Club apps lost the second screen and are not getting it back

Supporters already have a live companion product during matches, and it is the group chat, not the official app.

Ask a supporter what is open on their phone during a match and the honest answer is a thread with six people they have known since school. Not the club app. The club app got opened in August, once, for the fixture list.

I keep seeing the same roadmap. Live stats, a prediction game, polls, a reaction feed, sometimes a chat room moderated by an intern. All of it competing for a slot that a messaging app filled ten years ago and defends with the strongest moat in software, which is that everyone you want to talk to is already there. No feature ships that beats that. A poll about man of the match is not a substitute for your brother swearing at you in real time.

So the honest question is what a club app is actually for. My answer, and clubs hate it, is that it should be a wallet and a door key. Ticket, transfer, resale, seat, order, entry, travel. Boring, high value, obviously worth the install, used in a burst around match day and then closed. Everything in the engagement tab is noise that dilutes the thing people would genuinely open.

There is one exception worth defending. The official app is the only party with the data, and there is a real product in giving a fan something the group chat cannot generate for itself. Not a stats page. Something closer to a shareable card that fires automatically when the team scores, formatted so it lands well inside a message thread. Feed the chat instead of fighting it. Distribution beats retention here and clubs keep choosing retention because it looks better in a deck.

The deeper reason these apps struggle is that they are usually built to a sponsorship brief. A partner wants a branded module, so the app grows a branded module, and the navigation gets one item longer every season until finding a ticket takes four taps. I have used club apps where the ticket sat below the fold. That is not a design failure. That is a commercial decision nobody framed as one.

Strip it. If the app cannot get a supporter through a turnstile in one tap with a dying battery and no signal, nothing else in it matters.