Five football marketing campaigns that redefined fan engagement
The past few years have been transformational for the world of sport, with football marketing campaigns having to evolve rapidly in response to unexpected difficulties.
The COVID-19 pandemic especially challenged football clubs to find new ways to engage fans during lockdowns across Europe, accelerating innovation in football marketing and digital engagement.
As one of the most affected industries, clubs were forced to find new ways to maintain fan connection while upholding their existing branding commitments.
From melting trophies and redesigned kits to video game competitions, we’ll be highlighting some of the best football advertising campaigns since 2020, which have reshaped fan-first storytelling.
1. Ajax Amsterdam: A Piece of Ajax, a standout football marketing campaign
While COVID unfolded, the Netherlands’ Eredivisie 2019-20 season was cancelled before all the fixtures had been played.
Dutch football made its return for the 2020-21 season, but fans were still barred from entering football stadiums.
So when AFC Ajax claimed their 35th championship, they did it without fans for 30 of their 34 matches.
In the absence of stadium attendance and in-person support, Ajax shifted focus from physical presence to participation, creating a moment designed to draw out intentional fan action rather than passive celebration.
Not content with steamrolling the competition (they won the title by a massive 12 points), Ajax launched the Piece of Ajax campaign and melted down their championship trophy into over 42,390 individual stars – one for each of the club’s season ticket holders – as a thank you for their support while matches were played behind closed doors.
Edwin van der Sar, CEO at Ajax, said: “This season, we have largely had to play without our fans. Without them sitting in the stands, at least. Despite this, we have felt their support every week. On the way to the stadium, on social media, and in our personal contacts.
"Previously, when we said 'this title is for you,' we were expressing how we were doing it for the fans. However, sharing the trophy is the ultimate proof that we really are. After a turbulent year, we are ensuring our fans feel part of our championship."
By promoting this message across social platforms, during travel, and through direct contact with fans, AFC Ajex highlighted how fan engagement increasingly manifests across multiple environments, even when traditional attendance disappears.
Ajax’s commitment to sharing their successes with fans was admirable, and it won them many plaudits for their creative and heartfelt initiative.
Widely regarded as one of the best football marketing campaigns of the pandemic era, Piece of Ajax demonstrated how participation-led football marketing can deepen emotional loyalty.
But beyond the emotional impact, the campaign illustrates a broader shift in fan expectations, from recognition to participation.
Supporters now seek meaningful involvement in a club’s success, not just acknowledgement of it.
2. Leyton Orient: UltimateQuaranTeam! – one of the best football marketing campaigns of the pandemic era
When football fixtures in England were postponed indefinitely at the start of the pandemic, Leyton Orient Football Club's off-the-cuff campaign turned into a 126-team knockout FIFA tournament that would include teams from sixteen countries - including England, the USA, and the Netherlands.
With live football not an option, the initiative shifted fan engagement from scheduled consumption to active participation, inviting supporters to co-create the experience rather than simply follow it.
At a time when the world faced uncertainty, Leyton Orient’s campaign created a shared participation loop that kept fans interacting with clubs, players, and each other at a time when traditional touchpoints had disappeared and ultimately gave them something to smile about.
#UltimateQuaranTeam started as a “let’s do something while there’s no football being played” game, but it soon picked up momentum with teams like Manchester City, Roma, Orlando Pirates, Sydney FC, Istanbul Basaksehir and Groningen nominating one individual to represent them on the FIFA 20 video game, including professional footballer Andros Townsend (Crystal Palace).
The result? £66,122 was raised for the English Football League’s mental health charity Mind, and the official Covid Response Team, and a lot of FIFA games were played during lockdown!
Beyond fundraising, the tournament revealed how cause-driven participation can deepen engagement, which combines play, purpose, and community into a single experience.
Danny Macklin, Chief Executive at Leyton Orient, said: “This is very much the brainchild of our innovative Media Team. This provides a fantastic opportunity to play a small part in providing some engaging content to football fans at this very difficult time.
“Furthermore, and perhaps even more importantly, it’s a chance to raise much-needed funds for EFL clubs and two phenomenal causes."
The campaign has since been cited as a benchmark for digital-first football campaigns, blending community, entertainment, and purpose-driven football marketing.
For clubs, initiatives like this show that when interaction is designed with intent, even improvised formats can become powerful sources of behavioural insight.
3. Arsenal FC: No More Red – one of the most powerful football marketing campaigns in recent years
London is one of the world’s most powerful footballing cities.
Clubs like Chelsea, Fulham, and West Ham United call it home, but the red and white of Arsenal F.C is most closely associated with London’s football history.
Outside the world of football, London faces ongoing problems with youth crime and gang culture. In 2021, London saw the highest ever level of teenage murders since records began, most of which involved knife attacks.
Arsenal’s response was strong, and the club’s No More Red campaign (in partnership with Adidas) manifested itself on the pitch.
Arsenal removed any hint of red from their traditional strip, playing in an all-white kit in an FA Cup match against Nottingham Forest to raise awareness of the amount of young blood being spilt on the streets of London.
The campaign included interviews with current and former players, actor Idris Elba, and grassroots initiatives that tackled the root causes of youth violence.
Together, these elements extended engagement beyond the match itself, encouraging deeper interaction with the campaign’s message across multiple channels.
Arsenal went one step further; the all-white shirts were not made commercially available and were instead reserved for people making significant contributions to local communities.
Source: arsenal.com
Idris Elba, No More Red mentor, said: “From the time young people leave school, until the time they’re at home with family, there is often a void, a dangerous spike of nothing to do, where nothing can easily turn into something dangerous."
“If there continue to be no options for this after-school period, we will always see gangs form. Let’s create options for these young people.”
Voices like these added emotional weight to the football advertising campaign, strengthening participation and reinforcing how storytelling influences fan perception and response.
Arsenal’s campaign raised a lot of awareness for youth violence in London, and the club’s decision to emphasise the problem through a specially-made kit was particularly effective, and reflects how fans increasingly connect through shared values, not just results.
4. Manchester United: Donate Your Words – a landmark football advertising campaign
While Arsenal was tackling youth violence in London, its rivals, Manchester United, were focusing on the older generation.
The ‘Donate Your Words’ campaign, launched with chocolatiers Cadbury’s, found that 225,000 older people go more than a week without speaking to anyone. It raised awareness for older supporters who don’t have anyone to share their words with.
The campaign reframed fan participation as an act of empathy, which encouraged purposeful and real-world interaction.
Featuring club captain Harry Maguire and reaching 92.8% of the UK’s population, Manchester United pushed awareness for the older generations, including matchday advertising, digital media, and matchday access, to create a unique ‘Guest of Honour’ experience for 11 local elderly Manchester United fans.
“Any small gesture and interaction can play a part in helping to tackle loneliness amongst our older generation.”
Sean Jefferson, Director of Partnerships at Manchester United, said: “We are pleased to start our partnership with Cadbury by supporting their ‘Donate your words’ campaign.
“The club is encouraging all fans to give a few moments of their time to speak to older people around them who might welcome a thoughtful conversation.”
Like Arsenal, Manchester United brought their campaign to the pitch. A strong move that gave the Donate Your Words initiative an added sense of authenticity, creating meaningful interaction that extends beyond awareness into action.
5. LaLiga: The Red Carpet(s) – one of the best football marketing campaigns in european football
It isn’t just football clubs that are redefining fan engagement – entire leagues are too.
In 2021, LaLiga – Spain’s top footballing division – rolled out seven red carpets worldwide (literally) to activate global audiences around its showcase fixture, El Clásico.
By bringing El Clásico into public spaces, LaLiga transformed a broadcast fixture into a physical, shareable experience, creating visible signals of global fan engagement beyond traditional viewership metrics.
Source: sportingnews.com
Real Madrid vs Barcelona is one of the world’s most intense footballing rivalries, where the winners of El Clásico are often the team that goes on to win the league.
And it isn’t just a Spanish audience that is invested in the outcome, which is why LaLiga launched a campaign that brought El Clásico to nations including the US, Australia, and most famously, Tajikistan.
LaLiga won the “Best Marketing/Advertisement campaign” at the Marspo Awards in 2021 for rolling out the red carpet in Tajikistan's capital city, Dushanbe, to demonstrate the city’s love of football.
Source: laliga.com
Jose Carlos Loaiza, LaLiga Delegate for Russia & Baltic countries, said: "We are very happy with this recognition. From London to Dakar, the installation of the LaLiga ‘Red Carpets’ across the globe brought to life the excitement, the entertainment, the glamour, and the global reach of this fixture and LaLiga. “We are pleased to see we played a part in inspiring people across Central Asia, through the power of sport and entertainment.
"Too often, major sporting fixtures are seen through the prism of a “local” audience. LaLiga put that myth to bed with this campaign and was well-rewarded for demonstrating that even smaller nations enjoy football as much as local fans. And the campaign illustrates how major fixtures can generate value by activating fans where they are, revealing that global engagement is shaped as much by cultural participation as by broadcast reach.
A few final thoughts
Sports institutions can’t survive without fans, but meaningful engagement is no longer defined by presence or sentiment alone. The campaigns explored here show how clubs and leagues are creating moments that invite participation, interaction, and emotional investment, strengthening the relationship between fan and institution while generating measurable signals of engagement.
Photo by Ekansh Saxena on Unsplash
Looking more closely, each campaign may have originated in sport, but its impact extended far beyond the pitch. Whether addressing social issues or creating unity during periods of disruption, these initiatives succeeded by encouraging fans to actively take part. In doing so, they demonstrate how purpose-driven campaigns can deliver both cultural value and clearer insight into what truly resonates with audiences.
See how other brands are bringing this to life with Amondo.
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Sports brands & rights holders: 5 ways fan interaction powers the non-matchday experience
This article outlines five principles sports brands can use to activate fans between fixtures and capture real behavioural signals beyond matchday.
One of the biggest challenges for sports brands is the time between matchdays. Attention lapses, momentum declines, and performance becomes harder to uphold.
But non-matchdays aren’t a gap, they’re a unique opportunity.
When activated well, this period allows rights holders to drive meaningful fan actions such as signing up for memberships, purchasing merchandise, downloading apps, or planning future match attendance.
These moments reveal how fans actually behave, not just what they view or like.
By designing interactions around non-matchday moments — from membership sign-ups to buying merch — sports brands can uncover real signals of intent and preference, rather than relying on surface-level metrics.
So how do sports brands activate audiences between matchdays and turn behaviour into desirable intelligence?
We’ve identified five principles sports marketers should apply when designing content campaigns outside of matchdays to gain more insight into their fan base and drive commercial impact.
Tip 1: Design video to capture fan behaviour, not just fill inventory
Between matchdays, video is one of the most effective ways to keep fans engaged.
According to HubSpot’s 2024 video marketing data, short-form video is the most used format and delivers the highest ROI among marketers, with 83% reporting its effectiveness.
Short, bite-sized videos – such as fan-generated content, match clips, analysis, or behind-the-scenes footage – help extend the match narrative, fit naturally into modern attention spans and maintain momentum when there’s no live action.
Unlike static content, video demands time and attention. How long fans watch, what they skip, or whether they explore further are strong signals of interest that are far more meaningful than a like or impression.
The challenge is that this behaviour often lives on third-party platforms. This means that when a video is shared only on social media, most engagement insight remains inaccessible.
Putting video on your own website or app makes all the difference.
It lets you see how fans actually interact with content, so you can track and measure deep engagement, learning what drives fans to act, not just what they watched.
Takeaways
- Video keeps fans engaged between matchdays and creates clearer signals of interest than static content
- The real value of video lies in how fans engage with it, from what they watch, finish, and act on — not just who created it
- Hosting video on owned channels and websites helps brands see what drives actions like ticket sales, merch, and sign-ups
Tip 2: Encourage fans to contribute to unlock better insight
Wyng (formerly Offerpop) found that while more than half of consumers are willing to interact with brand campaigns, only 16% of brands successfully turn that participation into first-party behavioural insight they can act on.
The opportunity isn’t just to spark interaction, but to invite fans to actively contribute beyond matchday.
Sports rightsholders have some of the most loyal fan bases, and they want to stay involved between fixtures, sharing opinions, creativity and personal moments that reflect their connection to the club or brand.
By inviting fans to submit content, opinions or experiences, rightsholders move beyond surface engagement.
Every submission becomes a source of first-party data, revealing who fans are, what motivates them, which players or themes resonate most, and how different audiences behave outside of matchday peaks.
The result is non-matchday campaigns that feel more genuine and community-led because they feature real fan voices.
At the same time, rightsholders gain a clear view of how audience behaviour and what drives them, helping to shape content and partner value without increasing output.
For their “Run Your Way” campaign, New Balance used Amondo’s social gallery and Submission Tile to give runners a simple way to take part.
Participants shared photos and videos of their runs via race hashtags or by uploading content, which surfaced in a branded wall on the event site.
This allowed New Balance to see which moments people chose to share and how community content performed compared to brand content, all based on real behavioural data, not surface metrics.
Takeaways
- Fan participation drives intelligence, not just engagement
- Brands can create more value without creating more content
- This approach helps you to prioritise content decisions and partner activations based on behaviour, not guesswork
Tip 3: Create controlled content variation to generate behavioural insight
FC Nordsjælland used a deliberately different content perspective to observe how fans responded to a new format, topic and style compared to what they were used to for official club media.
In 2018, the club handed a GoPro camera to their intern, a 14-year-old fan. He interviewed players, including asking the club’s star striker why he wasn’t scoring goals…
By introducing a fan-led viewpoint inside controlled, branded formats, the club was able to compare behavioural responses – such as completion rates, replay behaviour and interaction patterns – against more traditional training and behind-the-scenes content.
This contrast helped reveal which types of storytelling drove deeper engagement from fans and sustained attention outside matchdays.
The value wasn’t the identity of the person holding the camera. It was the behavioural variation the format introduced, and the insight it generated into what non-matchday content actually resonates and holds attention.
Takeaways
- Fan submissions add authenticity and community value, but the real advantage comes from experimenting with formats and observing behaviour to see what actually works
- Varying content formats and access help rightsholders identify what drives non-matchday performance
Tip 4: Turn repeat fan behaviour into compounding intelligence
Non-matchdays aren’t only valuable because they create more content – they’re valuable because they create repeatable behavioural signals.
Using the same interactive formats over time encourages fans to return, making it easier to see clear patterns in behaviour; from content structures that drive deeper engagement andwhich access points prompt repeat interaction to which signals connect to downstream outcomes.
Over time, this behavioural data compounds.
Each activation adds context to the last, allowing brands to move from isolated performance snapshots to a clear understanding of what consistently works – and what to stop doing by proven behavioural drivers.
Takeaways
- Repeatable activation creates behavioural data that compounds over time
- Comparing signals across non-matchdays reveals what to scale, adapt or stop
- Intelligence grows by reapplying learning, not recycling content
Tip 5: Activate audience content through measurable interaction formats
During the Tokyo 2020 Olympics and the coronavirus pandemic, Team GB faced a clear challenge: fan support was remote, fragmented and largely invisible beyond surface engagement metrics.
Using Amondo, Team GB brought together fan-generated content, athlete stories and branded partner content into a series of Amondo Galleries designed for engagement, participation and activation.
Amondo’s Submission Tile invited fans and athletes to share photos and videos with messages of support, creating a continuous stream of authentic content throughout the Games.
At the same time, embedded Click-Through Tiles turned attention into action, converting passive viewing into measurable interaction.
App and newsletter sign-up CTAs were placed at moments of high emotional connection, enabling Team GB to grow its owned audience and capture first-party behavioural data. This gave the team a clearer understanding of who its fans were, how they engaged with Olympic content, and how to continue those relationships beyond the Games.
The result wasn’t just visibility – it was behavioural intelligence. A repeatable model for understanding and activating fan support when attention is distributed, and physical presence isn’t possible.
Takeaways
- Participation becomes intelligence
- Interactive formats convert attention into measurable action, capturing behaviour that social platforms don’t expose
- Behavioural insight enables long-term value, helping brands grow owned audiences and deepen engagement – even when physical presence isn’t possible
In summary
Non-matchdays are valuable because they allow sports brands to both publish more content and also create a repeatable opportunity to capture fan behaviour.
When fans interact with content through structured, portable formats, sports brands and rightsholders gain first-party behavioural insight into what holds attention, signals intent and drives outcomes between matchdays.
That insight compounds over time, replacing guesswork with clarity on what to prioritise, scale or retire.
The advantage isn’t fan-created content or curated feeds. It’s the ability to observe real behaviour, compare performance across formats and apply learning consistently as the season unfolds.
You can explore more examples in our case studies here.
Getty Images and Amondo partner to transform licensed visual content into actionable fan insight
This post announces Amondo’s partnership with Getty Images, showing how licensed visual content is activated to capture first-party fan behaviour and performance insight.
Content intelligence platform Amondo has partnered with Getty Images to give sports, media, and entertainment organisations a new way to display and activate licensed visual content. These experiences capture first-party fan behaviour and performance insight that other platforms don’t provide.
Getty Images is a preeminent global visual content creator and marketplace that offers a comprehensive range of content solutions to meet the needs of customers worldwide, regardless of their size.
Through its Getty Images, iStock, and Unsplash brands, websites, and APIs, Getty Images provides premium, licensed visual content that powers storytelling at a global scale. This content can now be discovered and activated inside Amondo’s platform.
Working with clients including Chelsea FC, Universal Music, Formula E, the International Cricket Council, and Live Nation, Amondo ingests brand, creator, and fan content and transforms it into portable branded formats across web, mobile, partner sites, in-venue screens, and OOH.
These formats capture first-party behaviours such as taps, swipes, depth, hesitation, dwell and QR journeys.
This behaviour connects to downstream commercial outcomes like traffic, sign-ups, purchases, ticket sales or conversions - creating an intelligence layer that reveals what content actually drives performance and why.
This means visual content is no longer just displayed; it becomes measurable, comparable, and optimisable based on how fans actually interact with it.
The integration allows organisations to connect their Getty Images account within the Amondo dashboard to add visual content from Getty Images to their Amondo Galleries.
"We’re delighted to announce our partnership and integration with Getty Images, enabling Getty’s visual content to be activated directly within Amondo. Many of our clients already use Getty Images, and this integration allows that content to be deployed in Amondo’s portable branded formats while capturing first-party behavioural insight into how audiences actually engage. The result is clearer intelligence on what resonates, how content performs, and what to scale next, moving clients from distribution to understanding what works and why.”
Charlie Bucker, Founder, Amondo
"Enabling our clients to work smarter and faster to showcase visual content that engages audiences across the globe is at the heart of our strategy. This is especially important during event-driven coverage, where Getty Images is relied upon as a core component of fan interaction. Our exciting partnership with Amondo streamlines the creation process through a native experience with content at customers' fingertips.”
Benjamin Beavan, Global Director Strategic Development, Getty Images
One of the first organisations to make use of the new integration is the British Olympic Association and Team GB around the recent 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing.
Team GB was able to access and display licensed visual content from Getty Images within daily Imprints showcased via the teamgb.com, official Team GB app and social media.
"The Getty Images integration with Amondo has allowed us to feature the high-quality and impactful photos that Getty Images is renowned for within our Amondo Gallery feeds — and in a fraction of the time it would take to do manually. We’re proud to have worked with Amondo in bringing the passionate support of Team GB fans into one central location, making it easy for athletes and supporters alike to feel the momentum behind the team from back home.”
Nicol McClelland, Head Of Marketing, British Olympic Association