Overview & challenges

With around 16 clubs, the Norwegian Professional Football League (NPFL) is the primary league for association football in the country. With studies showing that only one in four fans was known to them via ticketing systems, the league needed to find a way to acquire more customer data. 

“We wanted to know more about people who attended games at our venues. We were also seeking to provide them with the right service and content offerings,” says Thomas Torjusen, Head of Media and Chief Digital Officer at NPFL.

Seamless onboarding & visitor engagement

The league found a solution when one of its associated clubs – the Vålerenga Football club – moved to a venue with Cisco wireless infrastructure. By deploying Cisco Spaces, the NPFL was successfully able to deliver location-based engagements to fans within the stadium. NPFL can now quickly create and customize location-specific and user-specific engagements that can be delivered via SMS, smart captive portal, email, app, or API triggers. After moving to the new stadium with Cisco wireless, the Vålerenga Football club saw a 13 per cent increase in Wi-Fi user acquisition. They also witnessed a 22 per cent opt-in rate for location engagements.

“Cisco Spaces is the first step where we meet our customers. Fans come to connected venues and see a wireless network called @Football. We provide them with the portal page of the venue, which we can customize in the way the venue owner wants. It’s a very professional way to onboard the customer to the digital journey.”

– Thomas Torjusen, Head of Media and Chief Digital Officer at NPFL

Spaces provides granular control over what types of visitor information is collected during the onboarding process via captive portals. This helps the NPFL comply with General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) standards. The platform’s global compliance support also ensures that visitors maintain full control of their data. 

The league has also been able to acquire tens of thousands of CRM entries, and data needed for better insights into fan behavior and profiling. “Before Cisco, it was up to each club to set up its own wireless access and portal. Now it is easy to set up different events for different types of venues. In addition to football, we have established portals for hockey matches, motorcycle races, and other attractions. It gives our venues much more value because the experience can be customized to the specific event,” says Torjusen, adding that the NPFL is replicating this model across other clubs in the league.

Spaces is a scalable, replicable model that NPFL teams can apply to establish high-performance, ubiquitous location services at any venue — quickly and consistently, for a variety of events.