To celebrate the 60th anniversary of its flagship competition UEFA changed the structure of EURO 2020, appointing matches to Host Cities across Europe instead of a single Host Country. The mission was to bring football to the fans, engaging a new audience and delivering a best-in-class experience to their doorstep. To achieve this vision our business was facing a number of critical challenges, requiring a new approach to the way we engaged fans at our events.

The first challenge was selling the requirement for strategic change internally. EURO matches regularly sell-out, benefiting from a fiercely loyal football audience, but analytics from recent events tell the story of a narrowing attendance profile; 80% male, an average age of close to 40 and a high average income.

Recognising the need to target a new audience was the starting point, however new audiences brought fresh challenges such as elevated fan expectation coupled with diminished fan loyalty and a demand for diversity of experience centred around engagement, community, and social values. With these challenges identified, our mission was to re-think the way our fans engaged with a EURO, re-building the fan journey by putting fan needs and values at its core.

With 60 years of in-house expertise delivering a globally renowned event, driving transformative change within UEFA was a major challenge. Our strategy was to place irrefutable fan evidence in front of our stakeholders, using it as the catalyst to change the business mindset and open the door for the reinvention of our fan journey.

We drew inspiration from parallel service-based industries where insight driven service mapping is common-place. This involved working with specialist anthropologists and psychologists to deliver an ethnographic study of our customer base. Fans attending matches were followed across Europe, culminating in over 4000+ data points and 500+ hours of fieldwork, one of the biggest ethnographic research projects in the sport event sector.

Turning insight into action was the subsequent challenge and with digital innovation identified as the vehicle for fan journey transformation, integration of UEFA’s digital team was key. UEFA builds all of its digital products in-house, recruiting some of the best UX & UI freelancers from across the globe. To engage the digital team with the new fan-centric approach, we embedded them directly into the research programme. Experience mapping was delivered in parallel to digital service design, closing the gap between insight, ideation and design.

The fan companion was a direct output of the new fan-centric approach. Combining cutting-edge technology with personalised content - driven by fan data - transformed the way customers engaged with the EURO 2020 fan journey.

Supporting the fans’ need for discovery, we built a multi-functional journey planner. It combined the best of Google Maps with custom functionality such as automatic routing to your designated stadium entrance. To complement this service, we developed a digital travelcard, providing fans with free and seamless access to host city public transport networks, an industry first.

To foster the fan community environment, we built an interactive heat map that allowed fans to find each other in real time, fuelling the party in the host city.

Building on social and community values was the innovative “Volkswagen Free Chauffeur” service. A fully integrated Uber style service, that allowed fans to book and share rides with other fans. The service was 100% free of charge and with exclusively electric vehicles on offer, it was an environmentally friendly way to discover EURO 2020.

Finally, Daily Tips were fully personalised bite-sized messages based on your fan profile, ensuring that we surfaced only the most relevant and engaging content to fans.

A mixture of onsite qualitative investigation, app analytics and post-tournament quantitative research, provided a detailed assessment of the impact of the fan companion.

Based on an average ticket holder group size of between two and three fans, our KPI was to put the fan companion in the hands of one in every two ticket holders. This KPI was smashed throughout the tournament, with key markets such as London, Munich, Rome and Amsterdam delivering ticket holder download figures in excess of 80%. In total the number of unique users utilising the fan companion totalled 2.2 million.

With a push notification opt-in rate of 75% and an average session duration of 8:30 min, the fan companion demonstrated exceptionally high engagement rates. The journey planner alone had a total of 3.1 million views across the tournament period. The Volkswagen Free Chauffeur saw over 23,000 fans catching free rides.

The analytics are supported by the results of a post-tournament survey, revealing that 78% of ticket holders used the fan companion to support their fan journey.

The success of the fan companion, demonstrating how placing the fan first to strengthen our relationship with them, enabled us to change the way UEFA approached all future events.