Club 1885: Redefining Fan Engagement at Újpest FC

If someone had told us a year ago that launching a new loyalty program wouldn’t be about testing free coffee vouchers, hot dog coupons, or fuel discounts, but instead about football shirts, caps, and season passes, we would never have believed them.

And yet, here we are. On July 1, we successfully launched Club 1885, Újpest FC’s brand-new fan engagement and loyalty program. Thanks to its incredible start, it quickly became the most popular sports app in Hungary. But before we jump too far ahead, let’s take a step back and see how it all began.

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Where it started

In early 2024, MOL became part of Újpest’s journey. From the very beginning, it was clear that the club could benefit significantly—even in the short term—by introducing a digital loyalty and fan engagement program, leveraging the expertise and knowledge accumulated within MOL Group’s Digital Factory.

It is important to emphasize that Club 1885 is not just another mobile application, but much more than that: a fully digital loyalty and fan engagement platform. It effectively supports the club’s marketing, communication, ticketing, and merchandise activities, while also strengthening fan connection and engagement. In this way, it helps the club achieve key goals such as:

• Enhancing fan satisfaction and loyalty, and elevating communication with supporters to a new level—a particularly important objective given that the relationship between the club and fans has not always been seamless in recent years.
• Attracting more fans to matches and filling the stadium, since home games are the ultimate highlight for any football club.
• Strengthening and optimizing merchandise sales, making the fan experience both more engaging and more rewarding.

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Building the concept

With these objectives in mind, we began designing the concept of Club 1885, building it on four main pillars:

1. MOL Move’s capabilities – Already offering a wide range of features—such as communication journeys, promotions, gamification, and advanced personalization—we believed these could work just as effectively in sports as in retail, significantly boosting fan engagement.
2. The club’s dedicated staff – Beyond being highly skilled professionals, they are also passionate football fans and loyal Újpest supporters. Their deep knowledge of the community brought forward countless ideas, needs, and challenges gathered over the years.
3. Industry benchmarks and trends – We examined current best practices in the sports industry, looking at both major international clubs and teams more comparable to Újpest in size and history, as well as those pioneering innovative fan engagement solutions.
4. Direct input from fans – Finally, we asked supporters themselves—through surveys and face-to-face conversations—about their expectations, their pain points with the current setup, and the features they would value most in a fan engagement program.

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What Club 1885 offers

After countless workshops, research sessions, and discussions, the scope of the program came together—one that we believe will help the club fully achieve its goals. Like MOL Move, Club 1885 is built on Salesforce CRM, Loyalty, and Marketing Cloud, but its backbone consists of brand-new features designed specifically for the unique fan journey:

• More than an app: Club 1885 is a loyalty and fan engagement platform that strengthens the bond between the club and its supporters through continuous communication, exclusive content, regular offers, and personalized promotions.
• Loyalty tiers: By collecting points, fans can progress to higher levels. In addition to an exclusive welcome gift, each tier unlocks increasingly exciting discounts and rewards.
• Earning points: Fans collect loyalty points by attending home matches, and through ticket and merchandise purchases, enabling them to climb tiers and access greater benefits.
• Exclusive content: Perhaps the most exciting feature for fans is the news feed, where members get access to live streams of friendly matches, interviews, photo galleries, quizzes, and early access to many updates.
• Ticketing: Supporters can buy both season tickets and single match tickets directly in the app. Season tickets for the 2025/26 campaign, for example, were available exclusively to members during the first two days, and discount vouchers can be redeemed seamlessly.
• Merchandise: Fans can also collect points at the official store and enjoy benefits such as tier-based discounts, promotional campaigns, exclusive gifts, and personalized offers.

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Early results and learnings

Although the program was only recently launched, we are already seeing valuable insights:

• Based on the overwhelmingly positive reception and skyrocketing uptake, it’s clear there was strong demand for a loyalty and engagement program like this. Within a short time, tens of thousands of supporters had joined.
• There is a real openness among fans to digital solutions. The large number of early registrations and the record sales of season tickets through the app in its first days both demonstrate this.
• The program is already proving its power in activating the fan base on multiple levels. Thanks to direct, segmented, multichannel communication, supporters are actively using the app, consuming news and content, and participating in quizzes in large numbers. We also see how well-timed push notifications can shift ticket sales dynamics and how much easier it is to encourage Club 1885 members to attend matches compared to the wider fan base.
• And last but not least, the club has taken a significant step forward in understanding its fan base. By collecting data through activities such as attending home games, participating in campaigns, and making transactions like ticket or merchandise purchases, the club is already gaining valuable insights into supporters’ preferences and habits—insights that will shape future initiatives and make the program even more relevant and personalized.

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Looking ahead

Our journey with Újpest FC and the members of Club 1885 is far from over—the second half has only just begun. On the one hand, there is significant potential to further increase the program’s impact by building on experiences from MOL Move and on the learnings from Club 1885 so far, supported by feedback, results, and the wealth of available data. On the other hand, Club 1885 is not a finished product. At its launch we laid the foundations of a platform that can always be expanded with useful and exciting new features—taking an already exceptional loyalty and fan engagement program to even greater heights.

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