Sport[Gen] Lookback: Mastering Revenue Management in Professional Football

Last month, EVENTORI took part in Sport[Gen] Summit, the global gathering of sports business leaders held in Paris at Pavillon Gabriel. Bringing together leaders from across the global sports business world, the summit was the perfect stage for a conversation on where revenue management in sport is heading. Our CRO, Baptiste Jourdan, joined two of our clients: Gaspard Le Roux, Head of Ticketing & CRM at Angers SCO, and Thibault Jaillet Lébé, Head of Revenues Strategy & Business Intelligence at PSG, for a panel on "Mastering Revenue Management in Professional Football."

The discussion brought together three very different perspectives: a football club making the most of a tight budget, one of European football's biggest institutions managing multiple business lines at once, and the platform provider working alongside both. What emerged was a clear picture of where revenue management in sport is heading, and why it has become a strategic priority rather than a back-office function.

Revenue Management Now Covers More Than Ticket Sales

One idea ran through the entire panel: ticketing is only the starting point. As mentioned during the panel, revenue management in sports is no longer just about selling tickets. It is about managing inventory intelligently, maximizing customer value, and building sustainable revenue growth.

For a club like PSG, which operates across men's football, women's football, the stadium tour, and handball, that means juggling several business lines with very different dynamics, while still working toward a coherent, club-wide view of performance.

For a smaller structure like Angers SCO, the logic is the same, just applied at a different scale: getting more value from each of the club's 21 home matches a season by understanding fan behavior rather than simply filling seats. It's a shift EVENTORI sees across its client base more broadly: clubs using the platform's revenue management tools saw ticket sales grow by 140% and generated revenue increase by 80% year-over-year.

In both cases, the conclusion was the same: revenue management has become a genuine strategic asset, not a support task.

Live Data Is Rewriting How Clubs Read Demand

The panel agreed that the real shift in recent years has been the move toward live, usable data. Clubs are no longer satisfied with looking back at what happened last season. The goal now is to optimize inventory, pricing, and growth as the season unfolds, using data that reflects what is actually happening in real-time.

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This also extends to areas clubs have historically had less visibility into, such as the secondary market. Understanding resale activity and pricing gives clubs a fuller picture of demand, and helps close the gap between the value a match generates and the value a club actually captures.

Angers SCO's example illustrated this well: instead of applying a single approach to its whole fan base, the club looked at people who attended several games without holding a season ticket, and built a dedicated offer for that specific group. It's a simple idea, but one that depends entirely on being able to see and act on the right data at the right time.

Anticipating What’s Next Based on Data

One idea kept coming back throughout the discussion: anticipation. For bigger clubs especially, which have many teams and competitions to manage, the ability to anticipate rather than react is what allows a club to stay ahead of both its sporting calendar and its commercial one. Live data plays a direct role here: the earlier a trend is visible, the earlier a club can adjust.

Baptiste Jourdan, CRO at EVENTORI, made a similar point from the platform side: ticketing is often the first point of contact between a club and a fan. Well-organized data from that first interaction makes it possible to better anticipate what that fan actually wants, whether that's a specific offer, a merchandising suggestion, or simply a better experience next time they attend.

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It's also a point of contact many clubs still aren't capturing well: fewer than half of sports organizations collect first-party fan data through web logins, and only 32.4% use single sign-on, meaning a lot of that first-touch data gets lost before a club can even act on it.

Ease of Use Isn't Optional for Small Teams

Not every club has a large team dedicated to revenue management. Gaspard was candid about this: at Angers SCO, ticketing runs with just two people. In that context, ease of use isn't a nice-to-have; it's a condition for the tool to actually get used. Configuring a season once and then being able to adjust it without starting from scratch, along with responsive day-to-day support from EVENTORI's team, made the difference between a system that helps and one that becomes another task on the list.

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It's a pattern EVENTORI sees across clubs of every size: teams save an average of 5 hours a week once the platform is properly set up, with some clubs, including Angers SCO, cutting season setup time by as much as 83%.

This is a point worth remembering in a sector where club sizes and resources vary enormously: the value of a revenue management approach depends on how realistically it fits the team that has to run it.

Where Ticketing and Revenue Management Are Headed Next

Looking ahead, the panel pointed to three areas shaping the next phase of ticketing and revenue management in sport.

• Fan experience. The idea of ticketing as just a transaction is fading, replaced by a broader view that includes engagement, gamification, and loyalty, notably by connecting with specialized platforms such as Arenametrix.
• Security. The March 2026 ransomware attack on Vivaticket showed why this matters. The breach affected roughly 3,500 partner organizations across 50 countries, including the Louvre, and stolen customer data was threatened for release on the dark web. Incidents like this have made data protection a non-negotiable part of any platform's development, not an afterthought.
• Simplicity. Perhaps the most consistent thread across the whole panel: as ticketing and revenue management take on more responsibility, the tools built to support them need to remain something a small team can actually run day to day, without needing to become experts in the system itself.

The Takeaway

Whether you're managing a handful of business lines like PSG or running ticketing with a two-person team like Angers SCO, the direction is the same: revenue management is becoming a core strategic function in football, built on live data, real anticipation, and tools that stay out of the way rather than adding complexity.

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That's precisely the conversation EVENTORI is proud to be part of, both on stage at events like Sport[Gen] and in the day-to-day work with the clubs we support.

Want to discover what EVENTORI can do for your club? Request a demo.

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