Clubhouse

Two readers, one screen

Clubhouse brings ticketing, the club shop, matchday takings, player statistics and tracking data into one system, built per club rather than sold as a template.

The design problem is that two people use it and they want opposite things. A chairman opens it to see wages, matchday revenue and whether the sponsor is renewing. A manager opens it to see squad fitness, scouting notes and Saturday’s opposition. Both are looking at the same underlying data, and neither wants to wade through the other’s version of it.

Where the density goes

The matchday dashboard is the heart of it, and it carries an unusual amount at once: attendance, total revenue, revenue per head, ticketing, a timeline of takings across the afternoon, top selling items and where the money came from.

That much on one screen fails if everything competes. It works here because the numbers are ranked before they are styled. The four figures a chairman quotes sit at the top at a size you can read across a boardroom table. The timeline underneath is where the interesting question lives, which is not how much a club took but when, because peak drink at 14:36 and peak food at 15:51 are two different operational decisions.

The first direction was wrong

The first visual direction looked like the category. Competent, blue, and indistinguishable from every other piece of club management software, which is a real risk when the product is genuinely different underneath.

It was rejected and rebuilt around the thing that makes football football: the stadium, the floodlights, the scoreline. The version that shipped opens on a match rather than on a dashboard, and earns the right to show the dashboard immediately afterwards.

We designed the brand and the interface. The client’s team built it, and it is live at clubhousefootball.co.uk.