Creating a connected platform that keeps loyal fans connected & immersed in the game
Football is the most followed sport on the planet, yet the relationship between clubs and their fans has never felt more fragmented. Streaming wars, social media noise, and an oversaturated merchandise market mean that die-hard supporters increasingly struggle to feel genuinely close to the clubs they love.
Connected Fanatics was founded on a bold idea: what if a football jersey could do more than represent your club? What if it could connect you to it — digitally, in real time, in a way that felt personal and exclusive?
I joined as the founding product designer with a brief to design an MVP platform from the ground up. The challenge was to translate that vision into a coherent, scalable digital product that bridged physical merchandise and a live digital fan experience — while navigating a shifting stakeholder landscape, an emerging NFT market, and the complexity of building for a global, multi-persona fanbase.
Bridging the gap between football fans and clubs in a fragmented digital world
To design for football fans, I needed to understand them properly — not as a monolith, but in all their diversity. I conducted research across 100 global football fans and five in-depth user interviews, supplemented by conversations with industry professionals across the football business sector.
From this, I developed a fan persona matrix mapping five distinct archetypes: the Digital Fanatic, the Fantasy Fan, the Football Hipster, the Old School Fan, and the Generational Fan. Each brought a different relationship with their club, a different tolerance for technology, and a different definition of what “connection” meant to them.
The Digital Fanatic emerged as the primary target audience — highly engaged, tech-native, and actively seeking deeper, more immersive ways to interact with their club beyond a 90-minute match. This persona became the north star for every product decision that followed.
“Digital disparities in fan-team interactions can leave supporters feeling fragmented — connected to the noise, but disconnected from the club.”
This insight became the strategic foundation for the platform’s proposition: a centralised experience that replaced fragmented touchpoints with a single, cohesive fan journey — one that extended the value of physical merchandise into a living, digital relationship with the club.
Designing the NFC-powered jersey experience and product design system
With the research foundation in place, I led the end-to-end design of the platform — collaborating cross-functionally with brand, software engineering, and marketing stakeholders to bring the core proposition to life.
The central design challenge was creating a seamless bridge between the physical and digital: using NFC technology embedded in the jersey, fans could simply tap their shirt to unlock exclusive digital experiences, save match memories, and access gated club content. The gesture needed to feel intuitive and rewarding — something a fan would actually do in the moment, not a cumbersome technical step.
Stakeholder alignment was a persistent challenge throughout. Priorities shifted frequently across the business, requiring me to act as both a design lead and a strategic anchor — continuously reframing decisions around the core user value to prevent scope creep from diluting the proposition.
In parallel, the rapid rise of NFTs created a competitive pressure I had to design around. I ensured our NFC-driven model was positioned as a more accessible, less speculative alternative — one grounded in genuine fan behaviour rather than financial speculation — which proved to be a critical differentiator when pitching to investors and potential club partners.
I also led the development of the end-to-end design system, ensuring every screen, component, and interaction pattern scaled consistently across the platform as the product grew from concept to pilot-ready MVP.
British Lions Pilot Success
After two years of development, the Connected Fanatics MVP launched as a pilot with the British Lions — a live proof of concept that the physical-digital fan experience I designed could work at club scale.
The platform delivered a cohesive, NFC-powered experience across five core product areas, each designed to deepen the relationship between fans and their clubs in a different way.
Key Features
Clubhouse: A centralised feed aggregating content from all squad channels, giving fans a single destination to follow club activity, build loyalty, and feel part of the inner circle.
Community Feed: A social space for fans to share opinions, react to matches, and bond with fellow supporters — designed to foster genuine community rather than passive consumption.
Match Day: Gated, NFC-triggered content unlocked by tapping the jersey on match days — live updates, behind-the-scenes access, and real-time moments that reward fans for showing up.
My Locker: A personal digital vault where fans store memories, collectibles, and assets tied to their jersey — reducing the throwaway nature of merchandise and giving each shirt a lasting personal significance.
CMS (Admin): A flexible content management system I designed to give club administrators full control over content creation, channel management, and fan engagement — ensuring the platform could be adopted and operated by non-technical club staff without dependency on engineering resources.