How sport extends the experience around the fixture, fills the stands and earns beyond the ticket, and how to build it without a bad first year.
Sport used to compete with sport. Now it competes with festivals, competitive socialising, light trails, family days out, club nights and every niche experience a family, a teenager, a group of mates or a music fan could choose for a Saturday, in every town and every community. The clubs, venues and rights holders growing fastest have stopped treating the fixture as the only product.
It is already happening. Silverstone put 564,000 people through the gates across the 2026 British Grand Prix weekend, a record, with David Guetta drawing the biggest Thursday crowd in the circuit's history before a single F1 car was on track. The music did not replace the racing. It sold the race weekend. Tottenham Hotspur have permission for 30 major non-football events a year. Atlético Madrid have signed a 10-year deal for up to 20 concerts a year at the Metropolitano. The Hundred put 2.5m people through the turnstiles in its first 5 seasons, 41% in family groups, and sold equity in all 8 teams. Padel has gone from 15,000 players in Britain to 1m in 7 years.
This session brings together the people who have built new experiences from existing audiences, carried the risk on them with their own money, and sold them again the following year, alongside the clubs and venues working out how to do it inside a stadium. In 60 minutes, hosted by mustard, we set out what the Festivalisation of Sport™ actually is and what it is not, where it is already earning across the UK and Europe, where it goes wrong, and what it takes to make a new product for a sports audience work in year one and come back in year two.
It is built for the people who have to make the numbers work as much as the people who sign them off: the marketing director handed a new product to sell, the head of ticketing with fixtures that will not fill, the commercial director looking for revenue the fixture list will not give. Expect a definition you can take to your board, evidence you can quote, and an honest conversation about risk from people who have lived it. The full agenda and guest speakers will be announced to everyone who has signed up first.
Built for the people who have to sell it. Marketing directors, heads of marketing, heads of ticketing, heads of digital and heads of fan engagement at clubs, governing bodies, leagues, promoters, racecourses, circuits and stadium operators, alongside the commercial directors, CEOs and owners who sign off the plan. If your job is to fill the fixture, launch the new product or find the audience for either, this is for you.
Built by operators, proven in sport
We spent 13 years filling fields, arenas and warehouses for brands with no fixture list, no season ticket base and no home advantage. Some were the biggest names in the experience economy, Reading & Leeds, Parklife, Kendal Calling, Camp Bestival, where the job is to sell most of the audience again every year, because a festival keeps 10% to 30% of its crowd from one year to the next. Others we launched from a standing start: Christmas at Bute Park sold 40,000 tickets in 48 hours in year one, Afro Nation sold out its 20,000 debut in 48 hours. Growing an established brand and building a new one are different jobs, and sport is about to need both.
We festivalised an artist before anyone festivalised a sport. Annie Mac's Lost & Found in Malta, which we created, sold 8,000 tickets in its opening days and ran for the best part of a decade. Take the artist away and it disappears. Same test, different asset.
In sport we are the growth partner behind Aston Villa Women, where season ticket sales grew 245% year on year, Liverpool FC Women, Birmingham Phoenix in The Hundred, where ticket sales rose 47% and 7m people were reached on TikTok, Southampton FC at St Mary's, BOXXER, Baller League UK and Team GB. Women's football, franchise cricket, boxing, a stadium, a streamer-led league and a national team. Selling the sport is the day job, and those results are the proof we understand how a sports audience books, which is what you need before you build anything new for them. We are operators as well as partners, which is where the booker behaviour, pricing and on-sale knowledge underneath every strategy comes from.
Once there is a product and an empty room, our job begins: bring it to market, work out who the audience actually is, find them, price for them, sell to them, build a fan base that belongs to the club, and make the growth predictable using Experience Economics™. mustard is the growth partner for the experience economy, and a festivalised product is an experience brand from the day it launches.
The word festivalisation has been used in sports-event and academic circles since 2014 to describe cultural programming around major events. Ours is the commercial definition, for clubs, venues and rights holders, measured in revenue. We defined it and registered Festivalisation of Sport™ as a UK trade mark in 2025 because we think it is the defining commercial shift in sport for the next decade, and because we have been on both sides of it: the partner that sells the tickets and the operator who has to sell them again next year.
Co-Founder of Mustard and CEO of Mustard Entertainment will host the panel which will be announced in due course
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Festivalisation of Sport™ is the shift from selling a fixture to building an entertainment brand around it. It is every new experience a sport, a team or a venue builds off the back of the sport, its fans, its spaces and its calendar, and every pound it earns from them: new revenue beyond the fixture, and more people and more spend at the fixture itself. The concert in the stadium. The fan zone before kick-off. The new format. The matchday rebuilt as a day out. Take the sport away and a festivalised product disappears. It extends the experience around the fixture: before it, after it and on the days it is not on.
