The NFL’s second ticket pre-sale in Germany went on Tuesday, and the league didn’t learn much from the premiere.

The countdown is counting down.

60 seconds. 45 seconds. 30 seconds. The tension is rising, as is the nervousness, and a good portion of anticipation is also mixed in. The NFL is coming to Germany again, and since the league has changed a few things in the advance sale compared to last time, such as the ban on logging in on multiple devices, something could go right.

Just half a minute later, the euphoria is joylessly rammed into the ground. Extinguished. What remains is a lot of frustration for a great many fans. Understandable with a place in the queue beyond the million.
No question: the league is rubbing its hands at how much the sport is booming in Germany now. Nevertheless, advance sales for the Germany game between the Miami Dolphins and the Kansas City Chiefs (5 November) were so sobering that the NFL urgently needs to change something.

Double frustration after frustration: personalise the tickets. For a sports fan, there are few things worse than not getting tickets.

Yes, there is. One thing: when there are people who buy the tickets to flog them for x times as much. Because of course you promptly find offers on the relevant portals where the price for a ticket quickly cracks 1,000 euros. The bad thing is that many fans also fall for scams. Therefore: Make test purchases, block the tickets and put them back on sale, report the fraudsters. This also has a deterrent effect for the future.

Another possibility: a sales portal by fans for fans. It is said that it actually happens that one is prevented.

Tickets for real fans: Influencers may be an effective way to push a sport, to make it accessible to a young audience. But the rush shows: the NFL has long been a no-brainer in Germany. So the timing is right to let real fans into the stadiums.

However, one can assume that things will go the same way in Frankfurt as they did at the first game in Munich and that there will again be numerous clips on Instagram, TikTok & Co. around the game, which will especially annoy the real followers.

Cater to the fan clubs

Because with some of the influencers, it’s obvious they didn’t bother to get the tickets themselves, queue up in front of the laptop and get lucky.

Don’t misunderstand: You don’t have to qualify for a visit, you don’t have to have a minimum knowledge or an NFL visit to the US. You just need to have a genuine interest and enjoyment of the sport and the opportunity to attend such a game.

In other words, don’t just give out tickets to VIPs or influencers, but rather to organised fan clubs. That may be a very romantic idea in a time when commercialism is practised and football, for example, sells its soul. And even if the NFL is even more rigorous and profit-oriented when it comes to marketing – given that it has only played one game on German soil so far, it can do many things differently than one would expect. Then it should do so.

Fewer tickets: The NFL had reduced the number of tickets that could be ordered to four. In addition to personalisation, it would be worth considering reducing the number per order again to two per person. That way, more people would have a chance to get the tickets.

Draw places in the queue

Frustration prevention: What’s the point of leaving fans as frustrated as in the example mentioned at the beginning? Headlines about an absurdly long queue can be avoided. And this huge queue then also fed the suspicion that the NFL wanted to prevent registration via multiple devices, but did not really succeed.

A suggestion: draw lots for the places in the queue, make a kind of pre-selection, thereby reducing the rush and at the same time increasing the chance of actually getting a code for the day of the sale.

Yes, 1.5 million prospects remain 1.5 million prospects. But an upstream disappointment is possibly easier to take than place 1,456,432 on the day of the pre-sale. Even with place 250,000, a capacity of 48,000 and four possible tickets per person, one could calculate the probability oneself.

In that case, too, the euphoria was completely gone after the end of the countdown.