Manchester City: Putting staff in fans' shoes to map the entire match day journey

The Challenge

City Football Group, the football organisation behind Manchester City, is in the middle of a strategic shift. The ambition is to become a truly fan-centric football club, which means everything the organisation does is grounded in deep understanding of who fans actually are and what they actually need. Insight into fan behaviour isn't a nice-to-have for the marketing team. It's the basis for every customer-facing decision the business makes.

Our ambition is to turn those insights into the fuel that will create more relevant and more effortless experiences for our audiences.

For Andrew Gilligan and the Research and Insights team at City Football Group, that meant a problem with two layers. First, they needed rich, accurate insight into what the match day experience actually felt like for fans, beyond the abstractions of survey data. Second, they needed a way to make that insight contagious internally, so that fan empathy wasn't quarantined inside the research team but spread across every function that touches the fan experience.

Survey scores about queue length tell you something. They don't tell you what twelve minutes in a halftime queue actually feels like, what's in the eye line of the fan trapped in it, or how it shifts the emotional shape of the rest of their day.

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The Approach

The research team did something most football clubs don't: they sent their own colleagues through the entire match day experience as fans, and recorded every step.

Twelve colleagues, one match day, no shortcuts. Staff weren't allowed to use internal contacts to sort out tickets, weren't allowed to skip queues, weren't allowed to behave like employees. They had to research how to choose the right ticket, buy it, plan the day, get to the stadium, navigate halftime, and travel home, exactly as a paying fan would.

End-to-end capture via Indeemo. Screen recordings of the ticket-buying journey on the Manchester City app, photos and videos of the stadium experience, voice-over commentary catching frustrations in the moment as they happened.

Hypothesis-led journey structure. The team had pre-existing hypotheses about which moments matter most across a match day. The Indeemo data was used to validate, refute or refine those hypotheses against real captured experience.

Miro for collaborative analysis. Indeemo content was exported into a Miro board so the wider stakeholder group could work through the journey together. Each moment was tagged with emotional sentiment, colour-coded, and enriched with word clouds from the team's in-the-moment comments.

A multi-season Indeemo deployment. The journey mapping work sits inside a wider research practice at CFG that has used Indeemo across multiple football seasons, originally to understand overseas fan experience, latterly to map customer journeys at home.

At no point were they able to behave like an employee and take shortcuts through the system. They had to put themselves in the shoes of the fan.

The principle was deliberate. Putting employees in fans' shoes wasn't just a research method, it was the start of building organisation-wide empathy with the people the business exists to serve.

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The Results

The clearest result was the one that's hardest to put on a slide: the team came back from the experiment understanding their own fans differently.

Empathy as a research output, not a side-effect. Twelve colleagues lived the fan experience in real time. Halftime queues, stadium navigation, ticket-buying friction, toilet facilities. They didn't read about these in a survey, they felt them. That changed how the wider organisation talked about fan needs.

Specific, image-rich pain points. A 12-minute halftime queue, captured in Andrew's own footage, became a particular low point of his day. Toilet facilities, long a complaint in survey verbatims, came to life through actual photographs in a way written feedback never quite could. Hard data points and rich imagery, side by side.

Validated and refined hypotheses about the match day journey. The pre-existing assumptions about which moments mattered most got tested against real captured experience. Some held up. Others needed sharpening.

A research output the wider organisation could engage with. Exporting Indeemo content into Miro turned the dataset into something stakeholders across CFG could collaborate on directly, not just a report that arrived on their desk.

A foundation for the next phase. Indeemo will now be put into the hands of actual fans, not just colleagues, and into the hands of individual teams and departments, moving the practice from the central research team out across the business so individual functions can run their own faster feedback loops on the touchpoints they own.

When you're able to connect a hard data point with a relevant image or video, you suddenly create a much more powerful tool for leveraging the right actions or response from your internal stakeholders.