Ticketing has never been more central to the success of clubs and event organizers. What used to be a simple access point is now expected to drive revenue, engage fans, and provide reliable data for smarter decisions. The industry is only getting bigger: the global ticketing market is set to reach nearly $85 billion in 2025, while revenues from women’s elite sports alone are projected to pass $2.35 billion, more than double what they were just a few years ago. At the same time, organizers face growing pressure: legacy tools that don’t evolve fast enough, rising expectations from fans, and the need to do more with fewer resources.

To unpack these shifts, we spoke with Hugo, EVENTORI’s Head of Product. Hugo has been leading EVENTORI’s product since its very first lines of code, building the roadmap in close collaboration with clubs and organizers. With more than 10 years of experience across sports, IT, and product management, Hugo brings a unique perspective shaped by both the business and technical sides of ticketing.

Before EVENTORI, he managed digital transformation projects at organizations that led Tour de France, La Vuelta, Paris Marathon etc. He led complex IT and product initiatives in GDPR-compliant contexts for major enterprises. This mix of large-scale sports event operations and hands-on product leadership gives him first-hand insight into the real challenges organizers face, and how modern ticketing tools need to evolve.

How Has the Role of Ticketing Changed for Event Organizers in Recent Years?

Hugo: Ticketing has moved far beyond its traditional role as a simple access point to an event. For many clubs, it has become a strategic pillar of revenue. With TV rights under pressure in markets like France, organizers are increasingly turning to ticketing as a way to generate direct, controllable income.

This shift means that ticketing is no longer just an operational task. It is now about stabilizing revenues over time, deepening fan engagement, and leveraging data to create value. By integrating ticketing into broader “know your customer” strategies like identifying behaviors and consumption habits of fans for instance; clubs can turn one-off transactions into sustainable financial performance.

A telling example comes from AS Monaco Basket where the expansion of their arena combined with strong sporting results; pushed ticketing revenues to the next level. The challenge today is ensuring this kind of growth becomes consistent and predictable. That’s where revenue management strategies play a vital role.

Hugo’s Industry Insight: The global online event ticketing market was valued at $58.2B in 2024 and is projected to grow to $104.7B by 2032. This projected growth reflects why organizers can no longer treat ticketing as just an operation. It will become one of the fastest-growing revenue channels in the events ecosystem.

What Are Customers Asking for Now That They Weren't 2–3 Years Ago?

Hugo: Revenue Management and dynamic pricing are currently the most in-demand capabilities.

Beyond this, many sports clubs are focusing on improving their data quality. This helps them generate more accurate reports that reflect their current position. In the sports industry, IT ecosystems are typically quite complex. Organizations are working to consolidate different data sources under one umbrella for easier extraction.

This data-driven ticketing is crucial for CRM strategic communication plans and significantly impacts ticketing strategies as they are investing considerable effort in talking to the right customer at the right time.

A good example is how organizers engage with season ticket holders, encouraging them to book extra tickets early gives the club a clearer view of demand. With that visibility, pricing can be adjusted, boosting occupancy for lower-demand matches while maximizing revenue for higher-demand ones.

Hugo’s Industry Insight: FIFA’s decision to use dynamic pricing for the 2026 World Cup shows how mainstream dynamic pricing has become. Encouraging early bookings from season ticket holders to predict demand follows this principle. The earlier clubs can see demand patterns, the more effectively they can use pricing to boost occupancy for low-demand events and maximize revenue for high-demand ones.

What Are Some Overlooked Ways Ticketing Impacts Event Success?

Hugo: I would say that there are three ways that event ticketing can impact success:

1. Brand Identity and Conversion:

There are typically three main ways users land on a ticketing platform:

• First, they might search for it directly
• Second, they might navigate from the official website of the event or organization.
• Third, they might click through from external communications like newsletters, marketing campaigns, or social media posts.

When users land directly on the ticketing system, it's their first touchpoint with the organization. The platform needs to feel embedded within the organizer's ecosystem. This is crucial for brand image and conversion rates.

2. Cross-Selling:

Beyond basic ticketing, there's significant leverage in cross-selling in ticketing today. The question becomes: "I'm selling tickets, but how can I offer more value?" This might include experiences, food and beverage packages, merchandising, or VIP packages. This diversifies the offering. For one of our clients, VIP packages ranged between 3 - 10% in overall revenue.

Ticketing serves as an entry point. The basic purchase that brings fans into the club's activity. But beyond just providing access, you can create diverse offerings that enhance the customer experience.

3. Resale:

Resale capabilities are another important offering. They can be viewed as an additional service that optimizes both revenue (through extra transactions) and occupancy rates. Resale helps prevent empty seats when ticket holders can't attend (what we call "no-shows"). Having full stands contributes significantly to event success, and offering resale services helps reduce no-shows while increasing final occupancy.

However, the timing of resale options depends on sales trends. For one-time events where the service aspect is less emphasized, resale makes sense primarily when you're confident the event will sell out. If you enable resale for an event projected to be only 60% full, you'll negatively impact direct sales and you'll earn less from resale than from direct sales. Opening resale isn't always the right move; and prediction models can help you make this decision by giving you the best insight.

Hugo’s Industry Insight: The sports hospitality market which includes VIP packages, is projected to grow from $15 billion in 2024 to over $74 billion by 2036. It shows that fans are demanding richer experiences. Which means that early bookings and dynamic pricing need to be paired with tailored, high-value offers to increase the fan spend.

What Are the Common Challenges Organizers Face With Ticketing Today?

Hugo: There are several common challenges organizers face with ticketing today. Many of them come down to using too many different tools and spending too much time on support instead of strategy.

What we hear most:

• Too many systems: When front-office, back-office, access control, and CRM all come from different providers, data doesn’t flow smoothly. Fragmented ticketing systems mean integration challenges between systems, creating gaps in data where "real-time" isn't truly real-time anymore.
• Evolving needs: The industry today expects more from their platforms: revenue management, automation, analytics, and real-time data built into the flow. These needs have grown quickly, and many clubs are opting for solutions that help them move faster.
• Choice & flexibility: Some organizations operate in environments where their options are limited, which can make it harder to test new approaches or customize strategies. Flexibility is becoming a major priority.
• Moments of peak demand: Be it a finals match or a big concert on-sale, systems need to handle sudden spikes without adding stress for staff. Managers want reassurance that these high-stakes moments will run smoothly.
• Heavy support load: Teams are looking to reduce their day-to-day customer support and operational activity load. They have hundreds of thousands of customers to manage, and it can be extremely time-consuming. They would achieve much better return on investment by focusing on data analysis, CRM strategies, and revenue management, rather than spending hours addressing customer issues.

What good looks like:

• One platform that combines ticketing, CRM, access control, and revenue management.
• A roadmap that moves fast, shaped by client input.
• User-friendly design that reduces support needs.
• Reliable, real-time data that teams can trust when making decisions.

One of our clients, Grenoble Bruleurs de Loups has highly benefited from leveraging an all-in-solution. Speaking of this, the General Manager Alexandre Duyck says,

“The team now tracks real-time scanning curves and can adjust security on the go. VIPs are onboarded smoothly, even via phone. Seats are added directly into customer accounts. No PDF juggling. I check EVENTORI multiple times a day. In two clicks, I know where we are.”

Hugo’s Industry Insight: Less than 50% of sports organizations collect first-party fan data through web logins, and only 32.4% use single sign-on (SSO). This gap explains the point about fragmented ecosystems. Without strong foundations for data, real-time analytics and smarter ticketing remain out of reach.

What Does "Smart Ticketing" Mean to You?

Hugo: “Smart” is a word that gets used everywhere, but in ticketing it should mean something concrete: tools that save time, reduce manual work, and guide better decisions.

On one hand, it’s about ease of use: platforms that are quick to set up and take the complexity out of daily operations. On the other, it’s about being data-centric: processing information continuously in the background so teams no longer need to export spreadsheets and piece things together manually.

The “smart” part comes from automation and machine learning. Models can detect patterns, forecast demand, and suggest the best actions far more effectively than humans working in Excel. This allows ticketing managers to shift away from routine operational tasks and take on a more strategic role. Closer to revenue and pricing managers.

Hugo’s Industry Insight: The global AI in sports market is projected to reach $19B by 2030, with ticketing and fan engagement being among the top growth areas. For ticketing, this means that using machine learning to detect patterns, forecast demand and guide decisions is going to become paramount. We will see a shift in the role from manual operations to analytics-driven strategy.

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Do Modern Expectations (Mobile-First, Seamless UX, Instant Personalization) Complicate Strategy?

Hugo: At first glance, rising expectations around mobile-first design, seamless user experience, and personalization might seem like added complexity. But in reality, they actually help organizers prioritize than complicate.

For organizers, these expectations mean ticketing platforms must deliver a clean, mobile-ready experience by default. That’s not a burden, it’s a basic necessity. The shift is less about adding complexity, and more about raising the standard of what a good fan experience should look like.

Not every organizer has the same resources. Some have large marketing teams that want deep customization; others have a single person managing ticketing alongside multiple other roles. A good platform should adapt to both: offering simple, ready-to-use setups for lean teams, while giving larger organizations the flexibility to go deeper.

Hugo’s Industry Insight: Mobile is now the default. In the U.S., over 80% of live event tickets were delivered digitally in 2024, and that share continues to climb. Mobile-first and seamless UX aren’t just “nice extras,” providers should adapt them to serve both lean and well-staffed teams.

What Are Some Misconceptions About Revenue Management?

Hugo: Dynamic pricing often gets a bad reputation, but much of it comes from misunderstanding. There are three outstanding myths that I have on my mind.

Myth 1: Dynamic pricing just makes tickets more expensive.

Reality: The primary goal is to increase occupancy. Yes, prices may rise for sold-out games, but most clubs don’t sell out every match. Revenue management helps fill empty seats, which in turn drives more overall revenue.

Myth 2: Tools can make these decisions automatically.

Reality: AI in ticketing can forecast demand, spot patterns, and suggest strategies far better than manual spreadsheets. But organizers still need to weigh operational costs, like whether opening an extra stand is worth the added staffing expense.

Myth 3: Dynamic pricing only benefits big clubs.

Reality: Smaller clubs actually stand to gain the most. Filling more seats not only boosts ticketing revenue but also improves the matchday experience and secondary revenues like food, beverage, and merchandise.

Hugo’s Industry Insight: Combined matchday revenue for the top 20 clubs passed €2.1 billion, growing 11% year-on-year, and making it the fastest-growing revenue stream. This is indication that the industry is looking to adopt new ways to take advantage of the revenue opportunity. A good revenue management tool will help you make the best out of this industry shift.

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How Can Organizer Feedback Prepare Ticketing Tools For the Future?

Hugo: Listening to organizers has directly shaped EVENTORI’s roadmap. Two recent examples show how practical feedback turns into real improvements.

• Flexible ticketing fees: Some organizers needed to clearly separate ticket prices from service or processing fees for accounting and marketing reasons. At first, the only option was to include everything in the ticket price. Based on their input, we added configurable fees that can be tailored by product or sales channel.
• Product bundles with flexible VAT: Organizers also asked for more complex product structures that combine tickets with other services, like food and beverage, into one seamless purchase. This required us to support multiple VAT rates within a single transaction. The result is a user-centric bundle system that allows clubs to package offers more creatively, simplify checkout for fans, and handle accounting requirements in the background.

Both of these improvements came directly from listening to client needs and turning their frustrations into product features that deliver value.

Hugo’s Industry Insight: In PwC’s 2024 Global Sports Survey, 72% of clubs said their biggest need from technology providers is “flexibility to build bundled and personalized offers.” This is exactly the kind of demand that can drive product roadmap changes and prepare ticketing tools for the future.

What Are Some Other Emerging Trends in Ticketing?

Hugo: A few key ticketing trends are starting to define what comes next in the industry.

First is revenue management and dynamic pricing becoming standard practice. What was once an innovation is quickly turning into an expectation, with more clubs and organizers adopting dynamic pricing to balance demand and maximize results. FIFA has already confirmed it will use dynamic pricing for the 2026 World Cup, with tickets ranging from $60 for group-stage matches to over $6,700 for the final

Second is gamification and loyalty. Borrowing from examples like Spotify Wrapped or SNCF’s yearly travel recap, organizers are looking for creative ways to celebrate fans, reward loyalty, and build deeper engagement. Whether it’s “top fan” badges, season summaries, or exclusive rewards, these digital experiences make fans feel recognized and valued. The momentum is clear: the global gamification market is expected to reach $21–27 billion in 2025, and could soar to nearly $190 billion by 2034

Finally, there’s a shift toward simplicity. Organizers are moving away from endlessly complex offers and focusing instead on proven revenue levers (like pricing and segmentation) that deliver results without overwhelming fans. The market scale shows why: the sports ticketing segment alone is projected to reach $70 billion in 2025.

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Last But Not The Least, How Do You See The Role of A Ticketing Manager Evolve?

Hugo: The industry in increasingly looking for new ways to be proactive on the ticketing front. This means, making sure that every minute detail is taken into account. Sometimes these minute details when spotted at the right time, can increase ticketing revenue drastically.

Pricing will be one part of the evolution, but the role is diversifying. Ticketing now sits at the intersection of revenue, CRM, and fan experience; and managers are expected to have a hand in all three.

That shift changes the skillset. Yes, spotting pricing opportunities can boost revenue in a single match. But knowing how to use data to run smarter campaigns, personalize offers, and create fan journeys is important to bring people back.

Hugo’s Industry Insight: According to Deloitte’s 2025 Global Sports Outlook, the industry is becoming more professionalized and data-driven, with increasing competition and pressure to expand on fan engagement. This insight shows how ticketing managers of tomorrow will be evaluated not only on ticket sales, but their role in CRM, pricing, and fan experience strategy.

This is why clubs need solutions that can support this shift and evolve with them.

It’s the best time to start your journey towards staying ahead in the market. Talk to one of our product experts to get an insight on our ticketing solution, EVENTORI. Book a demo now.

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