Crusaders Football Club

Crusaders Football Club is a semi-professional Northern Irish football club playing in the NIFL Premiership. The club hails from Belfast and plays its home matches at Seaview.

In the 2019-2020 UEFA Europa League qualifiers, Crusaders beat FC Torshavn 5-2 on aggregate to reach the second qualifier. They faced the English Premier League side, Wolverhampton Wanderers, where after two legs they were sadly beaten.

This period marked unprecedented demand for tickets and access to games that Crusaders could not manage with their existing infrastructure.

The Club needed a solution, and fast.

Future Ticketing came on-board and working with the Crusaders team they had the platform set up in no time. The new ticketing system now allowed them to:

• Manage high volumes of ticket demand.
• Offer a simple and efficient booking process flow for fans.
• Provide exclusive access for Season Ticket holders and club members.
• Expand their ticketing to include hospitality, off-field events, concerts and boost revenue.

Staff were fully trained to self-manage the dashboard to set up events, provide access control and process orders.

“Crusaders signed up with Future ticketing in 2018 primarily for matches, customer experience and ease of access. However what we’ve seen since implementing Future Ticketing, we discovered the Future Ticketing software which allows us to expand past the single football games to provide for hospitality, corporate events, club events, concerts and other events.

Alongside this, we managed ticket claims for our Europa League games when games were in high demand especially against Wolves FC and local music festivals onsite.

Functionality is easy to use and quick for staff to process orders, set up events and control events.

The customer journey is very simple for our customers, which is important that customers can purchase online or on their phone, arrive at the stadium and scan in very quickly.

We receive a lot of compliments from visiting clubs on how easy the system is to use and a lot of compliments from our own club.”

In 2020, upon reviewing existing processes The club opted to become a cashless stadium and install an Epos solution in their restaurant. Crusaders, Future Ticketing and Facilipay together provided a RFID smart card solution with their Epos provider Clover. Using the Future Ticketing Ticket Store app Crusaders can sell food and beverages alongside tickets within their branded app.