Hammarby Fotball

About the project

How can a legendary football club score online too?

Founded in 1889, Hammarby Fotball is more than a football club – it's a Swedish institution, a lifestyle, and a community of passionate fans, or ‘bajares’.

Hammarby not only boasts the highest average attendance in Scandinavia, but is also famous for its the volume and enthusiasm of its supporters. But Hammarby felt the club’s digital offering was letting its fans down. They needed to up their game to give loyal bajares a winning online fan experience, while boosting revenues too. 

The final score? A new digital platform delivering a more engaging and personal club experience through new and improved functionality, services, and exclusive content.

Client Hammarby Fotboll
Agency Emakina.SE
Services Applications Commerce CRM Marketing automation Web building
The challenge

Supporting the all-important 12th player

Hammarby wanted to attract new fans of the men’s and women’s teams, and deepen the connection with its loyal following. They needed a new digital flagship platform offering a much wider range of club experiences like articles, podcasts, videos, live stats for games and players, premium subscriptions, co-branding, sponsored content and merchandise sales. This required a technical solution that could handle such a big variety of content formats and effortlessly manage third-party APIs.

Our solution

Through mapping personas and user journeys, we were able to deep dive into the perspectives, motivations and demographics of Hammarby supporters. This was followed by design and prototyping sprints to define the UX and UI. To maintain flexibility, we worked in agile development sprints, prioritising MVPs together with the client's product owner . And, when it came to beta testing, who better than the fans to give their honest feedback?

Emakina implemented Sanity for continuous deployment and easy content management. We also made integrations with APIs from AXS (ticketing platform) and the Swedish Professional Football Leagues.

A winning result

The new flagship platform brings fans closer to the game and to the teams, with a huge range of exclusive Hammarby content, merchandise sales, and live game and player statistics. While nothing of course will match the thrill of being in the stands, Hammarby now gives its fans a winning online experience worthy of their loyalty to the team, 24/7, regardless of location.

Hammarby can now manage omnichannel journeys, from the stadium and shop to the club partners, giving the club a better understanding of how to respond to the needs of its fans.