Don't Forget Your Tickets
Don' Forget Your Tickets is a podcast devoted to the unsung heroes of the spectator sports and events industries, the Ticketing Managers. We explore who they are, their well-guarded industry secrets, and how they entered the field. Beyond that, we delve into a broader ticketing realm, inviting experts from various fields to share their insights and stories. Our primary aim is to add value and highlight deserving individuals.
(The podcast was originally named TicketingPodcast.com)
Don't Forget Your Tickets
Exploring Subscription Models in Sports Ticketing with Mikkel Bjerre from FC Copenhagen
What happens when a traditional football club adopts a modern subscription model? Join us for a live special of Don’t Forget Your Tickets with Mikkel Bjerre, Senior Ticketing and Customer Service Manager at FC Copenhagen. Mikkel shares how FC Copenhagen’s innovative approach to subscriptions has transformed fan loyalty, improved cash flow, and engaged new audience demographics.
In this episode, recorded live in the Royal Tennis Hall in Stockholm in front of a live audience during the BNP Paribas Nordic Open, Mikkel dives into the challenges and rewards of shifting to a subscription model, from ensuring sustainable fan engagement to navigating the complexities of media rights. He also reveals how FC Copenhagen’s new initiatives like FCK+ offer fans exclusive content and first-in-line access to tickets, blending digital engagement with live match experiences.
Tune in to learn how FC Copenhagen is pioneering a fan-first approach, balancing tradition with innovation, and creating a ticketing model that keeps fans invested year-round. Don’t miss this deep dive into the future of sports ticketing.
Don't Forget Your Tickets is powered by TicketCo and hosted by TicketCo’s CEO, Carl-Erik Michalsen Moberg. The podcast was originally named TicketingPodcast.com
Hello and welcome to this live special of Don't Forget your Tickets, previously known as TicketingPodcastcom, as you know, this is the podcast where experts within the ticketing space share their stories and insights. Today we have been at the Royal Tennis Hall in Stockholm Stockholm, a wonderful city in Sweden, and this event is a part of the BNP Paribas Nordic Open. We've gathered a top-notch audience in front of you know Mikkel Bjarre. He is the senior ticketing and customer service manager at FC Copenhagen, and today he will dive even deeper into subscriptions on season ticket holders. How does that affect the cash flow? How should you start? Should you start with a small section, a couple of season ticket holders, or should you go all in at once? This is one of the things we will discuss in today's episode of TicketingPodcastcom. Just joking, don't forget your tickets. Tune in and enjoy the episode. Don't Forget your Tickets.
Speaker 2:Tune in and enjoy the episode. Hello and welcome to this live special of Don't Forget your Tickets, previously known as TicketingPodcastcom. We still have to say that, since it's a new name, this is the podcast where we bring forward the unsung heroes of the event industry, and that is, the ticketing managers and also people working within the ticketing space. And today we are at Royal Tennis Hall in Stockholm as part of the BNP Paribas Nordic Open, and we have gathered a top-notch audience here. If you're listening, you would wish you were here to follow this podcast and also to follow today's exciting matches, which I will probably come back to later.
Speaker 2:With me today on stage is the man who was one of the first guests on our podcast. Thank you for believing in the podcast, mikael and he's also the architect behind something really exciting. It's something that we've seen all over the software industry for a long time. We use it every day in Spotify and Netflix, and it's all about subscriptions, so please welcome, mikael Bjarre, senior Ticketing and Customer Service Manager at FC Copenhagen. It's great to have you back, mikael.
Speaker 3:Thank you, it's great to be here.
Speaker 2:It's also interesting to meet people in person when you've seen them on video right To see how they actually look like.
Speaker 3:You are a lot taller than I thought.
Speaker 2:I'm a little smaller on the screen maybe, but you look great in person as well, mikael, to tell you that. So before we delve into the topic we're here to learn more about, which is subscriptions right and how can sports utilize that, let's talk a little bit about the wonderful FC Copenhagen. What is it?
Speaker 3:well, it's the dominant club in Denmark. If we look at the number of trophies and cup wins yeah, again, also looking at spectators, we also at least at the top of the league. We are not that if we look at the the score right now, but hopefully when the season ends we'll be back on the top of the league. But with spectators we have been very successful, especially since launching subscription and been building on and also after COVID really hit some really good numbers, yeah. So regarding EFSC Copenhagen itself, it's a pretty young club in Denmark, only 30 years old, built on top of two historical clubs in Copenhagen with many, many years of history. But besides that, it's really something that the city needed a strong team to compete and go for the cup and the league title every year but also participate in in the european tournaments, and for that we have been participating 17 years I think in the last 18 years, so almost a consecutive been part of of the european tournaments also quite impressive for us and something that we also focus on.
Speaker 2:Yeah, great, and I mean, first of all, how do you end up in FC Copenhagen? But maybe you can tell us a little bit about who Mikkel Bjarre is.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so I'm a young guy from Jutland being interested in sports for many years. I took a couple of educations in sport management and first I started in my small hometown club, randers FC, as an intern, and after that I was working as a volunteer and starting to get some paid jobs in there, and suddenly I was working a lot of hours and still educating myself even more to have a bachelor in sport management, and when I was done with that, I started working full-time in the club doing a lot of interesting things as you do in a small club, trying a lot of different things such as club TV and, of course, ticketing, also having the daily operations of a public gym, so already having to work with subscriptions. Back then, yeah, and after working in Randers FC for several years, there was a job opening in NFC Copenhagen and I was lucky enough to start there back in 2015 and have now been there for nine years, and I think there's a lot of talk, too, about that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, and thank God you got that job because you came up with an idea, didn't you? Can you tell us a little bit more about that?
Speaker 3:Yeah. So already when I worked at Randers FC working with subscriptions, I met some guys in Denmark, especially one guy who has a company helping companies and industries working in subscription, and he was just quite frankly asking why is no football clubs working with subscriptions? And I was like it doesn't really make any sense that we don't do it. So what my main issue was, both in Randers at that time but also in the beginning of FC Copenhagen, was I could understand it was difficult to build when there was nothing existing and I would say in the first couple of years in FC Copenhagen. It was also understanding what FC Copenhagen is and how you could make subscription work when subscription have never been built before, in the ticketing system, for example.
Speaker 2:So just to go a little bit into what subscriptions really are, right, we use subscriptions every day. We pay with our Spotify account once a month. We would never pay that once a year, right. But this is all about taking the season ticket holders and let them pay for their season tickets with subscribing instead of paying for it once a year, right?
Speaker 3:yeah.
Speaker 3:So my main thought of what I really thought was a great idea was when I was working in hannes was like if I can get away from that renewal window every summer where I have, just when the season has ended and we have a short summer break, have to work really hard to renew all the season tickets and have this guaranteed churn every summer, if we could get away from that, that would be great.
Speaker 3:And again when we started working on it in Copenhagen, it was more like saying we know we have some good products, we can see that we can sell them. But we saying we know we have some good products, we can see that we can sell them, but we can also see where we have these challenges that you have to pay full in advance or you can pay it in installments but you will still churn automatically next summer. So having this data of a lot of people not half of our season ticket holders, but for some product categories, almost half paying installments I knew that there was a potential for working with it in a subscription way, that it would just be a season ticket that never runs out unless you do something yourself.
Speaker 2:Yeah, stop paying. Do something wrong and stop paying Exactly Right. So sport is traditional, right. Football is traditional in the way people think. I just met a ticketing manager who had been working in the same club for 35 years, right. How do you introduce innovation from the inside out in a club like FC Copenhagen? How do you sell the idea?
Speaker 3:Well. So at the time, I think there was a window of opportunity in FC Copenhagen. We have a 38,000 capacity stadium. We only have an average attendance in the domestic league of 15,000. And therefore a lot of ideas were welcome.
Speaker 3:But still it was quite drastically because, working with season tickets, you know you have the guaranteed cash flow. So there were some kind of obstacles. So they wanted to listen. But when I presented the idea for the first time, I was also like, well, the timing is not right now. I'm not sure that would be the right thing for our fans or something. So, luckily, in 2018, we had a change in management and, yeah, a lot of things were able to be revisited and I just had the opportunity to sit down with our new director and say, well, I have a lot of ideas, this is one of them, and she was just keen on it, let's go. So from that on and actually it was in, I think it was in February, so it was actually also with a quite short frame of window getting the acceptance to work on with it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, seems like you got the right people in the bus.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:So how painful was it to launch it.
Speaker 3:Well, I was lucky in the way that we had the system provider. They were willing to tweak the already existing installment technology, so in some way we already knew the system from within. It was not fully integrated in, for example, our ticketing system, but it was easy because we knew our way around some of the things. I would say the time was an issue for us because it was a very short time when we had to introduce it, but again it wasn't that painful.
Speaker 3:I would say the thing around having a new idea, that is, changing things drastically around, is like, well, what would happen in the winter break? What would happen if we don't win the championship? What would happen if, yeah, do all sorts of stuff that our fans will find unpopular? So there was a lot of open questions and I couldn't answer for them, but I was more like I just believe in this idea. I don't think that subscription will be big elsewhere if people just turn all the time and then again we are and I am really lucky. We're working with loyal fans. So there might be issues, there might be years where we don't win the championship, but again, this shouldn't be a product for those who only want to be there for a championship no, but changing systems always has some teething issues right and changes processes, the way we work teething issues, but they are teething issues.
Speaker 2:How happy are you now that you launched this back in 2018?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I'm really happy and satisfied with the results. So I would only regret that we couldn't do it before. But again it's, sometimes it's maybe the timing was right, you never know. But it was like already within a few months we could see the results of working with subscription. Within a few months we could see the results of working with subscription. We could see that the age group of 15 to 24 year olds was just really picking up this product and they never did before because they had to pay it all in advance or wasn't really keen on paying in installments. So pretty quickly it become quite clear that it was really something really good for us in terms of selling the product.
Speaker 3:The main issue afterwards were that we could see that those we were now selling a season ticket-like product to has never really been used to go for every weekend. So they may be picked up on the bigger games, but suddenly they just had a product that was active for all the games and that was something we had to figure out pretty quickly. In regard of having a sold-out ultra section, that was suddenly just like well, we can see the uses. It's not good enough. How are we going to handle that?
Speaker 3:And that's also why we already, one year after, launched a new product where it's not like a season ticket, it's more like a basic subscription, but you have access to pull a ticket instead. So you don't have anything in advance, you only have the right to pull a ticket for a certain area. But again, when we launched that in 2019 and also converted a lot of the existing to that product, we could see it solved a lot of our issues and gave us the opportunity to really create the best atmosphere in the stadium in terms of filling up enough, because, again, it all comes down to the fans, who are those doing the atmosphere. But having the right amount and making sure that we don't have a lot of empty seats and giving the experience that, well, it's a half-empty stadium, that really means a lot.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and speaking of physical capacity, which we're talking about here, right, people coming to the stadium. But you also do quite a lot of streaming, don't you? And that is interesting because you are selling the media rights and obviously that's a huge revenue stream. And how do you combine those two aspects?
Speaker 3:So before starting to talk about the media rights, we need to talk about what we did after selling actually selling out in season ticket and subscription. So after we could see we were on the journey to selling out of that, we started working on a basic subscription. And the first idea I had some years ago after launching the season ticket and subscription was, like we need a basic subscription so non-season ticket holders can purchase tickets with discount and get an advantage, get first in line to purchase tickets. But we could also see that there was more potential in a product like that. So, together with a lot of great colleagues, we built our basic subscription, fck+. That also includes a lot of the video material we already did and put on YouTube and just gave away for free documentaries. We have done a lot of them and really think we deliver in high quality. And then again also having some few training games we were starting to stream on youtube. But again it was always like an issue to see who's going to pay for this, so it costs money to produce and show the games. And again with this product, we just like had the platform so we could introduce it to the existing season ticket holders and subscribers with a small price increase for them, but also as a standalone product. We started by streaming the training games, and this product we launched back in February 2013. We started streaming the training games in the summer of 2023 and decided actually already there that, when we could see that people were actually purchasing this basic product to watch the training games, we decided that in 2024, if we were playing in the European qualification games, we would take the rides ourselves.
Speaker 3:So, for the home games, keep the rides instead of selling them and stream them to our fans. It's not something that is especially easy to predict in terms of how much can we sell, especially not. Also, how expensive is it going to be to purchase the rides for the away games. So it ended up being that we had the right for our three home games. We purchased the ride for one away game. The other two were too expensive.
Speaker 3:Yeah, that's a new thing for us working with media rights in the terms of purchasing it for standalone games, but it's really interesting. We saw a high increase in our sales, of course, for FCK Plus in the period. We are now monitoring them to look at the churn, to understand so we can build an even better business case next year, understanding is it viable for us to purchase the other games, even though they might be quite expensive. But it's really an interesting new way for us. And you could also say that FCK Plus is much more than just a ticketing ride. It's more than just streaming some games.
Speaker 3:We have a lot of, of course, the video content as well, but it's also like for us it's going to be the place to be on a waiting list, because, with a sold out stadium in season ticket and subscriptions, we decided to be on 23,122 products. Well, we need to pick people up somewhere, and what we have done previously is that, for areas being sold out, you could just sign up on a formula on the webpage and it was free. But we could also see that only one third of those we contacted afterwards were purchasing a subscription. So we really want to keep people active instead of having a lot of sleeping fans on a waiting list that is not going to purchase the products when we offer them.
Speaker 2:Yeah, got it. So basically, when you started subscriptions, you didn't do all this at once, right? You started with the low-hanging fruits and then you build your way up to more products, more content. You started acquiring your own content and media rights before you started selling it yourself. Do you think that one day you will basically just own all your content yourself and sell it directly? Is that the future, or do you still think the media rights has an important role?
Speaker 3:It's a tough question for a ticketing manager, I would say, because I think there's a lot of politics in that and we just signed a new long I think it's a six year long media deal in Denmark.
Speaker 3:I think we're looking into the future where we have seen that we can make it ourselves. We were praised by our fans for the productivity, the quality, the way we handled our home games. So I wouldn't say it's not possible. But I also know the money in media rights is extremely big. So I would say things are really changing in the media business and seeing streaming services really starting to purchase up, for example, disney Plus with the Conference League and Europa League rights that they are going into the market, maybe also pushing up the prices, rights that they are going into the market, maybe also pushing up the prices. So I think it's it's difficult to say that we will have it only for us, but I think there could be a way that we are sharing more, having more for ourselves yeah or being able to share it yeah, I mean, you have a lot of content outside the matches, like you said, the training sessions, documentaries, interviews, right.
Speaker 2:As long as you have producers and people to create content, that's a huge opportunity as well. So, as we're summing up today, we have a tradition at this podcast, and that is to sum up with some three key takeaways. But this time I'm going to ask you, mikael, if you could list up the biggest advantages of thinking subscriptions versus the one time a year renewal. What would those be?
Speaker 3:So I would say the first one, and it can be described in a graphical way. So we always had the graph of our season ticket renewals and how they went on year on year. But already after the first year of subscription we didn't start on zero and the year after we didn't start on, I think, 4,500. So it's even higher than that. So starting above zero was really the first takeaway from seeing this as a great development in increasing numbers because we could focus on new fans. We could do it by having the lookalikes from the existing subscribers and the fun thing is that when having a season ticket renewal we still have a product left on season ticket.
Speaker 3:It's not really possible for us to change into a subscription, but it's more like we don't really make a huge marketing campaign around renewal or purchasing. It's more like branding now than it is really renewing, because people will lose the seat if they're not renewing. People will lose the seat if they're churning, and that's the thing I will mention as. Number two is that we have put ourselves in a great situation now that if you are churning on your subscription, if you are leaving us, you're not guaranteed to ever get the seat back. And it's not because we want to force people to have the seat forever if they don't want to be there. It's more like, but you need to be aware that it's a problem if you leave us because you can't really get the same seat back and then it's keeping churn for us really low. And I would say the last thing is that when having those things around you like you can't really have this seat if you leave us, we also need to be able to provide solutions for our fans to lend out their season ticket, to convert it to a ticket with a single click in our app and send it to your friends, but also to release the ticket, to convert it to a ticket with a single click in our app and send it to your friends, but also to release the ticket back to us.
Speaker 3:If you are unable or unwilling to really use the time to give it away, well, you can release it back to us and we will donate money to our fans.
Speaker 3:They can use for activities if we resell the ticket. And those are some of the things that came only last year and some of the things that we are working hard on to enforce, not by whipping our fans, but by trying to really give them an incentive to do it by giving money back to the fans, but also having to say we really need you to show up. You didn't purchase the rights for an empty seat. We couldn't really say that back in 2015, with 15,000 in average attendance, but with more and more games selling out and 28,500 in average attendance, it's more easy for us now to say if you have an attendance on usage that is too low, you cannot keep your product, so we will cancel it and you are not able to get it back afterwards if you are keen on changing your behavior. So it's really something changing a lot around us on the go and not from day one.
Speaker 2:Well. Congratulations, mikael. I really enjoyed this conversation this time as well. It's much more fun to do it live, even though we have to do it digitally sometimes, and I'm sure the audience here at Royal Tennis Hall found it very interesting as well. So you're on an exciting journey for sure, mikael, and I know you are open to sharing more. If people would like to reach out to you or contact you, where should they go?
Speaker 3:I would say find me on LinkedIn. That would be the easiest way.
Speaker 2:That's where ticketing managers are.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and a lot of other people. But, yeah, find me on LinkedIn and I'm happy to share and we, of course, share a lot internally in the league, but we also happily to share and also learn things ourselves from other parts of the world.
Speaker 2:Very good. Will you be at the Don't Forget your Tickets conference at Emirates in January?
Speaker 3:If I get the invitation, very good. Will you be at the Don't Forget your Tickets conference at Emirates in January, if I get the invitation?
Speaker 2:You are getting it now, so thank you so much everyone. Thank you for showing up tonight. We're going to watch great tennis tonight here in Stockholm and also thank you to everyone who's been listening to a live special of Don't Forget your Tickets. This is the podcast where experts within the ticketing space share their stories and insights, where we certainly have learned a lot today. Today's guest was Mikkel Bjarre, senior Ticketing and Customer Service Manager at FC Copenhagen. Thank you so much for listening and thank you to our sponsor, tco, for powering this podcast. You.
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