Robinho, Tevez, Adebayor, Barry, Mancini… the list of English Premier League outfit Manchester City’s (MCFC) signings grows by the day. While Abu Dhabi based owner Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan is eager to deliver success on the pitch, it is clear that the club’s hierarchy is also keen on optimising results off it in the Club’s retail operation. 

The real change on the retail side of things came as MCFC combined its ticketing operation, call centre, and store and customer service centre into a purpose-built facility at The City of Manchester Stadium. A new layout across two floors saw sportswear items placed downstairs and shirt printing and ticket collection situated upstairs, an unusual design for a football club store that required a quantum leap in terms of analysing retail sales, staff performance and customer interaction. This need was further accentuated by store traffic trends, which see daily numbers of between 500 and 1,000 customers swell to as many as 40,000 on match days.

And with the club looking for a top-four finish in the Premier League this season, nothing less than a similar achievement will suffice on the retail side. A major challenge was positioning the sales, merchandise and customer service section as more than just an add-on to the football club shop – it had to be a professional retail operation. To this end, the club used Shopper Count, a footfall system that counts the number of people entering the store and measures their movements, along with Mystery Shopping, which helped the football club optimise its customer service systems. With these two systems working well, the club is now also exploring Shopper Engage, which tracks individual shopper behaviour and analyses how people shop the store, queue, and respond to signage, fixtures and other elements of the operation.

MCFC Head of Retail, Duncan Martin, says advantages of these systems include “a high level of accuracy, customised reports generation, proprietary equipment and ability to combine several research disciplines, and improving one-on-one customer interactions. Our concept is genuinely unique and we are already learning things about our business which will help us both improve the customer experience and our profitability.”

But as on the football pitch, success ultimately comes from the people you have on the ground. Richard Korn, Research Manager for Synovate, one of several researchers to lead this project, says: “What came through in this project is MCFC’s staff are proud to work for the club and are very passionate. Often, when conducting Mystery Shopping, it can be difficult to find true passion, but staff really want to make a difference and ensure the fans are not disappointed”.

With the retail side covered, the only real question now is can the players replicate this success on the field? Watch this space.