On the bus to Al Khor in 2022
Stuck in traffic in Yerevan in 2021
Cheering a walk-off victory at Fenway in 2011
On the train from Tallinn to Narva in 2018
Watching the sun set over the Allianz Stadium in Sydney in 2012
Eating Irn Bru ice cream at Inverness Cally Thistle in the spring of 2013
Watching the paragliders float down from the summit of Mount Ulriken behind SK Brann’s stadium in Bergen just a couple of months ago...

And this all started with one simple idea. What if we asked a young family to tell the story of what it was like to attend their first football match?

That one game quickly turned into a season-long pilot where the family attended 29 more matches and that exercise led directly to the creation of the EFL Family Excellence scheme.

In the three years before the scheme began, junior season ticket sales were flat. Ten seasons later, this number had increased by 45%. It was estimated that six million more under 12s were attending EFL games by then too. And even now, after a global pandemic, the EFL continues to set new attendance records.

By 2008, our work had expanded to embrace other fan/supporter types and we began to explore the experiences of fans with disabilities, away fans, the experiences of women at elite men’s football and much more. We engaged the world of non-league football and, in 2011, we began our work in elite women’s football.

From there, things snowballed (and quite literally: we soon assessed a game at Viljandi in Central Estonia on a freezing Easter weekend while skaters glided across the iced-over lake the town is famous for). Our work embraced clubs and leagues in western Europe first and the soon further afield in places like Moldova – Europe’s poorest country per capita, where we helped clubs to engage their communities in important areas of activity, like supporting children with disabilities and using the power of football to address age-old issues like poor levels of animal welfare.

Being invited by FIFA to assess games at the 2022 tournament in Qatar was a real pinnacle for us but also an opportunity to demonstrate how our methodology could also bring about real-time change (by using the external fan perspective to identify issues and then escalating them so that they could be addressed in time for the next game).

We remember standing outside of the Lusail Stadium (north of Doha) with thousands of excited Argentinian fans ahead of their opener vs. Saudi Arabia. That was a moment when it dawned upon us just how far we’d travelled since our first assessment in September 2006 (Swindon Town 1-1 Boston United). Two hours later, as the same thousands of Messi fanatics shuffled disconsolately away from the stadium after what many described as the biggest shock in World Cup Finals history, we were also reminded of the huge emotional spectrum of the game we love so much.

Now, we work with Premier League clubs and our work has taken us to many more countries, including the Superliga in Denmark, the Eredivisie in the Netherlands and in countries as diverse as Spain, Armenia, Turkey, Liechtenstein and Kosovo.

Time and time again, the impact of exposing sport’s leaders around the world to the real experiences of fans not only led to the identification of improvement opportunities, but the methodology – a qualitative ‘story-telling’ exercise – has also delivered significant emotional heft: a key driver of change.

We became the first organisation working in sport to introduce ‘personal value’ as a key measure, enabling sports clubs to see very clearly the financial benefit of strategic fan engagement and now that there’s a political requirement to focus on fans, we’re helping our customers to learn that fan engagement is not just following externally-imposed standards of transparency and accountability but is better seen as a strategic embrace of the fan where club identity, values, data and experience drive tangible ‘bottom line’ improvements.

We can lay claim to effectively ‘inventing’ new fan experience concepts, such online fan guides, family rooms in stadiums and first time fan experiences for those coming to their first games. And, when you see the proliferation of positive innovations like fan zones and ‘here to help’ teams, you should know that we played a key part in ‘selling’ their benefits to football and rugby.

We now enter our 20th year in this business and we continue to inspire innovation in fan experience; we’ve created a revolution in the quality of provision and we’re continuing to help helping leagues and clubs to set new attendance records while clearly demonstrating the commercial value of putting fans first.

There’s still work to do to elevate Fan Engagement to the importance it requires to make the biggest difference, but we’re here – and have been there from the start – to lead on fan experience and strategic fan engagement.

...Keeping our hands warm at a freezing Ceres Stadium in Aarhus in 2019
Enjoying mixed martial arts ringside in Singapore in 2016
Watching the Cubs lose (obvs) in 2008
Experiencing Aussie Rules Football at the Oval in London in 2012
Being drenched at the Munster v Lions game in 2023
Walking to the Rheinpark Stadium in Liechtenstein from the Austrian Border in 2019
Taking the Subte to River Plate v Banfield in 2022.