5 things the best sports clubs get right to grow memberships

TL;DR

Most clubs could sell more memberships than they currently do. What usually holds them back is the system the scheme runs on. Membership is often sold through a ticketing platform that was never designed for subscriptions, which leads to long checkouts, renewals that fail without anyone noticing, service desks buried in manual cases, and a commercial team that can't change a price without raising a development ticket. Clubs that grow their schemes tend to work on five things: the join journey, renewals, letting members self-serve, the value of every sale, and giving their team control of the whole digital experience, with analytics running underneath to show whether each one is working and lift conversion (CRO) and return on ad spend (ROAS).This post goes through each one, using real figures from a Premier League club that runs over 200,000 memberships on Limio, a commerce platform built for subscriptions.

Why growth stalls (spoiler: it's the ticketing system)

If your club sells memberships, there's a good chance you're selling them on a system designed to sell tickets. That made sense once. A membership was a card and a welcome pack, and the ticketing platform already held the fan's details, so it did the job.

A membership works differently from a ticket, though. A ticket is a one-off sale of a finite seat. A membership is a subscription. It renews, it lapses, it needs a payment method that still works eleven months later, and the fan holding it expects to manage it whenever suits them, including late at night when the ticket office is closed.

Run a subscription on ticketing systems and the problems add up. One large club we worked with had a membership sign-up that ran to twelve or fourteen pages. Its renewal rates were lower than they should have been, and thousands of cancellations a season were handled by hand. In most cases like this the demand for membership is already there. The limiting factor is the tools the scheme runs on, and those can be changed.

Growth starts with the right subscription platform

The best clubs aren't spending more on marketing or chasing a bigger fanbase. They've moved the scheme onto a platform built for subscriptions, which clears the things that get between a fan and the join button, lifts conversion, and gives their team room to keep improving it. Here are the five things the best sports clubs get right once they've invested in the right subscription platform, roughly in the order you'd tackle them. They're based on changes a Premier League club made, and some you can look at this week without changing anything at all.

1. Shorten the join journey

The biggest drop-off in most membership funnels is the join journey itself. Every extra page, every forced account setup, every request to retype details a fan has already given is another point where someone who meant to join gives up.

The way to improve it is to cut steps rather than add polish. Let people check out as guests. Offer the payment methods they already use, such as Apple Pay, Google Pay, cards and Direct Debit, instead of making them find a card they last used in the club shop. Pull in details you already hold so members aren't retyping what's on their record. This is the sort of thing a fast, subscription-native shop and checkout is built to do.

When the Premier League club moved to a shorter journey built for subscriptions, conversion on membership sign-up rose 11%. More of the fans who started joining finished, with no change to traffic or the size of the fanbase.

Worth checking at your club: open your own join flow on a phone and count the screens between deciding to join and finishing. If it's more than three or four, that's the first place to look.

2. Treat renewal as the real revenue event

It's tempting to put most of the effort into winning new members. For an established scheme, though, renewal is what decides next season's revenue, and it usually gets the least attention.

Two things tend to cost clubs renewals: The first is payment failure. A card expires over the summer, the charge bounces, and no one notices until the member has already lapsed. The second is the plain cancel button. A member who was only half-thinking of leaving is given an easy exit and nothing that might change their mind.

Both can be addressed. Encourage the payment methods that hold up better over time, for example a small Direct Debit discount at sign-up, which tends to pay for itself in stronger renewal rates. Let members fix their own payment details before and during renewal. And give the renewal journey more than a cancel button, whether that's a lower tier, a pause, or a save offer for the members worth keeping. Limio builds these saves and retention offers into the renewal itself, so the moment a member thinks about leaving is also the moment they're offered a reason to stay.

At the Premier League club, payment approvals between seasons rose 19% after billing moved to a provider built for it. That was revenue the club was already owed, lost only because the payments weren't going through.

Worth checking: look at your renewal rate broken down by payment method. If card and PayPal renewals sit well below Direct Debit, that gap is worth working on.

3. Let members self-serve

Every cancellation, card change and address update that goes through an agent costs money and creates a queue that only moves during office hours. Fans, understandably, want to sort these things out on their own schedule.

Give members a proper account area where they can serve themselves and most of that work moves off the service desk. At the Premier League club, 28,470 membership changes were made in the first 11 weeks of the season, and 98.6% of them were done by members themselves. Three in ten happened outside office hours. Over a season that comes to roughly 16,000 cases the team no longer has to handle, which leaves agents free for the ones that genuinely need a person.

This isn't about cutting the team out. Routine changes get done instantly by the member, and the team spends their time on the cases where a person actually makes a difference.

There's a compliance upside too. The UK's Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 expects cancellation to be as easy as signing up, and a proper self-serve account area already meets that expectation.

Worth checking: list the top five reasons fans contact your membership desk. How many are card updates, address changes or cancellations a member could do themselves in under a minute?

4. Grow the value of every membership sold

Cutting steps gets more fans to the end of the join journey. The next lever is making each order worth a little more and losing fewer of them along the way. On a platform built for subscriptions, these sit with your marketing team to switch on and adjust, no engineering required:

• Abandoned basket recovery that follows up with a promo code, so a fan who dropped out gets a nudge rather than being written off.
• Upsells at the point of sale, whether that's a higher tier or a different billing frequency.
• Cross-sells such as merchandise added to the same order.
• Conditional fields that only ask a given fan for what they actually need to give.
• A checkout that fits your club, working properly on a phone and matching your branding rather than a generic form.

Worth checking: look at your average order value and your basket abandonment rate. If you can't see either today, that's the first thing to fix, because you can't lift what you can't measure.

5. Give your team control of the whole digital experience

There's a less obvious brake on growth. At a lot of clubs, changing a price, adding a tier, launching an offer or setting up a campaign means raising a request and waiting for a development cycle, so the scheme only changes once or twice a season, if that. A scheme grows faster when the people responsible for revenue can change it themselves. On Limio the catalogue, pricing, journeys, campaigns and A/B tests sit with your commercial team, so a new tier, offer or test goes live without a development ticket. Conversion and retention become things the team works on every week instead of once a year.

And once your team controls the whole experience, new kinds of membership become realistic, because they're a setup job rather than a rebuild. A few that clubs are moving toward:

• International and digital-only memberships for fans who'll never come to the stadium, built around content, streaming and rewards, and priced in their own currency.
• A free tier that gives the wider fanbase somewhere to start, so you can see what they respond to and move the keenest ones onto a paid membership.
• Junior schemes that grow up, where a membership rolls into an adult one at the right birthday instead of expiring and asking a teenager to start again.
• Gifting, student and concession journeys so the right fan gets the right price.

One club we spoke with was looking at a free tier as the way in for hundreds of thousands of opted-in contacts, then converting a share of them to paid. The thinking was that membership should feel like something a fan wants to be part of, rather than a surcharge on tickets.

Worth checking: the last time someone wanted to run a membership promotion or test a new price, how long did it take to go live? If the answer is measured in weeks or months rather than days, that delay is holding the scheme back.

What keeps all five improving: analytics, CRO and ROAS

Every change above gets sharper when you can see what it's doing. The best clubs treat analytics as part of the platform rather than a report they open once a quarter, because the same data that shows where the scheme is leaking also shows where the next bit of growth will come from. Two areas matter most: conversion rate optimisation and return on ad spend.

Conversion rate optimisation (CRO) starts with seeing the whole funnel: first visit, basket, and completed order. When every step is measured, you can find the exact point where fans drop out, including ones no one suspected, and fix it. A single awkward step in the checkout can cost a club a large share of the fans who reach it, and it stays invisible until the funnel data puts it in front of you.

Return on ad spend (ROAS) needs honest attribution. Membership traffic comes from paid search, paid social, email and e-ticketing, and those channels don't all convert the same way. With proper last-touch attribution you can see which ones actually turn into paid memberships, rather than trusting the view-through numbers an ad agency tends to report. That's the difference between putting budget where it converts and putting it where it looks busy.

On Limio this comes as conversion reporting by channel and by funnel step, delivered to your marketing team automatically, so the people running the scheme can act on it every week rather than waiting on a quarterly review.

Worth checking: can you say today which of your channels brings in the most paid memberships, not clicks, not views, but paid memberships? If not, that visibility is the place to start.

Pulling it together

None of these five changes is dramatic on its own. Shortening the join journey, protecting renewals, letting members self-serve, growing the value of every sale, and putting your team in control of the whole experience all point in the same direction, with analytics showing you whether each one is working. They come together on a system built for subscriptions rather than one borrowed from ticketing. Get that foundation right and a lot of the growth turns out to have been there all along.

What to look for in a platform

If this has you weighing up where to run your scheme, here's a checklist worth taking into any vendor conversation. A platform that can genuinely grow a membership scheme should let you:

• Sell on a short, branded journey with guest checkout and the payment methods fans already use.
• Recover abandoned baskets, upsell tiers and cross-sell, so each order works harder.
• Handle seasonal billing, with the whole base renewing together and in-season upgrades charged correctly.
• Give members a self-serve account area to update cards, change addresses and cancel within the cooling-off window.
• Turn cancellations into saves and retention offers rather than a one-way exit.
• Put the catalogue, pricing, journeys and campaigns in your commercial team's hands, with no development ticket required.
• See conversion by channel and by funnel step, so you know where fans drop out and which marketing actually pays for itself.
• Connect to the ticketing platform, payment provider and CRM you already use.

The more of these a platform does in one place, the less your scheme leans on workarounds and the more of your team's time goes into growing it. Limio was built to do all of them.

Want to see how this works in practice? Limio's sports membership platform runs sign-up, renewals and self-serve on one system built for subscriptions. Book a demo and we'll walk through what moving your scheme would involve.