27 August 2026
The Code-Share Era: Why Sport's Next Growth Market Is Someone Else's Audience
Bayern Munich and the NHL just signed a partnership with no disclosed money in it. That is exactly what makes it interesting.
Read article →Strategy
Arsenal’s launch of “The Arsenal” is easy to misread if it is treated simply as a new app, a new content destination, or a fresh layer of fan service. On the surface, it is all of those things: a redesigned digital home that combines original programming, club news, matchday coverage, ticketing, retail, and personalised supporter features in one place, with original series such as The Link Up, The Big Match and Modern Leader used to give the new platform immediate entertainment value. But strategically, the significance runs much deeper.
What Arsenal have introduced is not just a media product. It is a piece of commercial infrastructure. It is an attempt to bring content, commerce, audience data and fan identity into one owned environment, and that makes it far more consequential than the typical club-platform refresh.
To see why that matters, it helps to start with the economics of modern football. The game is still built around the classic revenue triad of broadcasting, matchday and commercial income, but the balance inside that model is changing. Deloitte’s latest Football Money League reported that the top 20 clubs generated more than €12 billion in revenue for the first time in the 2024/25 season, and in the previous published breakdown for 2023/24 the average Money League club generated 44% of revenue from commercial activity, 38% from broadcasting and 18% from matchday income. That distribution matters because it shows where the next strategic frontier lies. Broadcasting is still huge, but it is largely mediated by leagues and rights-holders. Matchday is valuable, but it is capped by physical capacity. Commercial revenue, by contrast, is the category most open to expansion through better audience ownership, better targeting, better data and better digital conversion. Arsenal’s new hub sits precisely at that intersection.
That is why the most important thing about The Arsenal is not the existence of original shows. Content is only the visible layer. The more important development is that Arsenal are trying to build a closed-loop ecosystem in which attention can be captured, behaviour can be observed, and commercial actions can be encouraged without handing the entire relationship to third-party platforms.
On Instagram, YouTube, X or TikTok, clubs can reach fans at scale, but the platforms own the environment, dictate distribution logic and limit how much first-party data the club can actually control. Inside a club-owned app, the relationship changes. A supporter can watch a video, read a match preview, click through to a shirt drop, check ticket information, and continue interacting in a single environment. The club can then connect those actions into a behavioural picture that is commercially useful. That is a much more valuable proposition than simply generating views on open social media. Arsenal’s own launch language and campaign coverage make this integration clear: the platform is positioned not merely as a content feed, but as a central destination combining storytelling, retail, ticketing and personalised supporter engagement.
This is the key business lens through which Arsenal’s move should be understood. In old football economics, a fan was primarily valued through attendance, TV viewership or broad sponsor exposure. In platform economics, a fan becomes something more measurable and more strategically actionable: a logged-in user, a repeat visitor, a segmented customer, a potential subscriber, a likely buyer, a source of data and a point within a much larger network.
The transition from “supporter” to “user” may sound cold, but in commercial terms it is transformative. It means the club is no longer limited to monetising moments of mass attention, such as matches or shirt launches. It can begin to monetise continuity: the periods between matches, between transfer windows, between ticket renewals, between kit releases. It can build value from the persistence of the relationship, not just from spikes of event-driven interest. That is exactly how platform businesses create defensibility. They do not depend on isolated transactions; they depend on repeated engagement that produces both revenue and learning.
The reason this matters so much in football is that the industry has a gigantic monetisation asymmetry. Elite clubs already command enormous global audiences, but only a minority of those fans are directly monetised in a meaningful way. Matchgoing supporters are extremely valuable, and sponsorship and media rights turn broad global popularity into revenue at scale, but for countless overseas fans the direct economic relationship with the club remains thin. They may consume clips, buy occasional merchandise and follow results, yet still generate relatively little identifiable value for the club itself compared with the intensity of their loyalty.
A platform like The Arsenal is an attempt to narrow that gap. It provides Arsenal with a mechanism to convert geographically distant affinity into measurable, recurring direct engagement. In practical terms, it means a supporter in Lagos, Jakarta, New York or Mumbai is no longer just a social-media follower floating in someone else’s ecosystem. That supporter can become part of Arsenal’s own operating environment. The long-term commercial potential of that shift is enormous because scale and margin behave differently in digital systems than in physical ones. Once the platform infrastructure is in place, the incremental cost of serving additional users is relatively low compared with the marginal value that successful monetisation can produce.
This is also why Arsenal’s move should be placed in the wider context of football’s slow but unmistakable conversion into a media industry. The clubs most advanced in this area have all arrived at the same broad conclusion, even if they express it differently: elite football institutions can no longer think of media as secondary promotion around the core sporting product. Media has become one of the core products.
Manchester City, for example, have developed CITY+ as a premium content service and built a substantial documentary catalogue through City Studios, with official club material explicitly presenting exclusive original documentaries, full replays, behind-the-scenes access and premium video as a structured subscriber proposition rather than incidental club output. Barcelona have taken a similar but slightly more explicit direct-to-consumer route with Barça One, which the club described as the evolution of Barça TV+ and a platform intended to keep Barcelona “at the forefront of the entertainment industry,” with a free advertising-based model plus a paid ad-free option. Liverpool’s official video platform, now presented as All Red Video, similarly combines live and on-demand club programming, exclusive documentaries, full match replays and a 24/7 LFCTV live stream as part of a membership proposition. Real Madrid’s RM Play and live Realmadrid TV offering consolidate club video, documentaries and streaming in one owned environment, while Juventus maintain an official video ecosystem and explicitly label some of that output as Juventus TV with exclusive content, highlights, archive matches and press conferences.
In other words, Arsenal are not inventing the category. They are entering a developing competitive field in which major clubs are trying to become fully fledged direct media operators.
Yet Arsenal’s version deserves particular attention because it appears to lean more strongly into integration than some earlier club media efforts. Historically, club TV channels and club video products often worked as parallel media properties: useful, brand-enhancing, sometimes monetisable, but still somewhat detached from the rest of the club’s operating stack.
Arsenal’s new hub is more significant because it links the media layer directly to ticketing, retail and personalised supporter experience inside one branded environment. That matters because the value of a platform is not just a sum of features; it is the compounding effect created when those features interact. A supporter who watches a Bukayo Saka-led show and then buys merchandise is not just producing one media event and one retail event. They are creating a connected behavioural chain that makes future recommendations, future partnerships and future pricing more precise. The more often those journeys happen, the more valuable the system becomes.
This is why platform businesses are structurally different from ordinary digital products. They generate operational intelligence at the same time as they generate revenue.
That operational intelligence is likely to be one of the greatest sources of long-term value. The sports-industry digital trends report published by N3XT Sports found that while many sports properties have fan-facing websites and mobile products, fewer than half collect first-party data via a web login and only 32.4% use single sign-on, highlighting a broad gap in digital maturity. Those numbers are important because they show that the real competitive edge does not come merely from having a content destination. It comes from having an integrated identity system through which fan behaviour can be tied together across products and moments.
If Arsenal succeed in turning The Arsenal into a high-frequency, logged-in environment, they are not simply adding another media channel. They are building a first-party data asset that can influence sponsorship packaging, customer relationship management, merchandise conversion, retention strategy and global segmentation. In a business environment increasingly shaped by privacy changes and the declining reliability of third-party tracking, that kind of owned data asset becomes even more valuable.
This is where the business argument becomes more concrete and more data-driven. In football, many of the most commercially important audiences are actually under-monetised at the individual level. Clubs can have tens of millions of followers across international markets while still earning relatively little direct revenue per overseas supporter compared with the emotional intensity of that relationship.
The platform strategy offers a route to changing that arithmetic. Even relatively small improvements in annual revenue per digitally engaged fan can matter enormously when applied at global scale. Suppose the club can improve conversion into retail, premium membership, digital advertising value or sponsor activations by only a few euros per active user per year. Across a very large international audience, that can become meaningful incremental revenue.
But the more sophisticated point is that the platform does not need to extract the same value from every fan. It can identify tiers of engagement and monetise accordingly. One user may never subscribe but may watch enough content to make them valuable for advertising. Another may rarely watch but convert strongly on retail. Another may primarily use the app for ticketing or membership. A well-built platform can optimise across those pathways instead of forcing one uniform commercial model. That flexibility is where a lot of long-term upside sits.
It also has major implications for sponsorship. Traditional football sponsorship has often been built around exposure: shirt logos, LED boards, training kits, backdrop visibility, hospitality rights. Those assets still matter, but brand partners increasingly want more measurable outcomes. They want proof of audience quality, they want segmentation, and they want paths from awareness to action.
A club-owned platform allows sponsorship inventory to evolve from static branding into something closer to digital media inventory. A partner can be integrated into a series, targeted to particular markets, connected to a commerce moment or attached to identifiable engagement metrics. Arsenal’s new commercial partnerships already point in this direction, with reports noting that club partners are being featured across Arsenal’s digital and social platforms including the new app.
The strategic importance here is not merely more ad space. It is that the club can begin to offer brands a richer proposition: not just “millions saw your logo,” but “this type of supporter watched this format, in this market, at this time, and then interacted in these ways.” The deeper football moves into that logic, the more clubs begin to look not only like sports businesses but like media sales organisations with premium audience data.
There is also a brand reason why clubs are investing so heavily in this direction. Modern elite clubs are no longer only sporting institutions. They are cultural brands that operate across entertainment, fashion, tourism, lifestyle and identity. Arsenal’s choice to launch original series with more entertainment-inflected framing rather than purely utilitarian club video reflects that reality. The club is not only trying to inform supporters; it is trying to occupy more of their cultural time.
This is a critical shift. Traditional club media was often designed as a service layer around the football calendar. Contemporary club media is increasingly designed as an always-on cultural layer that can keep the club present in a supporter’s life whether or not a match is taking place. That does two things commercially. First, it smooths the seasonality of engagement. Second, it makes the club more attractive to sponsors and collaborators beyond conventional football categories, because it broadens the contexts in which the brand can credibly operate.
In that sense, Arsenal’s launch is part of a larger trend in which football clubs are trying to reduce dependence on external gatekeepers. Broadcasters remain indispensable because live rights still command extraordinary value, but social platforms and media intermediaries have become both necessary and limiting. They provide massive reach, yet they mediate the relationship. Clubs benefit from the attention those platforms generate, but they do not fully own the conditions under which that attention is distributed or monetised.
A club-owned platform is a hedge against that dependency. It does not replace social media; rather, it allows the club to use social media as a funnel rather than a destination. It does not replace broadcasters; rather, it allows the club to create a parallel domain of owned engagement where rights restrictions are lower and direct relationships are stronger. Strategically, that is a very different posture from the one football clubs held a decade ago. It is not just about publishing more content. It is about renegotiating who controls the customer relationship.
That said, the opportunity should not be romanticised. The platform strategy is attractive precisely because it promises long-term leverage, but it also comes with serious execution risk.
The first challenge is that attention is scarce. Football clubs are not only competing with each other. They are competing with Netflix, YouTube creators, gaming, streaming entertainment, podcasts, social feeds and every other claim on a user’s time. The presence of club loyalty does not automatically solve the attention problem. Fans may love a club deeply and still only want limited club-produced content outside matches. For this reason, the quality threshold is high. If the content feels formulaic, overproduced, relentlessly promotional or insufficiently distinctive, the app risks becoming an occasional utility rather than a habitual destination. The clubs making the strongest progress in this space, such as Manchester City with its more polished documentary pipeline or Barcelona with its ambition to position Barça One as a full entertainment proposition, implicitly recognise that football media now competes inside the wider entertainment economy, not in a protected niche.
The second challenge is that monetisation must be paced carefully. Fans do not respond well when clubs appear to treat loyalty as a resource to be over-extracted. One reason Barcelona made Barça One free with advertising, while also offering a paid ad-free version, is that it lowers entry barriers and broadens the top of the funnel. Arsenal’s own free-access positioning serves a similar purpose. That is smart, because the early strategic priority is usually not direct subscription revenue; it is scale, habit and data accumulation. But over time, the pressure to monetise grows. Premium tiers, better sponsor integration, ecommerce prompts, membership upsells and exclusive windows can all make commercial sense, yet they can also create fan backlash if users feel the product is moving from club service toward aggressive extraction. The strategic art lies in making monetisation feel additive rather than punitive. The platform must create enough convenience, entertainment and exclusivity that fans accept the commercial logic as part of a better overall experience.
The third challenge is organisational, and it is often underestimated. To build a serious football platform, a club cannot think like a traditional communications department. It needs product management, data architecture, user-experience design, content strategy, lifecycle marketing, audience analytics and commercial operations that can translate behaviour into business outcomes. In practical terms, it means clubs must increasingly resemble hybrid institutions: part sports organisation, part media company, part software-enabled consumer business.
That is not a trivial change. It affects hiring, reporting lines, investment priorities and executive decision-making. A club can launch an app relatively quickly. Building a platform culture capable of continuously improving that app based on user behaviour is much harder. The N3XT Sports findings on limited first-party data collection and low single-sign-on adoption across sports properties are revealing here because they suggest many organisations still have not built the foundational digital plumbing required to fully exploit the direct-to-consumer opportunity.
Arsenal’s move therefore matters on two timelines at once.
In the short term, the platform’s impact will probably be judged through indicators such as downloads, active users, retention, engagement with original programming and the extent to which supporters actually use the app for more than matchday checking. Those are not trivial metrics; they determine whether the product becomes part of fan habit or remains a branded utility. Financially, the near-term effect is unlikely to rival major broadcast or commercial deals. But that is not the right benchmark in the first phase. The initial value lies in behavioural capture and infrastructure building. If Arsenal can establish a large base of logged-in, repeatedly engaged supporters, the commercial options multiply later.
In the medium term, the platform can begin to reshape how the club packages value. Sponsorship becomes more targeted. Merchandising becomes more personalised. International fan engagement becomes less abstract and more operationally visible. Ticketing and membership journeys can become more efficient. Content decisions can be made with better evidence. Even fan sentiment and preference can be understood with more granularity. At that stage, the platform starts to act less like a communications channel and more like a decision engine. It becomes a strategic layer through which the club understands its market, not just speaks to it. That is when the true competitive divergence may begin between clubs that merely publish digital content and clubs that build integrated user systems.
In the long term, the implications could extend beyond club-level operations into football’s wider media economy. Broadcasters are not about to disappear; live rights remain too valuable, and leagues still coordinate the most important distribution structures. But if elite clubs build strong direct channels with large authenticated audiences, their leverage changes. They gain more optionality around archives, shoulder programming, documentaries, youth and women’s content, international community-building and premium experiences. They can enter rights conversations with more evidence about the value of their own fan ecosystems. They can also become less dependent on the mercy of algorithm-driven discovery on external platforms. Over many years, that may not overthrow the traditional rights model, but it can rebalance power inside it. Clubs with stronger direct ecosystems will know more about their audiences, sell more effectively against them and negotiate from a more informed position.
This is ultimately why Arsenal’s media hub deserves to be read as a business story, not simply a digital story. It is about whether football clubs can convert emotional scale into owned economic infrastructure. It is about whether they can turn fandom from something they periodically access into something they continuously operate around. It is about whether the leading clubs of the next decade will be distinguished not only by squad value, coaching quality and commercial partnerships, but by the sophistication of the ecosystems through which they manage audience relationships.
Arsenal’s launch suggests the club believes that future advantage will come from occupying more of the supporter journey directly: more of the attention, more of the identity layer, more of the transaction pathway, more of the data. The other major clubs building CITY+, Barça One, All Red Video, RM Play, Realmadrid TV and Juventus’ own video environment are making related bets from slightly different angles. Together, those moves point to the same conclusion.
Elite football clubs are no longer just trying to win the match and sell the shirt. They are trying to own the screen, the session, the profile and the customer relationship around the match. And in business terms, that may prove every bit as important as what happens on the pitch.
A. Strulak writes on sports business, commercial strategy and the economics of rights. Vinciamo Sports, Sport. Reimagined.
More Insight
Bayern Munich and the NHL just signed a partnership with no disclosed money in it. That is exactly what makes it interesting.
Read article →Talent is rarely the scarce resource in sport. The system capable of finding, developing and retaining it usually is.
Read article →Why a century of accumulated meaning is becoming football's scarcest commercial asset, and how one club is building that asset from scratch.
Read article →