The Sports Commercial Benchmark · In formation, 2026

Every club measures its marketing against its own targets. Almost none can measure it against the market.

Arenamark is the independent commercial performance benchmark for sport — automated, anonymised peer benchmarking of paid media, ecommerce, ticketing and hospitality demand, built on the platforms clubs already use.

The problem

A commercial director can tell you their cost per hospitality inquiry, their shop conversion rate, and their return on ticketing campaigns. What they cannot tell you — because it does not exist anywhere — is whether those numbers are good. Sport benchmarks everything on the pitch. The commercial side of the game has no equivalent.

Connected, not surveyed

Read-only connections to the advertising, analytics and social accounts a club already operates. No new tools, no data entry, no monthly reporting burden.

Benchmarked monthly

Performance classified into the categories boards care about — ticketing, hospitality, retail, audience growth — and compared against anonymised peer groups, every month.

Built on trust

A visible data-quality layer decides what is credible enough to publish. Every figure carries its sample size and provenance. Minimum sample rules are enforced on every benchmark.

Founding Group — Cohort One: Club Football

A benchmark cannot be bought off a shelf. It has to be founded.

Arenamark is being formed around a founding group of 10–15 clubs with meaningful digital commercial operations. Founding members join free for the first season, lock a permanent founding rate, shape the methodology before it becomes the standard, and receive a full multi-season analysis of their own commercial history within weeks of joining.

Governance, in brief

  • No club ever sees another club's data. Members see their own figures and anonymised, aggregated peer context only.
  • No partner, sponsor or investor sees member data. Access is read-only, granted by the club, and revocable.
  • Minimum sample sizes are enforced before any peer benchmark is shown — market context is never dressed up as a benchmark.
  • Only benchmark-ready data enters the pool. Every metric passes automated readiness checks before it can be compared.
  • The benchmark is independent — owned and operated by an independent company, whoever helps convene it.