With 34 championship titles in 125 years of club history FC Bayern Munich one of the largest and most successful sports clubs in the world. The club has gained a large audience worldwide: more than 200 million followers follow the club’s social media channels and up to 75,000 spectators come to every home game of the men’s team. The club’s other teams, such as the women’s soccer team and the men’s basketball team, also enjoy a steadily growing fan base.

Keeping FC Bayern at the top is no easy task. In order to offer the fans who visit the Allianz Arena for every home game an optimal experience, thousands of employees are deployed on match days. In addition, the game is supported by an administrative team with over 1,200 employees worldwide. The focus on match day operations covers all conceivable aspects, from security to ticket sales and admission to shops and the management of one of the largest car parks in Europe, where up to 12,000 cars drive in and out within a few hours.

FC Bayern’s matchday operations also generate a huge volume of data, making recording and analyzing every fan interaction – both from fans in the stadium and from the hundreds of millions of virtual viewers worldwide – a herculean task. Data about fan activity was stored in more than 50 separate legacy systems, resulting in a fragmented information landscape. It was therefore not easy for FC Bayern to understand the supporters’ requirements and meet them.

Fortunately, for a club that has been celebrating victories for over a century, innovation is no stranger.

Dominic Winterwho is responsible for development and processes at FC Bayern Munich, summarized the club’s challenges as follows: “We need data for everything.” From the fire department and the police officers on duty on match days to the IT teams and the sales staff: everyone involved “needed data, and everyone needed the same view of the data,” says Winter.

But the association’s data was spread across dozens of isolated systems from various providers and service providers. When it came to making important matchday decisions, teams had to resort to analog, fragmented methods of sharing information – often via text message and radio. This meant that individual team members could never access the same information at the same time.

FC Bayern therefore had to bundle its huge data volume in a central, integrated system that offers a uniform all-round view.

From silos to a leaner system

The traditional sports club has been working in partnership with SAP for more than 25 years. The SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP) was therefore ideally suited for the next phase of the club’s digital transformation. The platform includes the SAP Integration Suitewhich can be used to collect and bring together data from different sources and systems, including SAP and third-party systems. This newly integrated data landscape serves as a central data source across the entire company. This makes data analysis possible in real time, which not only optimizes the processes on match day and the fan experience on site, but also provides valuable insights for long-term strategic planning.

According to Winter, for example, the club can now access an up-to-the-minute, detailed overview of FC Bayern fans – “what they do, what their interests are, how old they are, whether they buy jerseys, whether they only go to football games, whether they are also interested in basketball” and much more. This has led to a much more comprehensive understanding of fan activity, not only on an individual level, but also in terms of the fan base as a whole.

Future forecasts: Expand the technology landscape to include AI

With this solid, integrated data foundation, FC Bayern can look to the future and expand its technology landscape with artificial intelligence (AI) to fully exploit the potential of its own data across the company – from increasing process efficiency to developing robust, data-driven forecasting functions.

Winter advised companies that want to carry out their own digital transformation not to put the cart before the horse: “To use AI, you have to have good data.” He pointed out that every company has its own processes. He recommended listening first: “Talk to your users. What problems do they have? What information do they need? What processes do they want to optimize?”

Although the path is not always easy, FC Bayern knows that the effort to win is always worth it.

The full episode with FC Bayern Munich from the “Better Together: Customer Conversations” series can be found at sap.com/btp.

Complete episode

Find out more about how FC Bayern Munich has realigned its matchday operations:

• Thought Leadership Podcast: Dominik Winter, who heads development and processes at FC Bayern Munich, speaks in the podcast with Tamara McCleary, CEO of Thulium. He shares why it was critical to improve the fan experience by integrating fan data to provide a personalized and targeted offering across different channels. From parking the car to the shopping experience, individual preferences are taken into account.
• video: Dominik Winter speaks with Timo Elliott, Vice President and Global Innovation Evangelist at SAP, about the herculean task of collecting and evaluating the enormous amount of fan data from more than 50 separate legacy systems. They also describe the next steps, also with regard to AI.

You can find all episodes of the “Better Together: Customer Conversations” series here.

Do you have ideas for topics or technologies we should cover, or would you like to join the podcast as a guest? We would love to hear from you. Send us an email.

Timo Elliott is Vice President and Global Innovation Advocate for SAP BTP at SAP.

Photo above courtesy of FC Bayern München AG