In the music industry there is a name for selling to fans without intermediaries: direct-to-fan, or D2F. The term took hold among independent artists once the internet let them sell without a label, and it describes a sequence: identify the fans, reach them directly, build a relationship and monetize it. In sport, the same idea usually goes by direct-to-consumer, or D2C.
Why clubs want a direct relationship with fans
Football clubs reached the same idea for a structural reason. A stadium is a limited stock: a fixed number of seats and a fixed number of home matches per season. Once it is full, revenue can grow in two directions:
- From the people at each match, by adding revenue lines or by raising the price of existing ones, improving or not the value delivered to justify it. Both raise what each attendee generates, which is the logic of Revenue Per Attendee.
- From the people outside, who are the vast majority of a club’s audience.
Add the need to depend less on broadcast rights and sponsorship, and a direct relationship with fans becomes both an opportunity and a necessity.
None of this is new to the people who run the major clubs. The diagnosis appears in strategic plans and annual reports, and the sector describes it in very similar terms. Identifying a problem or an opportunity, however, does not mean having the solution. Clubs have had to try things, and several of those attempts are described below. It also has to be accepted that some problems may not have a complete solution under current conditions.
From diagnosis to solution: As is, To be and execution
To separate the diagnosis from the solution, a framework from transformation projects helps.
Any transformation project goes through three phases. The As is describes the current situation with data: what the organization has, what it lacks and why. The To be defines the target situation and what reaching it requires. Execution is the work that takes the organization from one to the other.
All three are necessary, and in that order. Without an As is, the target rests on assumptions. Without a To be, the diagnosis has no direction. Without execution, the first two stay on paper, which is the usual criticism of traditional consulting.
Major football clubs are a clear example of a well-executed As is and a To be they have struggled to reach. They have measured their audience, identified the problem and described it publicly. The problem is the same across clubs: hundreds of millions of followers, many of them potential consumers, who are not in the CRM and who therefore cannot be monetized directly.
This article looks at why a direct relationship with fans, the To be, has proved so hard to reach: what the platforms control, what the law allows, what broadcast rights leave out, and why niche products do not reach the volume a club needs.
Can a football club market directly to its social media followers?
Not directly. A follower on Instagram, TikTok or YouTube sits in the platform’s database: the club has no copy of it and no permission to contact those people. It can publish to that audience, but it cannot send offers to each person. In the European Union, direct marketing by email requires prior consent or an earlier sale.
The As is: a diagnosis clubs have already made
The largest clubs operate, almost without exception, as companies, with audited accounts and boards accountable to shareholders or members. Of the 20 clubs in the Deloitte Football Money League 2026, 18 are companies and four are listed on a stock exchange: Manchester United (New York), Juventus (Milan), Borussia Dortmund (Frankfurt) and Benfica (Lisbon). The two exceptions are the two highest earners, Real Madrid and FC Barcelona, which are owned by their members.
The ownership model does not change the diagnosis. Clubs of both kinds have described the same problem in public:
- Real Madrid, 2017. Describing the platform built with Microsoft, the club set the goal “to build a profile of all our followers, get to know them and give them what they want” (Microsoft, translated from Spanish).
- FC Barcelona, 2020. The club announced “owned platforms to reach fans directly, without intermediaries” and a Fan Relationship Management platform “to collect data from its own platforms to get to know fans better” (FC Barcelona).
- Manchester United, 2025. Its annual report to the US Securities and Exchange Commission lists as a risk that its brand depends on a digital media strategy delivered “through the digital platforms we use and content we create”.
The size of the gap is also known. In May 2026, Real Madrid had 487.6 million followers across Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X and YouTube, and FC Barcelona 441.8 million, according to the CIES Football Observatory. Few clubs publish how many of those people they reach through their own channels. FC Barcelona is one of them: the club says its official app had more than 800,000 weekly unique users in July 2026, a figure equal to about 0.18% of its followers. The comparison is only illustrative, because one person can follow a club on several platforms and the app is only one way of identifying fans.
A survey of 50 sports organizations by Dizplai, a company that sells fan data technology, found they could identify 24% of their fans on average, mostly through ticketing (67%) and membership programs (48%).
The reasons to close the gap are financial. Deloitte cites signs of stagnation in traditional centralized revenue, the risk of less competition between broadcasters for media rights, and the opportunity to sell directly to the fan base.
The To be: what solving the problem requires
Describing the problem was the part clubs did well. The To be is where they have struggled, so it is worth defining precisely what reaching it would mean. For a club, it means meeting four conditions at the same time:
Each condition can be met on its own. We found no public evidence of any club meeting all four together at scale. The main reason lies on the fan’s side of the exchange. The club wants a direct relationship and data. The fan wants something of value in return, and most fans already get the club’s content free of charge on platforms they use every day. Unless the club offers something those platforms do not, a fan has no reason to register, give consent or pay.
That exchange is the starting point of the Digital Value Proposition: Delivery Cycle©: value delivered to a specific user, through the right access points, with an experience that removes friction. The other conditions add their own difficulty. A single identity means connecting systems built at different times with different partners. Journeys have to be designed and measured stage by stage, as a dynamic customer journey. And the volume requirement rules out products that only work for a niche, which is where much of the digital investment of recent years went.
Why is the To be so hard to reach?
Two obstacles are structural. They come from how platforms, the law and broadcast rights work, and a club cannot remove them by launching a better product.
A follower is not a contact
An official account on Instagram, TikTok or YouTube gives a club an audience it can publish to. Three conditions stop that audience from becoming customers the club can contact.
The club does not control the data. Instagram’s Terms of Use state that users “can’t attempt to create accounts or access or collect information in unauthorized ways”, including automated collection without express permission. There is no official way to export a list of followers, and even reaching them depends on the algorithm: the average organic reach of a brand post on Instagram was 3.20% of followers in the year to August 2026, according to Socialinsider’s analysis of 872,075 posts.
The law requires consent or a sale. In the European Union, Article 13 of the ePrivacy Directive allows direct marketing by email only to people “who have given their prior consent”. The exception covers contact details obtained “in the context of the sale of a product or a service”, which the seller may use to market its own similar products. Spain applies the same rule in Article 21 of the LSSI. Following a club on a social platform creates neither of those conditions, so the club cannot send its followers marketing emails.
Revenue on the platform is shared. When a club publishes video on YouTube, YouTube pays creators 55% of net ad revenue on long-form videos, and Shorts revenue is shared through a separate pooled model. Deloitte adds that YouTube-based offers give “limited data ownership opportunities to unlock deeper fan insights”. The club gains reach, gives up part of the revenue and has limited ownership of the data.
Manchester United’s annual report shows where a listed club draws the line between the two assets. It reports its followers by platform as evidence of its brand: 64.3 million on Instagram, 44.2 million on X, 29.5 million on TikTok and 10.1 million YouTube subscribers as of June 30, 2025. When it lists the rights it sells to sponsors, it includes “the right to administer promotions targeted at customers whose details are stored on our CRM database”. A sponsor pays to reach the CRM. The followers count as brand reach.
Music has the same structure. Spotify sends presale and merchandise emails to an artist’s biggest fans “based on our data”, so the platform decides who receives them. I looked at how that shapes digital products for live events in From Bootleg to Digital Add-Ons.
The core product cannot be sold live
The audiovisual asset with the highest commercial value is usually the match, and in the major leagues the club does not sell it. In Spain, Royal Decree-Law 5/2015 gives clubs ownership of their audiovisual rights but makes taking part in the competition conditional on ceding their joint sale to the organizer. Clubs keep two exceptions: a deferred broadcast of their match starting from the end of the matchday (our translation), through a channel of their own, and a live broadcast inside their own stadium. The Premier League and UEFA also sell media rights centrally for their competitions.
This leaves a club’s own platforms with pre-season friendlies, youth and reserve teams, archive footage and behind-the-scenes content. The match can be shown later, once the result is known, but a replay has lost the uncertainty that draws a live audience, and much of that audience with it. The product that generates the most emotion, and the most data, reaches fans through a broadcaster. Club platforms reflect this: FC Barcelona’s Barça Play, launched in July 2026, offers members pre-season games, reserve team fixtures and youth academy matches.
Formula 1 is often cited as the model for direct-to-consumer sport, and the comparison does not carry over to football. The FIA regulates the championship, and a single company holds the commercial rights, granted in 2001 for 100 years, from January 1, 2011 to December 31, 2110. That company decides where to sell exclusives and where to stream through F1 TV, whose revenue has grown tenfold in six years into a direct business of more than $200 million, according to Deloitte.
Even F1 gives up its own live stream where it sells exclusive rights: Sky holds exclusive live coverage in the UK and Ireland until 2034. The difference is that F1 makes that decision. A football club does not, because the league makes it for all its clubs.
The hype years: tokens, NFTs and the metaverse
Between 2021 and 2023, a group of technologies appeared to offer what the To be required. Fan tokens promised a direct relationship with fans who held a club asset. NFTs promised digital products with verified ownership. The metaverse promised a digital space the club could run itself. On paper, all three delivered the first two conditions: a direct channel and data on each participant.
The investment followed. Facebook, Inc. changed its corporate name to Meta Platforms in October 2021. Socios.com signed fan token agreements with more than 70 sports organizations, including Arsenal, Manchester City, Paris Saint-Germain, Inter, AC Milan and FC Barcelona. NFT trading volume reached $57.2 billion in 2022.
The other two conditions were never met. To buy a token, fans first had to buy a cryptocurrency, a step the UK Advertising Standards Authority highlighted in 2021 when it ruled that two Arsenal ads for its token were irresponsible. The products appealed mainly to collectors and to people expecting prices to rise, a small share of a club’s audience.
The fall in prices sharply reduced the economic appeal of these assets for those who had bought them expecting a rise. On September 15, 2026, the tokens of Paris Saint-Germain, Manchester City and Juventus traded about 99% below their all-time highs, and NFT trading volume had dropped to $13.7 billion by 2024.
FC Barcelona’s Barça Vision shows the same pattern when these products are grouped under one brand. Presented in June 2023, it brought together the club’s “Web3, NFT and metaverse initiatives” with the goal to “bring together FC Barcelona fans from around the world into a digital community”. Its two best-known NFTs sold at auction for $693,000 and $300,231.
The largest sums in the project came from selling stakes in the company: a 29.5% stake in the business was sold for €120 million in August 2023, and a planned stock market listing through a SPAC, at a pro forma value of about $1 billion, was terminated in June 2024. In September 2024 the club recorded a pre-tax impairment of €141 million because “some of the investors” had not paid.
The case matters for what it shows about the model. Grouping niche products adds several small audiences together, and the total is still far from the tens of millions a club needs. The asset these projects pursued, a direct relationship with fans at scale, required something a mass audience would use regularly. Web3: Blocked Momentum? looks at the cost side, from wallets to recovery phrases and fees, and When Hype Runs Us Over looks at what happens when a technology arrives before its value proposition has been validated. High friction and limited value for the average fan led to low adoption.
From 2023, venture capital moved elsewhere. Crypto venture investment fell from almost $13 billion in the first quarter of 2022 to $2.4 billion a year later, according to Galaxy Research. By the second quarter of 2026, more than 70% of global startup funding went to AI companies, up from just under 50% a year earlier, according to Crunchbase.
Meta’s Reality Labs, the division that includes its metaverse and its virtual and augmented reality business, reported a $19.2 billion operating loss in 2025, while the company’s investment plans for 2026 center on AI infrastructure for Meta Superintelligence Labs.
Funding and market attention moved to other areas. The problem these products were meant to solve did not change: the fans are still on the platforms, and the To be still requires the same four conditions it did in 2021.
Who has reached the To be
The organizations that hold a direct relationship with fans at scale have one thing in common: they deliver value first, and the data comes as a result of use.
The platforms are the main case. Instagram, TikTok and YouTube hold the relationship with club fans because they give them something every day at no charge. Spotify goes a step further and uses its listening data to decide who receives presale access to concerts.
In music, Weverse, HYBE’s fan platform, shows that an industry player can build that relationship too. It had 12 million monthly active users in 2025, who spent 263 minutes per month on the platform, bought 25.2 million products in its shop, and 20% of its superfans started as casual users. Fans register because artists post and interact there, and every purchase is recorded on the same account. Measured against this article’s framework, the four conditions of the To be are met in one place.
From To be to execution
Execution is the phase that turns the first two into results, and it is where the risk of repeating the cycle is highest. Investment has moved to artificial intelligence, and AI can personalize content, offers and journeys for each fan. To do that, it needs data on each fan: who they are, what they watch and what they buy. That is the second condition of the To be, the one clubs lack for most of their audience. Without it, AI ends up working with the platforms’ data, inside the platforms.
This is why the order of the three phases matters. A new technology does not replace the As Is or the To be. It can speed up execution once the relationship and the data exist, which requires less hype and more business-driven decisions. Adopted earlier, it repeats what happened with tokens, NFTs and the metaverse: investment that follows the technology cycle while the fans stay where they were.
Execution also needs a measure. For this problem, one indicator summarizes progress: the share of the audience a club can identify and contact legally. Followers measure reach. That share measures the part of the audience with which a club has what it needs to build a direct relationship and monetize it, and we could not find it published by any of the clubs cited. As long as it stays below 1%, most of those hundreds of millions of followers will remain in the platforms’ databases.
Frequently asked questions
What do As is and To be mean in a transformation project?
They are the first two phases. The As is describes the current situation with data, and the To be defines the target situation and what reaching it requires. Execution, the third phase, takes the organization from one to the other. All three are necessary, and in that order.
Why can’t football clubs monetize their social media followers directly?
Followers sit in the platforms’ databases. Clubs cannot export them, the algorithm decides who sees each post (brand posts on Instagram reached 3.2% of followers on average), and the law limits direct marketing to people who have given consent or bought something. To sell directly, a club needs the fan’s identity and consent on its own channels.
Can a club send marketing emails to its Instagram followers?
No. Instagram does not give clubs their followers’ contact details, and in the European Union Article 13 of the ePrivacy Directive only allows direct marketing emails with prior consent, or to customers who bought a product or service from the sender.
Why can’t football clubs stream their own matches live?
In the major leagues, media rights are sold centrally. In Spain, Royal Decree-Law 5/2015 requires clubs to cede the joint sale of their rights, and they keep only a deferred broadcast after the matchday ends and a live broadcast inside their own stadium. Club platforms are left with pre-season, youth, archive and behind-the-scenes content.
Why didn’t fan tokens, NFTs and the metaverse solve the problem?
They offered a direct channel and data, but they appealed mainly to collectors and speculators, a small share of a club’s audience. Prices fell sharply: several club tokens trade about 99% below their all-time highs. From 2023, venture investment and market attention moved to AI.
Can AI help clubs monetize fans they don’t know?
AI can personalize with anonymous or aggregated data, but a lasting, direct relationship needs the club’s own data to identify each fan: who they are, what they watch and what they buy. Clubs lack that data for most of their audience, so the direct relationship and consent have to come first.
Note on sources. Social media follower counts are from the CIES Football Observatory (May 2026) and cover Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X and YouTube; one person can follow a club on several platforms. FC Barcelona’s app users, the launch of Barça Play and Barça Vision, its investors, the SPAC termination and the impairment are taken from the club’s official announcements and the related press release. Manchester United’s follower figures, CRM sponsorship rights and risk factors come from its Form 20-F for the year ended June 30, 2025. Real Madrid’s 2017 statement was published by Microsoft and is translated from Spanish. Club ownership and listings are based on the Deloitte Football Money League 2026 and the clubs’ and shareholders’ published information. The 24% figure for identified fans comes from a survey by Dizplai, a fan data technology vendor, and should be read as such. Organic reach is from Socialinsider’s analysis of brand posts. Legal references are to Directive 2002/58/EC, Spain’s Law 34/2002 (LSSI) and Royal Decree-Law 5/2015; the quote from the Royal Decree-Law is our translation. YouTube revenue shares are from YouTube Help, and the Formula 1 figures from Autosport, Deloitte and Sky Sports. NFT trading volumes are from DappRadar, as reported by The Block. Fan token prices are from CoinGecko as of September 15, 2026 and change daily. Crypto venture investment is from Galaxy Research, as reported by Cointelegraph, AI’s share of startup funding from Crunchbase, and Reality Labs results from Meta’s 2025 annual results. Weverse figures are from HYBE, as reported by Music Business Worldwide. Header photo by Tobias on Unsplash.
© 2026 Oriol Guitart. This article and its analysis were written by Oriol Guitart. All rights reserved for the full term and scope established under Intellectual Property Law. Any total or partial reproduction, distribution, public communication and/or transformation is strictly prohibited without the author’s prior express written consent, and in any event the author must be acknowledged as such in any subsequent use.
