Sports Building hype and excitement about Sydney FC’s return to their spiritual ground

Headquarters: Sydney, Australia
Technology Stack: Storyblok, Next.js, Vercel

Sydney FC is one of the founding members of Australia’s A league. They are the most successful club in terms of trophies won: 31 trophy wins in their 16-year history created by local heroes, local legends, and world-famous players. They are a club committed to the community, with the goal of introducing children across Australia to the joy of football.

Sydney FC are incredibly proud of their new stadium, which opened its doors in August 2022 and allowed Sydney FC to come back home after being 4 years on the road. Having an online presence that allows Sydney FC to portray their excitement about being home at the Allianz Stadium and digitizing the stadium experience was a task they tasked Herbert Digital with. Herber Digital, a Storyblok Certified Partner, love bringing digital ideas, products, and experiences to life. They have helped their clients innovate on their digital products and platforms, from discovery, research, UX, and design to full-stack engineering, delivery, and ongoing support. Herbert Digital built the Sydney FC stadium website with all its revolutionary features in just 4 months.

The challenge of building online hype and excitement

The Sydney FC stadium features superior views from every seat and a roofline that keeps in the noise. When The Cove starts singing and the drums start beating, the sound flows through the stadium and gives a point of difference from other sports. The facilities are also exceptional. Being able to walk around the whole concourse and not miss a minute of the action is not something Australians have seen before.

However, back in 2018, the club had to embark on a 4-year journey during which they played on suburban grounds on different sites across Sydney to allow for the aged Allianz Stadium to be rebuilt from the ground up so they can have the wondrous new stadium they have today. This was exhausting for the Sydney FC fans and members. So, about two years before their return, as they were getting hyped about coming back home, Sydney FC's team realized they needed to find a way to build that same level of hype and excitement with their fans.

Therefore, Sydney FC partnered with Herbert Digital with the goal of building hype and excitement about the club’s return to their spiritual home ground and their newly built stadium opening in August of 2022. The following challenges had to be overcome:

• Build a website where members, fans, and corporates will be able to easily find and lock in the member packages, seat selection, and hospitality packages available in the new stadium well before the first game.

• Build a one-stop shop for Sydney FC supporters.

• Meet a very strict deadline to go live, well before the first game.

• Populate and manage the site content with an idiot-proof Content Management System that allows for easy onboarding and independence for the content team.

A new and interactive stadium site with Storyblok

The site experience offers supporters a one-stop shop for all Sydney Football Stadium news and information. It features a unique Experience Selector that allows visitors to pick the best seats for their circumstances, including the atmosphere they want to enjoy and the groups of people they want to sit with. This specially designed tool allows businesses to find the perfect Hospitality Option for their clients and staff. Lastly, the website provides all the information necessary for the different types of memberships and the experiences included in those membership packages.

Storyblok’s Content Management Platform (CMS) played an enormous role in building the stadium website as it provided the following benefits:

• Best-of-breed technology: Since Sydney FC needed best-of-breed technology that allows them to create, edit, and deliver content for their members, fans, and business organizations, Storyblok’s CMS was the perfect match.

• Easy to use: Storyblok satisfied the content team's need for a tool that was extremely easy to use and provided them with the best editor experience in terms of speed, independence, and creative freedom.

• Intuitive UI: The Sydney FC content team was able to approach the project and populate content with minimal training, which was their requirement.

• Visual Editor: The ability to see changes in real-time was a real game changer in meeting the deadline for populating all the content to the new website.

• Responsive CMS: In the development process, Storyblok was able to adapt to the changes and updates that the Sydney FC team required.

From Herbert Digital's perspective, Storyblok checks all of the boxes for a great CMS, too, in regards to pricing, the flexibility of content modeling, the ease with which one can access the APIs, the easy way in which it integrates with other technologies, and the availability of great documentation and information on how to get started and use the CMS.

Using Storyblok while working on the Sydney FC project was a pleasure, especially in those moments when being responsive to changes and updates was very important, according to Adrian Hoess, the Founder of Herbert Digital. In those cases where Herbert needed to add additional pricing or member categories, they found it very easy to adjust quickly because of the ability to create a flexible content strategy from the start. This also enabled the Sydney FC team to complete, add and change things fast and painlessly.

One of the biggest project challenges was mapping all the different seat and membership options with the questions and responses from the Experience Selector. However, with the combination of data sources and the ability to create different stories and different structures, it was easy to execute this task.

Sydney FC’s primary membership hub

From start to finish, the new site, with all its revolutionary features, was built in just 4 months. Thanks to Storyblok’s Visual Editor, Sydney FC was able to populate the whole site content in the CMS in just two weeks over the Christmas holidays!

What’s astonishing is that after being launched, in 2022, the page had close to 300K page views and over 1 million page events. Moreover, their Match Day Attendance increased by 228% year-on-year while Match Day Revenues were up by 370%.

Lastly, the site was built out for the initial project brief - the idea of creating a website that allowed Sydney FC to return to the stadium and sell memberships in year one. The team never really planned to continue using the website past that period. However, having seen the success and the ability to use Storyblok to manipulate what was required in terms of content, as well as its cost, they quickly realized that it was a no-brainer to continue using the site as their primary membership hub.