Exploring the Stadium Experience on Match Day

PROJECT OVERVIEW

As part of a live client brief during my master’s program at Hyper Island, our team worked with Manchester City Football Club to investigate a behavioral challenge affecting the match-day experience at the Etihad Stadium: a recurring pattern of fans leaving matches 15–20 minutes before the final whistle.

Over a three-week sprint, we worked to uncover pain points and underlying motivations that were driving this behavior. The desired outcomes of this project focused on research and insight, with the goal of helping the client to better empathize with the fans and inform design interventions. 

Constraints such as a tight timeline and the scale of the research space required us to be deliberate about convergence. Without clear prioritization and focusing our scope, it was easy to get paralyzed in iterative loops that surfaced more and more questions.

Through participant observation on match days, in-depth and guerilla interviews, secondary research, and continuous synthesis, we found that early departure is driven by a sense of urgency to avoid post-match crowds, and anxiety around congestion during the journey home. 

The outcome was a set of behavioral insights and opportunity areas for service-level interventions aimed at easing the need to “beat the rush,” staggering departures, and extending the match-day experience beyond the final whistle. The sprint culminated in a client pitch, where I packaged project findings and communicated insights in a way for stakeholders to understand and relate to.

More to come soon!