Beyond the Pitch: Inside Arsenal’s Global Fandom Playbook

0:00Define what you're actually doing day-to-day, week-to-week as the Chief Commercial Officer of Arsenal Football Club. I've got a really simple phrase, what I do, I serve our supporters what they want, when they want, where they want.

0:15Today, we're diving into football, or soccer, depending on where you're listening from. I'm here in London to sit down with Juliet Slot, Chief Commercial Officer at Arsenal Football Club, who's transforming the 140-year-old club into a modern global brand. And it comes at a time with the World Cup on the horizon as well. At the center of Arsenal's approach is a simple idea. Serve your supporters what they want, when they want, where they want. It's not about just filling a stadium, but turning Arsenal into a 365-day experience built on content, community, and connection. In this conversation, we unpack how that all works, from content creation and distribution to growing the women's game into a global business.

0:55No matter what team you support, this is your front row seat to hear how marketing can reinvent the game on and off the pitch. Here is my conversation with Juliet.

1:09Arsenal are this incredibly dynamic sports club, 140 years old, but acting and behaving in completely modern and progressive ways. I just want to learn from you, and I think all of the audience could learn from what you've been doing as you extend this brand from the streets of North London to the rest of the world? If we ultimately look after you, all of our supporters around the world, in whatever way they want to engage with the club, and we create that real sense of belonging around the club, everything else will flow from that. Whether it's about whether they want to buy a shirt, whether they want to come to a game, whether they want to engage in our content, whether they want to go and watch us on our pre-season tour, or whether they just want to watch us on the television in the market they're in.

1:48They want to feel closely connected to the club. And my job is to facilitate that in the best way I can. In the old days, it would be coming to the game, seeing the game and hopefully giving them a great experience. Today, we have hundreds of millions of supporters around the world. So my job is to help try and serve them in the best way possible, that they can get closer to the club. They can feel that real sense of being part of our family, that sense of belonging that they will have. As you well know, Josh, not everybody decides to be a supporter. They're often intergenerationally born into being a supporter of the club.

2:20You can't change once you decide on your football club. It's just not the done thing to change which club you support. So they're with us throughout their lifetime. And we're mere stewards of the club for the supporters. If you have that attitude towards how you then go about your daily life and you really try and understand those supporters and what they want from you, it makes my job so much easier. Yeah, it's an unusual answer because lots of people would say their job is to make money. I don't view that. But I think if we do the right thing with the right messaging and the right platform and the right engagement, that will follow.

2:56But ultimately, it comes from truly serving your supporter. One of my favorite movies is Moneyball, Brad Pitt movie, Billy Bean and the sort of the Sabermectics. Billy Bean in that movie tells the Jonah Hill character that he's not watching the game. And I was just wondering, is there an expectation that you go to every Arsenal game, wherever it is in the world? I go to every game, every home game. I don't go to every away game. Otherwise, I probably wouldn't see my husband or my family at all. But I go to every men's home game, every women's home game, and quite a lot of the away games. One, because I love doing it.

3:30I love watching it. And it's part of my job, seeing how we perform. And the other part is that I learn every time I go to an away game. I go to a different stadium. I see the customer experience or the supporter experience. So it's really helpful because I'm always learning. always trying to find some little nugget that we can take back to do at the emirates or in some way in in some part of the journey for our supporters so the reason i wanted you have on on the pod is not just because i'm an arsenal fan although funny little story i started out as an ipswich fan back in like 19 early 1980s they just won the fa cup but my elder brother was an arsenal fan and we used to do this school run with these other families and all the older boys were arsenal fans and i somehow morphed into i'm now an arsenal fan because i want to be like my elder brother and here I am 40 years later, 50 years later, I don't know, whatever it is.

4:18I'm one of your diaspora. I'm around the world watching the games from California where I live. It is remarkable. And you use the word engagement and community and being part of something. Can you just talk a little bit about how you build, I'm almost scared to say the word brand, but it is a brand, how you build a global brand of something which really has 38 games a year and a few other sort of competitions, but in a set window of time. How do you think about it? So first of all, we need to know what we stand for. So we have a really clear positioning, Arsenal acts for a winning team, community and culture.

4:50So from those three pillars, we then manage everything that we do through the lens of that positioning. So what does that mean? Well, we make sure that we deliver the customer experience or the supporter experience in every way. So whether it's the content that we produce, whether it's the stories that we tell, whether it's the way that we engage with you through our social media channels, everything that we do is driven through the lens of that brand. What we've tried to do over the last few years is really try and manifest that in a much bigger and broader way globally and digitally in a way that I think that was really going to tell them the story about what happens in between the games, tell them the behind the scenes, shape the narrative around what the club is 365 days a year.

5:32And we've had a huge amount of investment in our in our content team to allow us to really get closer to the both men's women's and academy teams and to tell their stories in a way that I think really helps shape what you know about the club beyond what you might have seen if you just watched us for all of our games so let's just go a little little deeper there because our audience is people building global brands or very strong national brands you have done a lot to transform arsenal I know it's a 140-year-old institution, but Arsenal, whatever you've been doing, has a certain je ne sais quoi.

6:05It is seen as a kind of cooler and it's got the whole North London vibe. And so you just mentioned tools and creating that engagement around the world. What are some of the things which actually have made a difference in the last four or five years while you've been helping the team do this? I'll put content aside for a minute because that's an obvious place to go. Just talk about what we've been doing in our retail wear. So we have an amazing partnership with Adidas, but through that partnership, we've done a whole lot of collabs. So, for example, two years ago, we collabed with a brand called Aries, which is a really great London-based fashion brand.

6:36And we created a whole range of clothing that really kind of resonated with a really cool group of supporters. But it also set us apart from being just selling match day wear. It's creating a culture range. We've tried to have that way of engaging our supporters in things that they do in their everyday life that kind of resonates and is authentic. Only Arsenal can do that because it is absolutely something that we have the right to have that conversation around. Because in fact, we are a very authentic North London brand that is not just a football club, but it's a much bigger community around which so many people come together.

7:12So retail is one place. Content is another way that we have really tried to engage. And what we try to do is develop different content streams that is in a way that is answering the different questions that our supporters are asking us. So first of all, we ask them, what do they want? So talking to our supporters all around the world, what kind of content and experiences and products and engagements do you want to have with the club? And we've then tried to develop answers to those questions. So we just launched a new app, which is probably a manifestation of three years of that insights and co-creation with our supporters.

7:44And that app has got not only just small stories around how we develop the training during the run out to a match day, but that app has also got whole story streams around Martin Odegaard as a modern leader, around Bukayo Saka and his absolute passion and love of music. And he meets an artist called Thames and they talk together about their shared passion and their shared Nigerian roots. So we're bringing the stories of the players and the people that make Arsenal Football Club to our supporters in a unique and engaging way. But it is actually how a lot of people around the world engage outside of their love of football.

8:21They are watching the streamers, they're watching the stories, and we're just bringing that in an authentic Arsenal way. The more that we can understand and personalise the experience of our supporters, the more I can then ask them what they want, and then we can then try and serve them better. So there's so many ways I can go with this, but I need to ask you about AI. So it's transforming the world. It's transforming marketing. How are you guys thinking about AI as it relates to building a fan base and selling tickets and all the rest of everything you're doing? Obviously, AI is how long is a piece of string you can apply in many different areas.

8:50We're testing and learning. So I mentioned on our app, we've developed a for you feed. So we're using generative AI to inform how we then serve different pieces of content to our supporters. I think that's probably the most practical place we're starting on using it within my team. We're also using it in how we then serve up our archive through the app as well. Okay, super interesting. Talk about the different type of content. What is a Singaporean fan versus an Indian fan versus a North London fan? Do you see distinct differences in what they want to consume and how they want to engage with the club?

9:24So first thing is I don't dissect our supporter hosts by nationality. I dissect them by their relationship with the club. So we have six segments that we have identified through a really, really big piece of global research. So that might be the person that the term styler that comes to every home game that has been supported intergenerationally. And then we have what we call some of the other supporter groups where they are maybe big eventers. They come to us a bit later. They have a little bit more of a distant relationship with us. So what we try and do is create different content streams through a test and learn process that we think they will like and we then serve them.

10:00So if you sign up to our app, which I hope you have, you will see that we have a for you feed. If you tell us through the different golden questions that we put to you the types of things that you're interested in in relation to Arsenal, we then use our tech and our infrastructure to try and serve you the different types of content that we think you will like. We then watch and track that. And then over time, we'll learn a lot more about you. And then we'll learn a lot more about the types of content that you want more of versus the types of content that you want less of. Have you thought about, I'm sure you have, what metrics you're using, like engagement in the app, engagement in the arsenal from afar.

10:37How does that translate ultimately into what the business ultimately wants in growing the brand? So it's a really interesting question because, you know, if you talk about the funnel, we're looking to try and grow as many people into our ecosystem as possible. So if you have a love of Arsenal, but you're not really engaging with us, and we're trying to reach out to you, mainly through our social media to say, come and find us and we'll show you how great it is to be engaged and to be part of our community. As you come into our own and operated, I'm then being much more sophisticated around how we're trying to serve you different types of content and different experiences.

11:10And then the more I learn about you, the better I will serve you. And the better that we will then develop things that you really enjoy loving and knowing about arsenal okay so that translates into commercial action so yeah so what my team and i measure is engagement okay so the more there's volume and there's engagement and i'm a great believer that the more engaged you are the more that you are feeling part of a community yeah so it's a really similar metric and lots of people say oh if you had a video view for three seconds that's an engaged supporter i want the video view to be significantly longer.

11:43I want you to watch more videos on a more regular basis. I've always said that if you wake up in the morning and you pick up our app and you look at a piece of content on a daily or even a three or four times a week basis, then we are then delivering you what you want, when you want, where you want. For us, that engagement has to be the more that you are in our own and operated channels, the more that we are then better serving you and therefore we can understand you better. And it's a virtuous circle of engagement, support, development. And then there's that wonderful piece of trying to test and learn something that we don't necessarily know that you want to see whether it is something you do want to see more of.

12:21And we're going to try that a lot over the next two or three years, different types of content that might be not what you would call mainstream that we can see. Actually, we think that we can push the way that we tell different stories around the club to our supporters and see whether they want more of that. What is a piece of content in the last couple of years that just popped? You were surprised by the fact that it popped? Around our women's games, we've been looking at doing some really interesting different pieces of content. And through one insight we had is that a lot of single people come to watch, physically come to the stadium to watch our women's games.

12:53It's a safe place. It's a place where they have an amazing experience. And then because you're sitting next to somebody and you're having that shared experience, quite often you start talking. So we had a little bit of insight that people were actually meeting each other at our women's games. So we decided to do a call out to say we wanted to create a dating game. Encourage people, like, do you want to come and be on a blind date through Arsenal? And it went viral, absolutely viral. We had so many people applied to be on the actual experience. Any weddings coming out of this yet? Not yet. Not yet.

13:27But what I love about that is that tells something really insightful about what football is, because it is a community of belonging. So if you go, for example, you come over from California to London, chances are you either know someone here who's going to watch an Arsenal game with you or you'll go, where are all the different supporter clubs? Where will I go and watch a game where I'll find other people who love the club and share that passion? Well, if you think about that, that is like an extraordinary position for a community is that you are always going to find somebody in your community wherever you go in the world.

13:59that's an amazing brand or club to be a part of because there is always something for everybody in Arsenal and I think that's what's so wonderful is that you know our women's games just gave us that little insight because we were bringing new people in who'd never been to football before coming to watch an Arsenal women's game and they were meeting each other. We're going to talk about the women's game in just a second I just want to follow up though but as you've you've been at Arsenal four years now right um it sounds like you know chief commercial officer it sounds like you're the chief content officer.

14:28How much of the team now is actually, you're a publisher, you have editors, you have social media videographers, and you're responsible for this content. So I passionately believe that we have an extraordinary opportunity to use content to tell our stories. I am not the chief content officer. What I'm very lucky to have is I feel like I'm the conductor of an amazing orchestra of curators, but we also have a lot of co-creators in our supporters. So we are really aligned in this ethos around the club that it's us and also our supporters around us helping us co-create, whether they're creating content that we repost or they're being part of helping us develop the right content that they want to know about.

15:10I'm going to ask you one of my favorite Arsenal content creators. He's on YouTube, sure. He's on YouTube. He's on TikTok. He's called Rory. There's Rory Talks Football, Rory Talks Arsenal. What you're describing is brands as content creators and creative engagement marketing, but you have to cede some control, right? You can't do it all yourself. So you have to bring these people into the fold in some capacity and sort of help direct them and steer them. Is there a tension there for you? Like, how does it feel doing that, handing over your brand to other people? First of all, I don't think we hand over the brand because we always co-create.

15:44So co-creating means you work out what you want to do and you do it together. We're not responsible for the content that is developed by a lot of the narrators around arsenal. And long may they last because the more people talking about us, the better, as far as I'm concerned. What we can be in control of is the content we create ourselves and the content that we co-create with many, many different people. And I think that no one really wants us to do anything that's really going to damage the club because we all care so passionately about it. Everyone cares that we have a club that is really passionate around winning major trophies, that is doing it the right way, that has a way of turning up in a one club ethos there's so much strong passion around the club so i don't really feel that many people trying to trip us up who are part of our community coming back to community so so back in the day at google um we've gone through this journey creating content bringing in partners working with people and there's nothing worse than your uncle putting on a leather jacket and turning up at the club and trying to be cool right and so that balance between when we get it right and when to get wrong and there's been occasions where we've turned up kind of wearing the metaphorical leather jacket where it just hasn't worked as you've gone through this journey have there been any moments where you go we just got that wrong and what caused you to get it wrong or to just to be nice let's find one way you've hit it out of the park so what's what's been your favorite content partnership for the last four years what's been a moment where you learned something then we just crossed the line we didn't realize we were crossing my favorite content partnership is when we developed with Aries because we we developed a range of clothing but we also developed a real great strong narrative around what that clothing was and what it stood for.

17:19And we developed the most amazing piece of creative together with the players, filmed in a church. It was a little bit of a play on the word community because church is community and we were creating this. So that for me was a really, really exciting piece of content. Not something that necessarily someone would expect a football club to do, but that's because I generally think that we have that right to play in the culture fashion world in terms of things that we haven't done so well um i would say that sometimes we have tried to sell something you know we've tried to promote again probably through some of our retail but try to promote a product and sell it and we get caught out immediately because actually the supporters are going well you're trying to sell me something here that goes back to my mantra we want to serve our supporters what they want when they want where they want.

18:08Sometimes we've sold them what we want, when we want, where we want. And I would say that making sure we don't revert to that and constantly try and do what we think is right for our supporters, even if we think we're not going to do as well as we would have done if we just kind of volumized and put everything out on mass email. I think ultimately that is the right way to generally be the right type of club that I want us to be because we are building a long-term financially sustainable club. And that means taking the long journey rather than the quick fire, quick sale. Let's talk about the women's game a little bit.

18:44And the starting point here is, can we talk about it from a commercial perspective, right? Arsenal women's soccer team is the most successful soccer team in women's team in the UK. As I understand it, it's the highest revenue generating women's soccer club in the world. So just talk about the business decisions along the way and some of the choices you made to actually scale this women's team and the women's game overall? I've had the great luck throughout my career to do a lot of work in women's sport right from when I was at Adidas back in the day and have always been passionate about it. So Arsenal started our women's team over 40 years ago.

19:20We had, in my opinion, we had the right to genuinely say, let's build something out of this. And we put together a a strategy that was going to like play, originally play a few games at the Emirates and put some marketing money behind. You sold out the Emirates women's games now, right? So yeah, but that's what happened. And I mean, this is about timing and luck and also having a great plan because we wrote a plan, we got the investment in that budget and then our women's team won the Euros. And I will tell you, the night that we won the Euros, Leah Willinson said at the end of the game, she said, this is great.

19:55Thank you everyone for supporting England. Make sure you come and support us in the WSL. We had actually put on our game, our first, we were going to play Arsenal, we're going to play Spurs at the Emirates. It was the first time we're going to play the North London derby for a women's game at the Emirates. And that night, our ticketing system crashed because everybody went on to try and buy tickets. And we knew then that there was something really strong here. But the thing that we did, which I'm so proud of with the team, is that we looked at who bought those tickets and we immediately identified the three different audiences that were really interested in women's football and we use data and insights to build a whole creative campaign to encourage them to come and then we started asking them why we're coming building on understanding why they're coming and then literally investing and in investing the marketing to encourage them to come so if you think about it from a men's game we don't market tickets for a men's football game because we sell out for every game so we had to bring in a whole new set of skills to learn how to sell tickets and we looked at different sports and we looked at how we're going to understand people and this is about understanding what the product is which is different to the men's game and secondly trying to find new audiences because we only sold 18 of those tickets were people who come to our men's games so literally 80 of the people that have been coming to our women's game are a new audience so we needed to learn understand them and then we needed to like understand how to create their environment in the stadium and so this season we've been doing something called block by block and each of the blocks so we sold eight last season we sold 18 ,000 season tickets to our women's games in a mixture of full seasons and then eight games and five game packages so but there are 18 ,000 people who have committed to come every virtually every game so we said to them well let's go block by block and we've done focus groups with them how can we make this your experience and you how can we could shape your experience of the emirates and so they've Some of them have created like TIFOs.

21:49We've worked with them on the music. We had Olivia Smith came to one of the focus groups. What music do the players want to walk out to? So we've created this huge community that is different to the community that comes to our men's games. But they're our women's games community, but they're all part of the Arsenal community, but they have slightly different needs. And so what's been so fascinating is what you would never have imagined that would be a whole new group of people coming. I didn't imagine that i would have assumed that it was going to be you know 80 current men's fans who turn up for the women's and you're saying it's that was a reverse of that only 18 i just want to go back to partnerships again how do you know you're working with someone who you're actually going to work well with and can you tell beforehand yes i'm very lucky that we have an amazing set of partners um we we say no to people that we don't feel that we can we have shared values with because we'll ultimately fail them the best partners in the world are where there's a great united business objective that we think we can deliver our global platform is unbelievable we but we want to make sure that we can deliver on that global platform for our partners and also going back to the supporters we don't want it to jar we don't want it to be something that our supporters go why are they telling me that whereas i would say i could put my hand on my heart and say i I don't think in the last two years we've run a campaign that I wouldn't be proud to share with our supporters on behalf of our partners.

23:14That's a great place to be. I want to, let me ask you a slightly sensitive question. We're also a partner, Google that is, with Liverpool Soccer Club. And at the end of last season, when Mo Salah scored the fifth goal of the game or something, when he scored, he ran over to the sideline and in the game they won the championship. Grabbed a Pixel phone, took a selfie and that selfie was all over the front page of the newspaper. I thought it was great marketing I thought it was brilliant and genius there was some backlash to that so you don't have to comment directly on that but where's the line in terms of being too interruptive too disruptive and how you sort of manage that decision I'm I that was one of the most authentic moments I think that a partner could have ever had because if he hadn't grabbed a pixel and he he would have taken any phone there had to be a pixel because the pixel was there it was handed to them but actually when you win what do you do what you the first thing you want to do is take a photo to remember the moment you want to share it around the world so for me that was the most brilliant brilliant piece of marketing because it didn't jar at all i i could only imagine that a few people go oh it's a bit commercial but i think the majority of people would have gone that's amazing every now and you see something that someone else does you go i wish i'd done that it was such a clever piece of marketing by the uk marketing team here what's the last time you saw something that another sports team has done you went oh that's really smart one of the things i think we've done brilliantly is what we've done with adidas and this is a bit more serious but I think it's important for us so we can do things to launch new products and ranges but one of the things we want we really want to do is we want to make sure that together we do something that actually has resonates and does something important in the community so we run a campaign with them we've done it for the five years of the of the partnership called No More Red so as you know knife crime is a challenge in London and we Arsenal in our community department have been doing projects to try and eliminate and reduce knife crime for years.

25:04What we've done with Adidas is they came to us and said, how can we do something authentic and purposeful in the community and make a difference? And we said, can you help shine a light on the projects we do against knife crime? It's a really simple idea. So a big partner comes together with a project that's quite small, but we're running in our community. They've shined a light on it and promote it globally. And it was probably, I say for the club, we have like 30 million people around the world watching the BBC front page when we first launched it with Idris Elba and various other people talking about the challenges in iCrime.

25:38And we've done it not just once, we've done it every year. And we have a commitment with them throughout our partnership to do something around that every year. That for me is really powerful that we're doing something that's not selling. It's about actually using the platform that we have and they have together to do something that was really, really important in our community. At a practical level, every marketing organization, every company struggles with being one unified team. Everyone's got their own goals and needs and timelines. How have you created that one club ethos and actually getting teams to work together and collaborate and move forward as one?

26:11You could have silos. Silos organizations do not work. What we have is a really united executive and board. Starts from the top from our ownership. Very clear on what we want to achieve with we have a strategy that everybody is signed up to and that strategy we talk about regularly whether it's in our be together forums which is for all of our staff whether it's when we're when i'm helping support as i did some of the image rights deals for some of our players sat alongside eddie when he was doing it with some of the players talking about what we what we're trying to do what we stand for what our brand stands for and how that manifests itself in everything we do across the club.

26:49Having one united marketing function. I don't have a women's marketing function, a men's marketing function. We have a unified function. So we have a very clear strategy and a very clear vision. And everybody knows what we stand for and everybody comes to work knowing their role in what we stand for. That is not easy to achieve. And we have to keep reminding ourselves. We have to keep talking about it. We have to keep prioritizing to make sure that we're not trying to be everything to everybody. But if we are all united together behind what we stand for, we have already begun to see the success off the back of that.