The Ultimate CRM Buyers Guide for Football Clubs
Reading time:
12 mins
Lukas Mikkel Hansen works at the intersection of CRM, automation, and commercial operations in football. As Country Manager North America at Playmakers, he helps clubs in Europe and the US move away from one-off campaigns toward always-on communication systems that run across an entire season.
Based in New York, Lukas works hands-on with clubs to segment fan bases, automate weekly comms, and turn existing data into repeatable revenue from tickets, merch, and partners. His perspective is shaped less by tools and more by how systems behave over time under real operational constraints.
In this interview, we talk about always-on campaigns, timing over tactics, and what actually compounds when clubs stop thinking matchday by matchday.
Season ticket holders who don’t actually show up. Clubs often overlook how costly empty seats from their most loyal fans are. The best-run clubs actively manage this, with incentives or penalties, and end up reselling the same seat more than once on average.
Families are another big one. Their buying logic is different. They plan earlier, respond to different messages, and behave much less impulsively than other segments.
Matchday +1. The day after the game. That’s when momentum is still there and can be utilized to push the next game. Thank fans for coming, reset the narrative after a loss, and jumpstart the next sales cycle. Many clubs just go silent instead.
Ticket urgency closer to kickoff. Simple reminders a few days before the match that seats are running out, or specific sections are nearly full. It’s not fancy, but it works again and again.
What I appreciate about this conversation with Lukas is not that it introduces something radically new.
It’s that it confirms, very calmly, where the real leverage in football CRM actually sits.
Three answers. No buzzwords. But each of them points to a structural truth clubs still underestimate.
The most important segment Lukas mentions is not surprising, but it is still massively under-managed:
season ticket holders who don’t show up.
This is a perfect example of how clubs misunderstand segmentation. They treat it as a marketing exercise. In reality, it’s an economic control system.
Empty seats are not a fan engagement issue.
They are a revenue leakage problem with second-order effects:
The key insight here is that loyalty without attendance is not neutral. It’s actively destructive if unmanaged.
From a CRM perspective, this means clubs should stop segmenting fans by static labels and start segmenting by behavioural deltas:
Actionable takeaway:
Every club should have a live segment called something like “STH at risk of non-attendance” and attach rules, not campaigns, to it. That can mean incentives, resale nudges, or even soft penalties. The exact tactic matters less than the fact that the segment exists and is monitored weekly.
Families are the second segment Lukas highlights, and again, this reinforces something I see constantly: planning behaviour beats impulse behaviour when volume and predictability matter.
Families buy earlier. They need reassurance. They respond to clarity, not urgency blasts. Treating them like ultras or casual fans is a guaranteed conversion loss.
CRM maturity starts when clubs accept that different segments require different operational rhythms, not just different messages.
The most underrated moment in the fan journey, according to Lukas, is the day after the game.
I fully agree.
Matchday +1 is not about nostalgia or emotional storytelling but a handover moment between cycles.
What most clubs do:
What should happen instead:
From a systems perspective, Matchday +1 is where:
Actionable takeaway:
Every club should run a permanent Matchday +1 automation with conditional logic:
This doesn’t require complex tooling. It requires discipline and ownership. Once this automation exists, it quietly compounds across an entire season.
The most effective always-on campaign Lukas mentions is almost boring:
ticket urgency close to kickoff.
And that’s exactly the point.
In CRM, effectiveness is often inversely correlated with how clever something looks in a slide deck.
Urgency works because:
The mistake many clubs make is treating always-on campaigns like “background noise”. They over-design them, over-segment them, and then lose trust in them when results flatten.
In reality, the best always-on campaigns behave like infrastructure:
Actionable takeaway:
If a club wants to test whether its CRM setup is mature, ask this question:
“Which campaigns would still run flawlessly if our CRM manager was sick for two weeks?”
If the answer is “none”, you don’t have automation. You have scheduled tasks.
What ties all of Lukas’ answers together is a shared underlying belief: CRM is not a marketing layer. It’s an operating system.
Segments are control variables. Journeys are feedback loops. Always-on campaigns are load-bearing systems.
This is also where I believe the conversation in football needs to move next.
Clubs don’t lose money because they lack creativity.
They lose money because they lack systems that behave well under real-world constraints.
This interview reinforces something I see again and again in my work:
the clubs that win commercially are not doing radically different things.
They are doing a few fundamental things consistently, season-long, and without drama.
That’s not a tooling problem.
It’s a systems mindset.
And that’s where real CRM maturity begins.
