Sports Tech · Merthyr Town FC
The system a football club runs on, from the boardroom to the kitchen.
We built Merthyr Town FC a system to run the club. It is called Touchline: commercial partnerships, contracts and hospitality in one back office, a box office that builds its own fixtures, board reporting, a club app, and Hatch — food ordered from a QR code instead of a queue.
A football club was being run across spreadsheets, inboxes and goodwill. Sponsorship deals lived in one person's head, ticketing was rebuilt by hand for every fixture, safeguarding consent could not be evidenced quickly, and nobody could give the board a straight answer about how the club was doing without assembling it first.
Sponsorship and commercial partnerships were the club's income and its most manual work. We built a CRM for them, so partners, contracts and proposals live in one place rather than across inboxes and spreadsheets — and hospitality bookings sit alongside them, against the same partner records.
Club staff working through commercial partnerships at Merthyr Town
Photograph to comeAdministrators were building ticketing for every fixture by hand. The box office now pulls fixtures automatically from a national football and sports database and sets the ticketing up itself. Season tickets are merged into matchday check-in and scanning, so one record covers who has paid and who is through the gate, and payments are handled in the same system.
The Merthyr Town box office on a matchday
Photograph to comeJunior memberships need parental consent, and consent needs to be provable. We built sign-up so a parent consents once, the record is stored against the child, and the club can evidence it — GDPR-compliant by construction rather than by policy document. Member and staff ID cards are generated from the same records.
Junior members arriving at a Merthyr Town matchday
Photograph to comeA board asking how the club is doing should not have to wait for someone to assemble the answer. Reporting runs across the whole system — financials, fan engagement, and the commercial pipeline — so the picture is available rather than compiled.
The Touchline reporting dashboard on screen
Photograph to comeQueues at the kitchen cost the club sales and cost supporters the match. Hatch lets someone order from a QR code at their seat and pay on their own phone; the order goes straight to the kitchen. Tested and launched at the ground.
A supporter ordering from Hatch at their seat
Photograph to comeThe club is getting its own app, built on the same system, so the relationship with supporters runs through something the club owns rather than a platform it rents. Due to launch.
The Merthyr Town club app on a phone
Photograph to come