The FanHub story

What a journey!

Soon the 200,000th fan will join FanHub – comfortably enough to fill Wembley, Hampden, Windsor Park and Cardiff City Stadium combined.

Something that becomes more challenging as a company grows is consistently communicating why we do what we do. Almost by accident, a business can start to feel faceless and “corporate.” But that doesn’t represent our reality: the false starts and near-misses, the lightbulb moments, and how now, after ten years, we’re finally about to deliver what I set out to build.

Why FanHub?

FanHub was built by two match-going fans that saw the same issue from the terraces. As fans we spend far too much time and money following our teams but for what: no-one’s even noticing.

I started following Boro in the late 80s because one of my dad’s mates was playing for them. He’d taken me to watch other teams before, but this was different. That day, I spent most of the match just watching the fans – and both me and my brother were hooked from then on.

Harley was born into a family of Gasheads so from his earliest memories it’s been blue and white quarters. Through the slide down to the National League, back up again to League 1 and down again, he’s been part of that journey and continues to be found most weeks at the Mem with a pint of Thatchers in hand.

From a business perspective, we make a great team because while our skill sets are very different, our belief in the mission is exactly the same.

Every stakeholder in football wants to extract more money from fans. Player wages spiral, ticket prices and TV subscriptions rise year after year, and there’s an endless stream of companies vying for our attention.

As a fan, it’s confusing. I spend more every season, yet my club still relies on the owner injecting their own capital – the reality from the Premier League all the way down to non-league.

So I dug deeper. And what I found explained it all: sport generates huge sums of money every year, but the vast majority of that value is captured by media companies.

Broadcasters alone swallow more than 80% of sponsorship revenue (around £50bn globally each year) – and that doesn’t even touch the billions generated by social platforms from the content that we, as fans, create and consume.

Here’s another insight: sports sponsorship is a massive industry, about the same size as betting and gaming. But one sector in sport is over 3.5 times the size of both combined: travel.And as a fan, that makes total sense. Travelling from my home in the South West to watch Boro at the Riverside costs £300+ for transport, food and a hotel… ten times the cost of the ticket. My club sees none of that spend and if that example is representative of most fans, that model is replicated millions of times each week, just in the UK.

The same issue applies at international level – when tens of thousands of England or Scotland fans travelled to the Euros last summer, spending millions of pounds, the vast majority of that spend was captured by travel and hospitality businesses. The fans that made the effort to travel received nothing.

The struggles of getting it wrong

So the original idea for FanHub was simple: to become the one brand in football that gives value back to the fan – saving money on travel and rewarding fans for following their team.

As someone who’s spent nearly all my professional career building companies, I think the biggest misconception is that it’s about having a brilliant idea no one else has thought of, which then becomes an overnight success with unstoppable growth.

The reality couldn’t be further from the truth. In my experience, building a successful company means constant self-reflection, taking learning from every failure, and finding increased determination from every rejection. FanHub has involved a lot of both.

The first three versions all failed – only a few hundred users across all of them, and tens of thousands personally invested before we got it right on the fourth attempt.

We’ve made mistakes along the way too. In some cases, we failed to deliver what our users wanted from rewards. Giving away free bobble hats and hoodies is manageable when you have a few thousand fans. It’s a completely different story when there are 50,000 active every month – and no revenue to fund it.

What comes next?

I’m sharing our story now as we’re at the dawn of a new era. One that solves the biggest issue – how to generate revenue without charging fans a penny.

By cracking that, we also solve rewards. And with just a few tweaks to our model, we can finally deliver the value that fans deserve.

The holy grail has always been to generate revenue from the money fans already spend while following their team.

And after a decade of learning, we believe we’ve cracked it.

Next month we launch the LYLTY era.