despite hosting three games for free, a 19% increase in season ticket sales, a 20% rise in membership to 33,000, and significant boosts in other revenue streams.

"To give you a few figures, we increased the sponsorship revenue by more than 50% in comparison to the season before. We increased our merchandise sales above 50% because people come to the stadium, some of them for the first time in their life, they get emotionalised [and so] they have a lower barrier to buy their shirt or their scarf," Jobst noted.

Encouraged by these early successes, Fortuna Düsseldorf is expanding the scheme this season to include four matches against Hamburg, Elversberg, Darmstadt, and Preußen Münster.

Original article published 10.09.2024 on the Sports Pundit website.

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