Why Rights Holders’ Addressable Markets Are Bigger Than They Think
Let’s say this upfront, the market IS way bigger than you think, but you need to know what to build in order to reach it.
I really enjoy meeting and speaking with people who run sports properties. Lately I am hearing a consistent and quite pessimistic story…
“The marketplace is tribal. Fans are inherited rather than won, decided by postcode, by family, by whoever took you to your first game. There is a fixed number of people who will ever care, and the job is to hold on to them.”
I understand why someone would think this, and it might just be one of the most expensive beliefs in the industry.
If it were true, every club would be running a closed system. A fixed population growing old and dying off at one end, topped up by children at the other. Success would be a demographic accident. Nobody would ever really grow, and nobody would ever really fail.
That is not what happens. Although I’ll concede I’ve never yet worked for a long period inside a rights holder so I may be misinformed.
Seat capacity multiplied by fixtures and cap matchday ticketing does not define revenue limits. Yes it‘s legitimate arithmetic, a club with forty thousand seats and twenty home games has a hard ceiling on tickets sold, and no amount of brand work will move it.
The observation isn’t wrong but the inference is.
Rights holders have mistaken the ceiling on one line item for the ceiling on the business.
Media, membership, content, retail, travel, hospitality, participation, gaming and licensing are not capacity-bound. None of them care how many seats there are.
Five cohorts, not one audience
The more useful question is not how many fans exist, more how many can be created. It is who is already willing to spend time or money in the orbit of the club, and what each of them actually came for.
In most properties, I see five.
Evangelists: Identity-level. They consume everything, forgive anything, and would struggle to explain the club as a choice, because it never was one. Loyalty is the language.
The sport-literate: They follow the sport more than the club. Educated, discerning, and entirely capable of comparing what you offer with what is on down the road. They will invest when quality and proximity justify it, but they are not blind to price.
Event seekers: They want live competition. The noise, the stakes, the professional gladiators. They come rarely, often around tournaments rather than league seasons, and they spend more when they do, because the occasion has to be worth the trip.
The brand adjacent.: They engage with what the club represents. Winning, glamour, the facilities, the hospitality. Engagement here rises and falls with cultural weather, and when the stock is high you can expect many small transactions from people borrowing the credibility.
Tribe seekers: They may know nothing about the sport at all. They are looking for something to belong to, and they have arrived to find out whether this is it.
Nobody in the fourth or fifth group is a lost cause. They are simply a different customer who has been sold the same thing as everybody else.
Two scales, running in opposite directions
In trying to unpack this I think I’ve unearthed a new model where fandom runs one way and expectation runs the other.
The evangelist accepts a cold pie, an obstructed view and twenty minutes in a queue, because loyalty absorbs friction.
The event seeker who paid two hundred pounds for one afternoon a year absorbs nothing.
They are not comparing you to last season. They are comparing you to a concert, a restaurant and a day out with the family.
So the standard of experience required is roughly inverse to the depth of affinity.
It’s so difficult to walk this tight rope as a rights holder. Going too far one way may mean they lavish attention on the people who would forgive them anything, and treat the people who forgive nothing as an afterthought.
You are not segmenting people. You are segmenting occasions. And this lets you changes the size of the prize.
These cohorts are not five groups of people. They are five modes, and the same person moves between them. Someone can be an evangelist for their own club, an event seeker for a European final, and brand adjacent when they book a box for a client in a city they hold no allegiance to.
Which means the addressable market is not the number of people who care. It is the number of people, multiplied by the number of modes, multiplied by what each mode is worth.
The fixed-tribe belief is not only wrong about how many people there are. It is wrong about how many doors each person can walk through.
What actually goes wrong
Almost everyone gets sold the same thing.
Whatever a person arrived for, they are offered a ticket and a seat. The tribe seeker who came looking for somewhere to belong is handed a transaction. The event seeker who wanted theatre is handed a transaction. The brand adjacent guest who wanted status is handed a slightly more expensive transaction.
And the one group that does get something richer often gets it wrongly. The sport-literate visitor who simply wanted quality and value is drowned in seventeen years of narrative they were never part of.
Serving too high is as costly as serving too low. It is just harder to count.
The work that needs doing
Build inventory that matches expectation at every level, with a route in and a price point that fits.
Then govern all of it with one narrative.
That second part is not to be treated as decorative brand fluff. The moment a club offers a generous experience to casual visitors and a diminished one to the faithful, the faithful read it exactly as it looks. Every tier has to be recognisably the same club, expressing the same belief, or a strategy meant to grow the business begins costing it the only audience it could always rely on.
“Why does not already happen?” I hear you ask, and it some organisations it might well do. I do not think many rights holders would disagree with much of this.
The reason it rarely happens is not due to lack of aspiration, but maybe capability.
Tiered inventory is a product and data discipline, and most clubs have a ticketing system, a retail partner and an agency. They frequently cannot tell which cohort a person belongs to, so they cannot serve them differently even when they would like to.
Which is where clarity does its first and most useful work. Not in a campaign, and not in a rebrand. In knowing precisely who you are talking to, what they came for, and what you are prepared to offer them, before deciding what to sell.
Four questions to run in your next commercial meeting
Not a framework. Just the four things that expose whether you’re running one product or five.
What did each of our five cohorts actually come for? Not what we assume they came for. Come for, in their words.
Which of them can we currently identify by name? If the answer is only renewals, everything downstream is guesswork dressed as strategy.
What is the first thing we sell someone who knows nothing about the sport? If it’s the same thing we sell a thirty-year season ticket holder, we have one product..
Would our most loyal supporter be offended by the experience we give our most casual visitor? If yes, the narrative isn’t governing anything.
Most leadership teams can answer the first. Very few get past the second.
Revenue in sport is not capped by seating capacity. It is capped by how many different kinds of people a club is equipped to serve well.
Brand strategy is not a marketing exercise.
It is how leadership protects competitive advantage as a business grows.
