Premier League Football Club
Ticketing Systems Migration
In February 2025, a major English Premier League club embarked on an ambitious mission to redesign its ticketing strategy. This initiative aimed to align with its overarching Digital Transformation Strategy and achieve several core objectives, including:
- True integration of all supporter engagement elements within a mobile-optimised digital environment
- Improved understanding of ticketing buyer behaviour at both macro and micro levels via Single Sign-On
- Enhanced management of ticketing inventory and the reduction in potential ticket touting
- A radical repositioning of its memberships offering
- Go-to-market readiness for both general admission and hospitality season ticket and memberships renewals phases in early June 2025
- Full operational readiness by the end of July, ahead of the commencement of 2025/26 Premier League season
To add to the complexity of the brief, the Club had committed to replacing its existing ticketing solutions provider with a new ticketing solutions partner, dissolving a relationship that had been ongoing for nearly two decades.
Recognising the complexity and urgency of the project, the Club selected PTI for its proven track record in delivering large-scale digital transformations within elite sports, ensuring expert oversight and seamless execution of the complete ticketing migration. This enabled the Club to concentrate on business-as-usual activities at a critical phase of the season, whilst ensuring the successful deployment of the overall project.
Project Deliverables
PTI were charged with on-time delivery of core components including:
- Migration of services to a new ticketing solutions partner
- Identification and implementation of key functionalities including ticket forwarding, ticket resale and ticket delivery element in-line with the club’s needs
- Integrations management of key services including ticketing, finance, digital and access control services to ensure minimal matchday impact upon the Club and its supporters
- Delivery of a new hospitality sales portal
- Data migration services to support the club’s move towards full Single Sign-On provision
Our Approach
From the initiation phase of the project, PTI played a pivotal role, delivering regular guidance and progress reports at C-Suite level. Having access to the club’s Executive Leadership Team on an ongoing basis ensured that the project was delivered on time, recognising and eliminating risk at its earliest opportunity.
PTI was embedded on-site throughout, enabling us to deliver full project management at a holistic level, permitting us to:
- Bring together cross-functional key – both internal and external – across all disciplines including Ticketing, Marketing, Safety & Security, Digital, IT and Finance to ensure everyone had a voice
- Provide expert advice of contractual and operational best practice, reducing project risk to the business
- Provide expert advice relating to supporter communications best practice, reducing friction on matchdays
- Support the digital team’s efforts to deliver In-App ticketing by acting as an integration conduit between ticketing, access control and app developers
- Develop and manage workstream, systems training and testing protocols to ensure smooth internal engagement and adoption
- Cleanse and update existing data records, incorporating key purchase indicators
The Results
From Project Initiation to Delivery, PTI played a key role in helping the club to overhaul its complete ticketing proposition, providing a customer experience far deeper than most other clubs have achieved.
Importantly, most ticketing migration processes take in excess of six months to complete – including data cleansing, seat inventory verification and product creation / build. However, PTI enabled the club to be fully prepared to commence with its season ticket renewals phase in half of that time.
More notably, the Club was matchday ready by the end of July and in-time to complete a series of near-capacity digital ticketing events without incident.
Other wins of note include:
- Digital ticketing was introduced via the Club’s app with minimal disruption to matchday operations
- Strong supporter adoption of the digital experience, whereby more than 99.5% of all home supporters access the stadium via In-App ticketing
- Service continuity was maintained during critical sales periods, with only minor downtime, helping to safeguard revenue and supporter engagement
- Single Sign-On (SSO) successfully integrated across both app and website platforms, simplifying supporter access and laying the foundation for future digital enhancements
- The club had surpassed its total membership targets for the 2025/26 Premier League season even before a ball was kicked
- Ticket forwarding and ticket resale frameworks now implemented, providing greater flexibility and utility for supporters, whilst delivering greater commercial returns to the club via its official and regulated secondary marketplace
- A new hospitality sales engine deployed, integrating effectively with the ticketing system to streamline premium offerings and providing a dual sales mechanism serving differing customer segments
- Anti-touting measures and account monitoring tools were introduced, strengthening compliance and control
- Geolocation controls were implemented to manage ticket sales by region, helping to mitigate potential matchday risks
