Most clubs' engagement thinking stops at the stadium gate. There's a matchday check-in, maybe a giveaway for whoever's in their seat by the start of play. That's the right instinct for the fans who are there. It just describes a shrinking share of the people actually watching.
For most clubs, most fans watch most matches somewhere else: on the TV at home, on a stream in another country, crowded round a screen in a pub because the ground was sold out or three time zones away. Call it matchday, call it game day if that's the word your fans use. Either way, most of the crowd isn't in the building. The 2026 World Cup made that impossible to ignore: for every fan who had a ticket, thousands more kept the same rituals alive from somewhere else, and a club doesn't need a tournament to have that same shape of audience every single week.
Broadcasters have an answer for that crowd: in-stream voting and polling built for an audience the size of a country. Clubs don't own the broadcast and don't have a production team standing by, so copying that toolkit isn't much of an option. The platforms built for that scale are a different category of product anyway. What a club-sized operation does have is the screen already in every fan's hand. That's the second screen, and treating it as part of matchday rather than an afterthought is the entire idea behind this post.
What is second-screen fan engagement?
Second-screen fan engagement is any activity a fan does on their phone that earns recognition from their club while they watch the game somewhere other than the ground itself — a partner venue, a pub on the other side of the world, or their own sofa. It turns a passive broadcast into something the club can see, count and reward, without the fan ever needing a ticket.
We build Game Set Engage, and this is the reason our check-in system has three tiers instead of one. It isn't a niche habit to design around, either. Nearly nine in ten Americans say they use their phone while watching any live TV (87%, according to Reviews.org), and it isn't only idle scrolling. In Deloitte's 2023 sports fan survey, roughly half of fans across every generation surveyed, from Gen Z down to Gen X, said they use social media or messaging to interact with others about the game while watching from home. The phone is already out. The question is whether anything on it counts toward being a fan of your club.
Where do your fans actually watch the game?
At the stadium, at a partner venue, or at home. One campaign can reward all three without the club running three separate promotions.
A club builds an event check-in campaign and sets three independent point values: one for checking in at the ground, one for checking in at a partner venue, and one for checking in from home. All three tiers share the same window, which derives from the event itself: it opens an hour before the event starts and stays open until thirty minutes after it ends, wide enough to catch fans arriving early or checking in on the way out.
| Where the fan is | How it's verified | Who sets the points |
|---|---|---|
| At the stadium | GPS in the app, no QR code or hardware needed | The club, per campaign |
| At a partner venue | A ten-minute QR code in the fan's app, approved by venue staff, with the fan's GPS confirmed near the venue | The club, per campaign |
| At home | GPS in the app, the same check as the other two tiers | The club, per campaign (off by default) |
Every one of those three check-ins is GPS-verified. What we confirm is where the fan's phone is, not what's on their screen. We don't claim to know whether they're actually watching. A club can leave the home tier switched off, in which case a check-in attempt from outside the stadium or venue radius is simply refused. Switch it on, and a fan on their sofa can check in and earn whatever the club decided that's worth.
Our recommended starting split is 5x, 3x and 1x: the strongest reward for standing in the ground, a solid one for the partner venue, something for showing up at all from home. Treat that as a recommended flow, not a fixed rule — every number is a field the club can change on the campaign builder.
What can you actually run while the match is being played?
Three campaign types are built for the game itself: predictions, quizzes and auctions.
Predictions ask a fan to lock in a call on something that hasn't happened yet (the final result is the obvious one, but it can be whatever the club sets up), and they only pay out once the club resolves the result. A prediction campaign can open before the match starts or stay open into play, since the club controls its own window; once the club resolves it, or the window closes, new entries stop. Get it right, and the fan earns that campaign's own points, same as any other campaign, never a separate bonus pot.
Quizzes work differently: the answers are set upfront and scored the moment the fan submits, which makes them good material for a break in play rather than a full-match mechanic. Build one from the dashboard in a few minutes; the builder currently handles up to three questions per quiz.
Auctions are the one genuinely live mechanic on the list. Bids happen over a realtime connection instead of a page the fan has to keep refreshing, a bid in the closing thirty seconds extends the clock instead of letting a late snipe win it, and the auction settles itself the moment the clock actually runs out. Fans bid points; only the winner pays, at settlement. Club staff can watch the bid history update live from the dashboard while the match is still on.
None of that needs a data feed synced to the actual match, and we don't have one. That's deliberate. The club sets the windows (when a prediction opens and closes, when the quiz goes live, when the auction starts) rather than the platform trying to react to a goal or a whistle in real time. For a club running its own campaigns without a broadcast production team behind them, that's the point, not a gap. It's the difference between a tool sized for a club and the in-stream, broadcaster-scale voting tools built to handle millions of concurrent viewers on someone else's feed.
Is the pub screening your match competition, or a partner?
Treated right, it's a partner. Any venue can register on Game Set Engage for free and apply to partner on a club's check-in campaigns, and there's no distance limit on who can apply. A pub hosting your diaspora fans on another continent is as valid a partner as the sports bar down the road. Watch parties and away-day screenings both count as events a venue can partner on.
Once approved, the venue shows up as a check-in option inside the campaign and adds its own offer on top, typically something like a discount on the tab. The fan gets both at once: the club's points and the venue's deal. Each confirmed check-in and each confirmed offer claim accrues a fee, at the amount the club sets, that the venue owes the club, settled monthly — revenue the club can trace back to a specific room full of people watching the match, not a sponsorship line item nobody can prove. It's the same logic behind treating the business owners already sitting in your stands as partners rather than cold sponsorship targets, except this version doesn't even require them to attend a match in person.
How do you reach fans before the match without spamming everyone?
With a push notification sent to a segment, not the whole list. A club on the City plan or above can build a segment (fans who usually watch from home, say, or fans who've checked in at partner venues but never at the ground) and target a notification to exactly that group ahead of the next fixture, rather than firing one blast at every registered fan regardless of whether the campaign applies to them. See where segmentation sits on the plan ladder: Local is free up to 1,000 active fans, and Fan Segments switch on from City.
What does a season of this actually tell you?
Three things a stadium-only view of the club never produces. First, where-they-watch demographics: fans who complete the club's Extended Profile campaign (consent-gated; nothing is inferred) tell the club where they usually watch, and the club sees the aggregate split between stadium, venue and home. Second, unique versus repeat participants, so a club can tell the difference between one-off curiosity and a fan who checks in from the same pub every single week. Third, an aggregated heatmap of where check-ins cluster, campaign by campaign, showing the shape of where the audience actually is without plotting any individual fan.
Over a season, that turns "we think a lot of our fans watch from home or abroad" into a number the club can act on: which city deserves a venue partner next, which segment is worth a dedicated push, which campaign type actually reaches fans who never buy a ticket.
None of this requires rebuilding how the club runs a matchday. Start free on the Local plan (up to 1,000 active fans, no card needed), set up your club, turn on the home tier for your next event check-in campaign, and see how many fans check in from somewhere you'd never counted before.
Frequently asked questions
Can fans check in from home?
Yes, if the club has switched on the home tier for that campaign. Fans check in through GPS in the app, the same as the stadium and venue tiers; the club sets the point value, which can be lower than the other two tiers or left at zero, which effectively turns the home tier off.
How do you engage fans who never come to a game?
Through the same campaign types that run at the stadium, opened up to wherever the fan actually is: home check-ins when the club enables them, predictions and quizzes that don't require attendance at all, and partner venues near wherever a cluster of fans lives, including venues abroad for diaspora supporters.
What is second-screen engagement, in one sentence?
It's rewarding whatever a fan does on their phone in connection with the match while watching the broadcast somewhere other than the stadium, so that watching from a pub or a sofa counts toward the same points and profile as watching in person.
Do you need broadcast rights to engage fans during a match?
No. Nothing described here touches the broadcast feed itself. Check-ins, predictions, quizzes and auctions all run inside the Game Set Engage app on the fan's phone and the club's own dashboard; a fan can be watching on any channel, or none, and still take part.
How do partner venues fit into a live broadcast?
A venue screening the match, whether it's a pub across town or a bar built around a diaspora crowd abroad, can partner on the club's check-in campaign for that event. Fans who check in there earn the club's points plus whatever offer the venue adds, and each confirmed check-in accrues a fee the venue owes the club.
