Olympique de Marseille

A passionate community whose digital relationship had never been designed.

OM's fans had a rich, emotionally complex relationship with the club — spanning matchday ritual, community identity, content consumption and commercial engagement. This relationship had never been mapped as a designed experience. Decisions about digital features were being made without a shared understanding of the fan journey.

Map the fan relationship across its full emotional and temporal arc.

The fan journey was mapped across the full season cycle — pre-season anticipation, matchweek build-up, matchday experience, post-match processing and the between-game community maintenance. For each phase, emotional intensity, engagement behaviours and digital touchpoint expectations were documented and analysed.

A fan journey map that became the strategic foundation for all experience decisions.

The journey mapping gave the club a shared analytical framework — a way of evaluating digital features and investments against their actual value to fans at specific emotional moments. Experience decisions became anchored in the fan relationship rather than platform capability.

Five disconnected touchpoints. No governing ecosystem logic.

Content, ticketing, matchday services, merchandise and community engagement were managed as separate platforms with separate product roadmaps. There was no ecosystem logic connecting them — no shared data layer, no experience continuity and no strategic coherence across the fan journey.

Define the ecosystem architecture before the product decisions.

The ecosystem strategy defined how the five touchpoint categories should relate to each other — what data and context should flow between them, which moments required deep integration and which could operate independently. The product framing gave the club a decision-making framework for prioritising ecosystem investments against fan value.

A coherent ecosystem strategy connecting content, matchday, ticketing and commerce.

The ecosystem strategy gave Olympique de Marseille a structural foundation for its digital product investments — replacing disconnected feature decisions with an integrated view of the fan experience across the full relationship.

The peak emotional moment for fans had the weakest digital support.

Matchday was the most emotionally significant moment in the fan relationship with the club — and the digital experience around it was the least designed. Pre-match, in-stadium and post-match digital support were minimal, inconsistent and disconnected from the physical matchday reality.

Design the matchday digital layer around the fan's actual experience.

The matchday experience framework was designed around the fan's emotional and practical needs before, during and after the match — from journey planning and gate access to in-stadium services, real-time content and post-match community. Each touchpoint was designed to support the matchday experience rather than interrupt it.

A matchday experience framework designed for the fan, not for the platform.

The matchday framework gave OM a product vision for the most important experience in the fan relationship — connecting digital services to the physical and emotional reality of attending or following a match.