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Case studies

Premier League Football Club Transforms Matchday Commerce with Graphene’s Event Retail Solution

The Challenge

Matchday revenue locked behind traditional channels

A Premier League football club saw an opportunity familiar to every major venue in live sport: matchday footfall was high, but the selling window was short. Thousands of hospitality guests and fans pass through the ground before kick-off, during the interval, and on the way out. The club shop had limited floor space and opening hours, and while guests could browse merchandise on the main website, nothing about that experience was tailored to the matchday moment or the environment they were in.

For hospitality customers in particular, there was scope to do much more. Premium box holders and general hospitality guests were focused on the match, not on queuing or navigating a general-purpose website.

The club also had no mechanism to react in real time. If a product was underselling or a food line was overstocked, there was no way to push a promotion to guests already in the building.

The Approach

Direct-to-Shopper commerce, built on Graphene Engage

PMC worked with the club to deploy an event retail solution powered by Graphene Engage. The approach was to create purpose-built sales channels that could be spun up for every match, tailored to each audience, and shut down when the moment passed.

A guest scans a QR code at their table or in their box and lands on a mobile storefront instantly. No app, no account, no catalogue to search. Every fixture is a fresh campaign with its own branding, product selection and fulfilment options. A guest can order personalised merchandise and have it delivered straight to their seat during the game, or to their home address. Behind the scenes, a dedicated pick-and-pack operation underneath the stadium handles fulfilment in real time.

The Solution

From a premium box pilot to a club-wide commerce platform

The programme launched as a proof of concept in a handful of premium boxes, testing the full end-to-end process: ordering, personalisation, pick-and-pack, and delivery to the box during the match. Once proven, the club expanded rapidly.

The solution now runs across every hospitality tier, not just premium boxes with the same QR-to-purchase access. Beyond hospitality, the club has launched a dedicated player microsite where players and their agents can browse the full range, apply player-specific discounts, and self-serve entirely. Hospitality customers can also choose click-and-collect, ordering during the match and picking up on their way out of the ground.

The platform is built on Graphene, PMC’s de-coupled, API-first commerce platform. Cloud-native and microservices-based, it integrates with the club’s existing systems rather than replacing them. The architecture is serverless and event-driven, built on AWS Lambda, so the club pays only for what it uses on matchdays rather than maintaining always-on infrastructure. That makes the solution cost-effective to run at any scale, whether the club is serving two premium boxes or every hospitality area in the ground.

Graphene Engage’s single product catalogue and basket sit behind every channel, so inventory, pricing and customer data stay consistent whether someone is ordering from a box, a hospitality table, or the player microsite.

The Outcome

Consistent revenue, new channels, no competitors

In its first full season, the event retail solution generated significant additional matchday revenue — sales that came entirely through channels that did not previously exist. In the second season, the programme opened with more than double the sales of the same period the year before, while average order value increased by nearly 40%. Guests who would have bought from the shop are now buying more easily, and guests who would never have queued are buying for the first time. The overall effect is a better customer experience and stronger matchday revenue.

The club is now operating matchday commerce capabilities that no other Premier League club has replicated. The combination of hospitality-wide ordering, a player microsite, and click-and-collect represents a model that is unique in English football.

The club isn’t just selling more. They’re selling better. Guests are getting a genuinely improved experience, players are getting a service that finally matches what they’d expect, and the club has a revenue channel that scales without adding headcount or floor space. That’s what this technology was designed to do.