What this looks like when a front office does it right.
These aren't hypotheticals. They're results from front offices Josh Mason has run or advised — told with the real numbers, including the parts that didn't work.
We gave away 46,000 fewer tickets — and set an attendance record.
In 2018 the club distributed 62,952 complimentary tickets — 36.4% of everyone in the building. Comps devalued the product, corrupted the demand data, and masked weak paid growth. But comps also did real work in the community, so we didn't kill them. We redirected them: 2,500 tickets preserved for community organizations across 37 standing commitments, habitual giveaways eliminated, and the freed-up energy invested in season-ticket conversion.
Paid attendance share rose from 63.6% to 91.2% while total attendance set a club record — 182,457 across 20 dates. Full-season equivalent units more than doubled, 3,505 → 7,334 (+109%), and total stadium revenue reached $3.26M. The detail that proves the point: paid attendees bought merchandise at 2.4x the rate of comped ones. People value what they pay for — and your per-caps know it before your surveys do.
Six people to five thousand — three years before the first kickoff.
In 2011 Indianapolis had no professional soccer team, so six people started building the community a team would need. Watch parties in borrowed bar space. Brewery partnerships. Chants written for players who didn't exist yet. Scarves for a club with no name, then a name, then a registered 501(c)3. By the time Indy Eleven played its inaugural match in April 2014, the Brickyard Battalion stood 5,000+ supporters strong — public, organized proof of demand that helped make the club possible at all.
The front-office lesson: supporter culture is not a marketing output. It's an asset that predates the product, and the clubs that treat it that way get to launch with a full end instead of an empty one.
We were only measuring 6% of our media. So we fixed the definition of "done."
Across TV, radio, print, outdoor, and digital, only 6% of the media buy could be verified as actually delivered — the other 94% ran on vendor invoices and trust. Three structural changes fixed it: a buy isn't done at invoice, only at verified delivery; verification was built into every vendor conversation and reporting cadence; and channel CPM benchmarks were computed from actual delivery instead of industry averages.
The theme night that became the biggest revenue generator in club history.
Indianapolis already had a sports identity — racing — so instead of competing with it, Racing Indy Night borrowed it. A partnership with the Indianapolis Motor Speedway put IndyCar driver Jack Harvey alongside Indy Eleven's Cam Lindley; WTHR's Chuck Lofton wore the gear on air; and the crossover gave two fan bases a reason to sit in the same stadium.
It became the largest revenue-generating single item in club history and drove 20%+ growth in net-new gameday attendees and database fans — supporters the club had never reached through soccer messaging alone. And the real test of a matchday platform: it outlived its creator's tenure, running on after Josh left because it belonged to the fans, not to a staff member.
Nivel de Cancha: a new audience, not a translation.
The obvious move for Spanish-language content is to translate what you already make. Nivel de Cancha did the opposite: original Spanish-language programming built for how that audience actually follows the game — its own hosts, its own voice, its own rhythm. The result wasn't the existing audience served twice. It was a new audience the club's fan data had never contained, entering the database through a door built specifically for them.
The front-office lesson: audience development isn't localization. If your Spanish-language strategy is a translated press release, you don't have a Spanish-language strategy — you have a checkbox.
XI Century Club: the loyalty milestone nobody was tracking.
Clubs count everything a player does — appearances, minutes, goals. They count almost nothing a supporter does. The XI Century Club flipped that: the club began awarding supporters "appearances" exactly as it does players, and built the data infrastructure to actually know when milestones happen. It also opened the questions that matter — when was your first match versus when did you become a member, and what experiences carried you from one to the other? Each milestone earned reinforcement: a message from a favorite player, a surprise in the mail, a seat upgrade. The concept grew into the first fully integrated fan loyalty platform in world football — proof these ideas scale from a minor-league theme night to the biggest clubs in the sport.
The first app failed. The second one had a reason to exist.
Indy Eleven's first app didn't meet expectations — it served supporters nothing they couldn't already get from the website. That's the honest part, and it's also the diagnosis: an app without a purpose is a website with an install step. The rebuild started with the end in mind: what behaviors do we want to reinforce? What can we learn about our supporters we can't learn anywhere else? How does a phone in a fan's pocket make the matchday itself better?
The flagship answer was The Eleven Q — an in-app trivia show hosted pregame, at halftime, and post-match, streamed straight to supporters' phones with real prizes on the line. Built with partner The Q in 2020, it kept fans who couldn't or wouldn't come to the stadium playing along live — engagement, and engagement data, from every supporter no matter where they sat.
Back Home Again: the campaign built in weeks — with a punk anthem.
The 2020 campaign, "Victory Is Ours," was built with the INNOVATIVE agency and never got its season — COVID saw to that. When 2021 brought a late decision to return to Michael A. Carroll Stadium, the team had weeks, not months, to build a campaign. "Back Home Again" leaned into exactly what the moment meant to Indianapolis — and then broke the script: a local punk band, the crew behind Punk Rock Night at the Melody Inn (one of Indy's oldest punk bars), recorded a punk version of "Back Home Again" that ran in advertising and blasted through the stadium every time a goal went in.
That's what surprise and delight looks like operationally: not a bigger budget, but a piece of local culture no other club could copy, placed where the emotion already peaks.
Own the one market you should dominate.
Surrounded by bigger competitors pulling talent and attention out of the region — Chicago Fire and FC Cincinnati among them — the club couldn't win an arms race. So the strategy went where the big clubs weren't: the recreational youth level. Build the foundation with clubs, coaches, volunteers, kids, and parents; turn kids into soccer enthusiasts early; keep them playing longer; and give them a club to aspire to. Not an academy skimming the top one percent — a pipeline that makes the whole market bigger and makes Indy Eleven its default club.
The front-office lesson: fan development and player development are the same funnel. A seven-year-old in a rec league is a season-ticket household today and a supporter for life tomorrow — if the club shows up first.
Four clubs, three NFL stadiums, one measurement problem.
Manchester United, West Ham, Everton and Bournemouth at MetLife, Soldier Field and Mercedes-Benz Stadium — with the league, every club, Ticketmaster, the venues and media partners all marketing independently. Engaged by Relevent Sports to help lead marketing operations, the job was building what nobody owned: the connective tissue. A prescribed UTM architecture across every partner, a tracking plan designed before on-sale — registration capture, GA4 and Tag Manager, promo and QR codes, Ticketmaster transaction reporting — and sixteen data sources reconciled into one commercial view.
The data changed the playbook. March 13's on-sale moved 44,629 tickets in a single day — an on-sale is an event, not a date. Roughly 35% of sales still came in the final 30 days, so the budget needs more than one conversion window. Email returned 24.8x and search 16.9x as closers. Static creative beat video by 2.6x on cost inside the same platform. And even after cleaning and reattribution, 52.6% of tracked transaction value still read "direct" — proof that the transaction is easy to see and the journey that created it is not, and the case for persistent, designed-in measurement at every club.
Club operator. Data vendor. Same model.
Josh has run this playbook from inside a front office (VP of Marketing & Strategy, Indy Eleven — USL Marketing Executive of the Year, 2021) and from the vendor side at Pumpjack Dataworks, where fan-data platforms served Real Madrid, The Masters, Inter Miami CF, FC Dallas, and LIV Golf — plus U.S. marketing intelligence for the Premier League Summer Series with Relevent Sports. The model on this site is the one those organizations use, sized for yours.