Don't Forget Your Tickets

How club-branded Fan Apps sell more tickets and build loyal communities - with Adam Stighäll, CEO of Forza Clubs

• Carl-Erik Michalsen Moberg • Season 8 • Episode 1

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What can a club-owned fan app do that social media can’t? A lot, especially when it comes to ticket sales, first-party data, and shifting fan behavior at scale, says Forza Clubs' CEO Adam Stighäll.

In this season-opening episode, Adam explains why clubs and leagues are moving beyond algorithms to build their own “digital living rooms,” how ticketing becomes the killer utility that drives adoption, and the best practices behind paywalled content that fans actually value. We dig into launches across Scandinavia, behavior shifts like increased home game attendance, and the real resourcing it takes to make an app work week after week.

Highlights from the conversation:

  • Own the journey, not the algorithm: why clubs are reclaiming communication and data with branded apps instead of renting reach on social platforms.
  • Ticketing as the adoption engine: how digital tickets, transfers, and season card utilities drive monthly active users and repeat engagement.
  • What to keep free vs. what to gate: the 80/20 model for premium content, early access windows, and avoiding fan backlash.
  • Longer-form wins in apps: why the same interview that’s 2 minutes on social should be 8 minutes in your app—authentic, low-edit, and higher value.
  • Who converts first (and why): younger hardcore fans download early; ticketing utility brings the laggards.
  • Proven outcomes: how moving attention from social to a club-owned app correlates with more home game attendance and higher sales.
  • Data that matters: building a fan database with demographics and preferences to power automation, merchandising, and smarter campaigns.
  • Resource reality: how to shift 4–5 hours a week into app-first content, what to stop doing on social and what to do more of in your own channel.
  • Say no to reinventing the wheel: why standardising best practices across launches beats bespoke one-offs that don’t scale.

Adam’s core message: when clubs create a genuine, branded home for fans where utility and content live together, engagement grows, data compounds, and ticketing performance follows.

Tune in for practical playbooks, real-world results, and a clear path to turning fan apps into your primary sales and engagement platform.

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

SPEAKER_01:

Welcome to a whole new season of Don't Forget your Tickets. In this episode, we dive into fan apps. What jobs do they do? And how will they change the feature of the ticket? Our guest in this season opener is Adam Steinholt, CEO of the Swedish Fan App Four Star Club. Let's get into it.

SPEAKER_02:

Hello everyone and welcome to this episode of Don't Forget Your Tickets. This is the podcast where ticketing managers normally reveal their secrets, but today we have a new guest joining us, and that is Adam from Forsa Clubs. How do you spell your last name, Adam? Stieghol. F-C-I-G-H-A-L-L.

SPEAKER_00:

Stighol, and that's the same in Swedish as it is in English. No, we have those dots above the A that complicates everything. So when you're going to travel, you get a bunch of new letters on the ticket. We have a couple of those as well in Norway.

SPEAKER_02:

And speaking of Norway, this is the first time we're doing a physical podcast in Bergen. Congratulations, you're the first guest in. Yes, it was about time. However, we've done over 50 episodes of don't forget your tickets. Super proud of that. And we've had a lot of great guests. And it's going to be super interesting to talk with Adam today. And what we're going to discuss today is fan-based apps, right? Apps that fans use to buy tickets and so much more. And that's what we're going to know today. So why are clubs using a fan app? You have so many apps today, Adam, and you have a lot of social media channels. There's so many ways to reach the audience. Why an app? Tell us a little bit more about that.

SPEAKER_00:

The basic thing is that you would like to own more of the customer journey. Whether you are like a football brand or just like an e-commerce business, it makes a lot of sense to do that. So basically, just looking back, you know, 25 years ago, we all invested in fancy websites and put a lot of money to make that like the primary platform for communication and that kind of stuff. And then let's say 10 years ago, we put all the money and resources into building a social media following. And now what we are doing is basically just following an existing trend where let's say a club or a league try to own communications by themselves with their customers, with their supporters. Why is that important? It's important for several reasons. One is obviously sales, but the moment that let's say a supporter starts using a product that is owned by the club, you get all the fan data as well. And that's especially important in the younger fan category because it's not easy to get you know customer data from a 15-year-old, but through an application, you will get data from those who are to 13 years of age, which is a huge user group as well.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00:

So I would say monetary reasons, fan data reasons, and also if you want to, let's take it like from a branding perspective, if you want to have a marketing effect on someone, you want to have a daily communication or at least weekly qualitative communication. And to have that on, let's say, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, where you are completely drowned by an algorithm, makes it so much harder. And on top of that, you must probably pay meta to just being able to communicate those who are actually your clients and customers. So obviously, this is a ticketing podcast, right?

SPEAKER_02:

We talk tickets. What's the important role of ticketing in this fan environment? How does ticket come into the picture? You're talking about sales, probably talking about a lot of things when it comes to sales, but how is ticketing important in relation to sales?

SPEAKER_00:

Yes, so when I say sales, I mostly mean like merchandise and ticket, and then if you have maybe some kind of paywall, you can make money out of content as well. But uh, tickets becomes a huge driver actually for engagement in the apps. You have had AIK on this podcast before, they sell the most tickets in Scandinavia and also have the most used club application. You can see their user numbers rise from 40,000 people a month to 60,000 people a month when they went fully digital with their ticketing. So it becomes an important thing from a utility perspective because let's say content from the club and let's say interviews and those kind of stuff might not be enough as a reason for people to start changing behaviors, yeah, but ticketing is an extremely strong driver for a change of behavior, yeah. And it's probably the most obvious one as a means to do so.

SPEAKER_02:

So it's not only a barrier to get to the game, it's also an opportunity to drive adoption of the app, I suppose, in the audience, etc. But tell me a little bit about the business model, because the company that you're running is called Forza Clubs. However, when you're building an app, the app is not called Forza Club.

SPEAKER_00:

How does it work for the club? I mean, if you're a supporter, you don't want to buy anything from us, you want to buy from the club, obviously, and you want to feel that you know that you're in the living room of the club or the league that you're supporting. It's the same, like when these kind of similar things have been tried, let's say by Facebook and those sort of platforms, you can see conversion rate, it just plummets, goes to almost zero. So you have to build it completely in sort of in the character graphical profile and sort of feel for this every specific club. Yeah, otherwise it doesn't work.

SPEAKER_02:

So if I'm uh Bohemians, the fans, they will then see a Bohemian app. They will not see a Forza Club app, right?

SPEAKER_00:

No, hundred percent.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, hundred percent their own app. Great. That's I think that's quite important, right? You want to follow the brand, you want to follow the club, you want to follow the comps that the club has.

SPEAKER_00:

And also just from a branding perspective, like once more, the ultimate goal should be I mean, if you're gonna sell more tickets, you need to drive underlying demand for tickets. You need to drive the fan engagement and increase it. And you won't be able to do so if it doesn't feel like a genuine sort of club product, otherwise you will fail.

SPEAKER_02:

Great, good to get that out of the way and cleared off, Adam. So, one thing that I'm also curious about when you launch with the club, you have a lot of people downloading the app, right? And maybe not everyone at once, but who's the typical fan who's using the app at an early stage? If you look at the innovation curve, you have the early adapters and the innovators in the beginning, and then you know how it works, like the late bloomers coming in the end. Who's the typical first mover from a fan perspective?

SPEAKER_00:

It's definitely the younger fans. You could call them the hardcore fans, those who will follow everything that a club does. So basically, generating downloads for those people is very, very easy. What's hard is to get the big consumer group, you could call the big supporter group, which is in this technical term, would be the laggers or the followers to get them convinced. This is also where getting ticketing as a part of the product is extremely important because that's the biggest drivers for those called, let's say, laggers and followers. Who doesn't, you know, my father would never pick up an application if it were for getting behind the scenes content from his favorite ice hockey club in Sweden. But he would do so if he would need to use or send tickets to a friend or go to the game. So it's about getting all of those user groups. The younger people is easier on average, like so that the next generation of fans, those who are 17 and below, are not as reliant on having, let's say, ticketing features, they more want interaction and also play a few games in the app and those kind of things, and also, of course, access to the players on the team.

SPEAKER_02:

That's great. And that's the downloads, right? But the other thing you mentioned is some of these clubs also monetize on exclusive content from the club. Who are those followers?

SPEAKER_00:

What fans are willing to actually pay for communication from their club? Yeah, that's a really tricky one if you haven't sort of tried it at scale as we have. So the simple answer is that it's a lot more people than you might believe. So usually it's around 10%. We talked about AIK, which is you know the biggest one in sort of in this space in Scandinavia. They have 60,000 people using the app every month, a little bit more than uh 6,000 is choosing to pay to use the app. What they get for that is that they get some content before the non-paying users. You could say that let's say they get 10% content before the others, so you get an early sort of advantage, you could call it, and then you get 10% of content that no one else gets, and then 80% is still free because you want to be able to reach all your fans, so you cannot exclude them, and then also is a balance about having people like what you do and so forth and so forth, not having to make fans upset either, which can happen if you execute it in a poor way.

SPEAKER_02:

I think that's a challenge in football in general, right? That many clubs are scared of okay, what happens if I start charging for things? You just see how dangerous it is to increase season ticket prices year by year. But when you introduce these new revenue streams, I mean it still comes out of the fans' pocket, right? Do you have any best practice for those kinds of implementations? On, like you mentioned, the split of the content types, etc.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, for sure. And this is a really delicate thing because if it's executed wrong, it becomes, you know, it's a disaster. Yeah. That's also the problem that all the clubs are reinventing the wheel every time. So it's not done at scale. So it's a lot easier for us, obviously. Now we are doing our 13th app launch this year, and all of them, excluding I would say three, have had some kind of paywall. So obviously, you learn from time to time. Yeah. And the best practice would be that everything that used to be free in the past, like from a content perspective or stuff like that, or access to tickets, obviously, yeah, are gonna be free in the future because just from a sort of a uh to not get negative feedback, and then your best sort of content pieces of the stuff that most fans might be interested in, yeah, give that for the first two or three hours, it's exclusive for the paying users. Yeah, then release it for everyone. If you do that for about, let's say, 20% of the content that you produce, you give enough of an incentive for those who are, let's say, early adopters, just want to come a little bit closer to the club, or maybe actually those who don't find a good way to support the club economically in some other way. Yeah. Because not everyone lives in the city where you play, people follow from afar. Yeah, not everyone sign up for a membership and have that card sent home to them, like you know, when we were kids. So it's actually a lot about just opening a revenue stream that suits some people that might not fit into these other categories, whether it being a ticketing subscription or just buying jerseys for that matter, which is another category.

SPEAKER_02:

So is there a lot of the paying members, to put it that way, that also have season tickets? Of course. Yeah, there's a huge correlation. Yeah, so that's a huge correlation. So most paying members also have season tickets.

SPEAKER_00:

It's around 50% of those have both, so to speak. And but that also gives a very big group that is not a season ticket holder that choose to pay to get access to uh information or longer interviews from the club before everyone else. But there's another catch to this as well, that's usually also forgotten. Like right now, football clubs produce content that is adapted for social media because for whatever reason, likes and followers is some kind of holy grail. Yeah, it's of course changing because everyone wants to grow their fan database, so it's becoming obvious to clubs that it's lesser important that might sort of have been sort of believed for these past five years when there's been this huge hype on following. But if you adapt your content to social media, maybe you buy a new player, then you do a two-minute interview. You might do it quite raw, it's quite authentic. You just put up a camera and then you ask a bunch of questions, post it on Instagram. But the thing is, like when you start looking at okay, if application is the format, then it makes a lot more sense to push that interview from two minutes to eight minutes because you are much more interested in longer format contents in that kind of platform. And then what also happened, if you start pushing stuff from two to eight minutes, it's also perfectly viable to put the premium stamp on it to say that this is exclusive for the first 24 hours, maybe. What did it take if the production time went from two minutes to eight minutes? It's an increase by six minutes, yeah. But basically, it doesn't add any production time because no one wants to have edited interviews anyway nowadays. They wanted real, right?

SPEAKER_02:

Yes, uh real content. What's the most successful content you've seen so far when it comes through that?

SPEAKER_00:

Most successful content. Yeah. The simplest and by far the smartest thing is that like 30 minutes before your starting 11 is released to the public throughout all these live score applications and whatnot, you send your starting 11 to your paying customers. Yeah, that's the simplest thing because it takes zero production time. Yeah, it doesn't decrease any value for people who choose not to pay, but it increases value for those who are paying. And it's also a great way to do advertising for your app. Because if you're smart, then you just write like starting 11, you will always get it first in our club application. Fans go screenshotting, they post on Twitter, X or they send to their mates who also then get sort of aware that this app exists. Exactly. So that also drives the further adoption, right?

SPEAKER_02:

Which is great. And it's recurring. You mentioned one thing in the beginning of the conversation, and that was customer data. What data do you collect on behalf of the club and how do they use it?

SPEAKER_00:

It goes into whatever data uh CDP data platform they have, but basically favorite player, date of birth, gender, how old they are, and also phone number and email address. It depends a little bit on what you like to have. But yeah, it's an important, super critical stuff, and then the favorite player on top of that. How does ticketing managers use the app? Ticketing managers use the app currently, it's the sales platform, first and foremost. That's one thing. So, which is we will come back to that. It's a view of whatever platform that you have that you can go in and buy your tickets, and then of course you store the tickets if you are a fan in the app or your season ticket. If you're not going to a game, you might open the ticket to be sold again or you know, send it back to the club if you're a season ticket holder and stuff like that. So that will be also from a customer perspective. But you asked about the ticketing managers, right? Yeah, yeah. So they use that as their biggest sales platform because that's what happens with all the platforms where people spend most time. And this is not going to shock anyone, but that is no longer at websites, no, it's no longer at social media, and that's also what is driving this entire the attention economy is actually fueling this change as well. Because if you create your own sort of digital living room for the club, fans will spend more time there, equals they will spend more money there. So it becomes the major sort of sales platform.

SPEAKER_02:

I'm talking to a lot of different people in ticketing, right? And from different organizations. We have everyone from FIFA to clubs in general on this podcast, and they have different resources, right? Some clubs have very limited resources. I just spoke to a ticketing manager where she is the one who's doing almost everything. She's the marketing manager, commercial manager, and the ticketing manager all at once. What resources do you need to get cracking with an app and utilize it best practice? Because when you talk about it, it might seem overwhelming, right? Content, putting things out, communication, integrations. I mean, the way you see it, what internal resources does a club need?

SPEAKER_00:

It's about like four to five hours more than they spend today, most likely, because they are producing already content. But of course, it's a change in strategy because let's say you have your new player once more that you sign, that you want the fans to get familiar with this player and so on. Today you do a two-minute interview, you post it maybe on Instagram. What you would do if you are, I would recommend if you have a good application that is content-driven, you do 30 seconds of that interview, you post on Instagram, but for the full interview, you go to the app. Yeah, and then once the supporter does that, you get all the fan data, you also get them into your environment where it's not like being a supporter on X or Twitter, it's just hate in the comment sections. And here in this living room, it's something completely different in terms of atmosphere, and also from the branding perspective, yeah, like once more. So I would say four to five hours more compared to what they do today, but it is mostly a strategic shift that you choose to do stuff that is more well suited and you choose to move the focus towards okay, how do we engage the fans more? How can we get more of them into a platform that we own, get the fan data, and also use that in ways that they already do through market automations and stuff like that.

SPEAKER_02:

I mean, because there is an exercise, right, that clubs have to perform, and that you probably see in the model that when you find out, okay, what should we do more of? And most clubs or um ambitious clubs say we do more of everything, right? But what should we do less of? So if I'm a club, if I'm a commercial director, ticketing manager, whatever, right? And if we start using the Forza Clubs app, and I want it to work, what will I automatically remove from my daily life? Because what I'm adding, you already mentioned, but what can I remove? Social media?

SPEAKER_00:

I mean, can you help us a little bit there? That's actually like a key question, like what to remove. So you can put it this way what are we doing today that is adding the least value? And usually that should be in terms of engagement or sales, which is likely this doesn't work in every market, but I work with several clubs that actually chosen to why do we even run our X account? What value does that add to anything in our customer journey or as a football fan? It doesn't add anything, but it takes us a lot of time. Yeah. Also, like now we're really nitty-gritty. Why do we post the end score of a game on social media as a picture that we put time on editing? What was the purpose of that? Yeah, and what did it actually add in terms of value? It wasn't a huge amount of production time, but still, like, why do we do it? So I would put it this way: usually you scrap those things that could also be content pieces that is the least amount of value, and also maybe actually it's not like this in every country, obviously. It changes a little bit, but let's say in general, you could take X as a very good example as being a platform that is mostly negative for the brand and adds very, very little value to the supporter. So that could be one thing, but like I said in the beginning, it will likely increase the time you need to spend on something. Yeah, like I said, it's it should be around four to five hours extra a week to just get some interactions, maybe do some quizzes and polls and stuff like that, and also just making this okay. Now we're making actually a highlight over an interview, which takes a little bit of time to make, and then we just make the long-form content over here instead.

SPEAKER_02:

So, what you're saying is make that investment today, change the way you work, do an exercise, remove a couple of things, and add a couple of new things, and long-term success will come. Can you shout a little bit about uh some successes that you've had so far, Alan? I think that's relevant. And also, I mean, if you can name clubs as well, because I mean these are brands, right, that the listeners know of. So feel free.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, it's all about the results actually. So that's actually the main thing if you're a club. Look at what results have been achieved in other places and try to replicate what can suit you guys. But we can take uh Norway was the latest market we entered, which was in February with Molde Fedik Stad and uh Bodo Glimto is doing extremely well at this uh point in time. If you look at how the app users, you can say that they have moved a little bit from their social media to their respective club applications. 29% of those supporters are now going to more home games than they did before. That's kind of a big driver, and the reason for this is that they feel that they get closer to the club, which is because the application is a platform that, if you're a Bodo Glimp, it is in yellow and it is in black. Yeah, everything in there is about the club, it's not controlled by an algorithm. When you have seen a video or interacted with a quiz or a game in the app, it doesn't do like YouTube does and put some esports stuff afterwards or cats and dogs or whatever might catch your attention, which is a huge difference from a branding perspective. So it becomes a positive place for your brand, increasing the engagement, which is the underlying driver for buying more tickets and going to more home games. So if you look at it from that perspective, it's completely logical. Yeah, but that's also what's tricky when you are, let's say, social media oriented, is that your content will get lost among so many other things, yeah, and it's not something that you even use as a utility thing or even daily. And many clubs, I would say, here struggle to get also the data and to get that sort of direct communication working efficiently. So I would say the Norwegian ones being a perfectly good example. You had AIK on the podcast before, they had a similar number. I think it was 23% of the non-season ticket holders went to more home games. 28% of the season ticket holders started attending more games after they have used the app for six months. Yeah, but also related to you engage more with something that you spend more time with. I mean, now you don't have podcast listeners that is living and dying with this podcast. But if you are, let's say, someone who listened to uh podcast host for two hours a week, you actually create a relation. Yeah, and this is something that all clubs need to focus more on is that not only focus on likes on social media and let's say interactions, but also like how many fans are spending how much time with our brand each week. Yeah, but and if that number is a good number and a growing number, you will also sell more if you make it easy to buy stuff, which I mean you are on to in this podcast every month.

SPEAKER_02:

Exactly. I think so. And it is super interesting, right? The way you communicate, this podcast will of course forever be free. Now I've committed that for uh in the long term for forever. We're just super happy that we have so many rock stars on, and great to have you here as well, Adam. Uh, I have to say, really cool, and I mean the story, it's a tough competition out there as well, right? There's a lot of uh geniuses out there who are building great apps.

SPEAKER_00:

Why do you guys uh stand out? Because we say no, that's probably the biggest reason. Most tech companies they are building exactly what the club wants. It's just that a club or a league haven't done this 50 times before. So you are reinventing the wheel every time. Then you don't know what results you're gonna get because you are doing something in a way that you didn't do it last time. As we said at the beginning, it needs to be completely custom and it needs to feel as a part of the club, but still it needs to follow sort of the best practices, and so you get some sort of insights at scale that you can use to make data-driven results and not just guess. Because if we start guessing every time, sometimes we are right, but it's gonna be a lot harder that way. The boring answer is to say no to those who want to do something completely, let's say, their own way that are not well grounded in I would say data.

SPEAKER_02:

I guess gut feeling is always right, especially if you uh back it up by data.

SPEAKER_00:

Exactly. If we don't have any data, we go with my gut, yeah.

SPEAKER_02:

Alright, so I think that also sums up the key takeaways for this episode, Adam. Thank you so much for coming here to Bergen. I mean, I know there's a lot of reasons to come to Bergen. It's the most beautiful city in Norway, as well as there is an interesting game tonight. Brandvor versus Glasgow Rangers, and I guess you're going there as well. For sure. That's gonna be awesome. Very, very good. If people want to get in touch with you, Adam, what do they do?

SPEAKER_00:

I think LinkedIn is a good place to start, Adam S-T-I-G-H-A-L-L, or just follow us as Forsa Clubs to see what we're up to.

SPEAKER_02:

Fantastic. Again, thank you so much for joining. You've all listened to Don't Forget Your Tickets, which is the podcast for people in ticketing. And we have a lot of followers. And also, I would like to say if you have anyone that you would like to recommend as guests, or if you want to recommend anyone to listen, feel free, really appreciate it. Please reach out to me or the producer Tom Osmenson. Thank you to Ticket Co for powering this podcast. And until next time, see you around.

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Carl-Erik Michalsen Moberg

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