Following nearly 1 year of preparation, my business partner and I launched MySeatz.com, in August 2011. MySeatz was launched to become the destination for deals on Football League tickets.

MySeatz aimed to increase attendances throughout the Football League by working directly with clubs to make tickets available at a discounted price through sporadic, time limited, and often last minute deals for tickets on the MySeatz web platform. MySeatz was the first dedicated UK Football ticket deal website.

The state of Football attendances seemed to support our theory. Taking each League as a cohort, The Championship, League 1 and League 2 only filled an overall average of 68.7%, 42.7% and 43.4% respectively of stadium capacities in the 2010/2011 season. (These stats haven’t changed much in the last 18 months, incidentally).

It was great…all of this was fuel for the MySeatz fire.

Much of the preparation time my co founder and I spent pre launch was on considering the viewpoint of the Football club, particularly as we understood that clubs wouldn’t be eager to devalue their own ticketing infrastructures.

From a fans perspective, they were able to visit MySeatz.com and register their interest in receiving deals from any one of the 72 Football League Clubs. When we had a deal for their club, we’d email it to them…simple!
We were therefore building fan networks for each Football league club, then offering clubs a cost effective opportunity to sell ticket deals to their registered fans on MySeatz.

However, after over 1 year of efforts, and little positive response from Football Clubs, we called time on the MySeatz journey due to a lack of traction.

Why?

After our de briefing on the failings of MySeatz, we offer the following advice from our experiences for those looking to offer products or services to Football clubs:

Don’t be seen to compete

It sounds obvious, but even we didn’t think we competed with the Clubs. Our self perception was that we empowered clubs by giving them an off the shelf network of fans to tap into. They viewed us as potentially taking fans that were already theirs, and reducing their income by selling cheaper tickets to those fans.

Clubs like control

Feeding off the previous point, Clubs want to retain control over how they sell their products. Third party suppliers can in no way be seen to compete with, or cannibalize sales of the partnering Club. We recognized this and made our service as flexible as possible with no commitments or upfront payments being asked of the clubs. This wasn’t enough.

The clubs wanted control over our network of fans, however without control over our network we had very little leverage, so we were unwilling to allow them direct access to it, which in turn created another barrier to partnership.

Clubs accept empty seats

Clubs understand that empty seats will always be an issue, and many of the clubs we spoke to seemed fairly content in this regard. The general consensus was that whilst they had measures to increase attendances, none of these would be prioritized over the de valuing or cannibalizing of full price ticket sales of regularly attending fans.

The “We’ve done it this way for many years” approach

I don’t want to over emphasize this point, because respectfully, there are many clubs doing many new and innovative things. However, there were certain clubs who were particularly unwilling to consider new ways of approaching an issue, such as ticketing, which has traditionally been managed the same way for some time (although the internet/mobile has changed their distribution channels of late). With these clubs, we didn’t get much of a look in.

Empower the Clubs

On reflection, a better version of MySeatz would have been to provide a “platform as a service” white label solution to empower the clubs to directly offer their own deals using the technology in our ticketing system, without the brand of MySeatz. They could then use the system to further build their own network of fans, rather than feel like we were offloading their fan network to MySeatz.

In the end, there’s a whole lot of opportunity out there for new products and services to offer Football Clubs in terms of ticketing, merchandising, marketing, data analytics, for those ready to disrupt.

In our case, empowering rather than outsourcing would have been a better strategy.

Best of luck to the next hopefuls.

John Henwood