Fan of the Match
AI platform that measures live crowd emotion in real time to identify an event's most passionate supporters, rank them on a live leaderboard, reward them, and turn that energy into audience analytics clubs and sponsors can act on.
What is Fan of the Match?
Fan of the Match is a fan engagement platform built by PluggableAI, a Portuguese company based in Braga. It addresses a narrow but real problem for clubs and event organisers: the energy in a venue is obvious to everyone present and invisible to every reporting system afterwards. The product measures that energy while it happens and turns it into something a commercial team can use.
Technically it is delivered as an SDK embedded into an organisation's existing mobile application rather than as a standalone app the audience must be persuaded to install. Optional inputs — wearables, external hardware, manual check-ins — can be layered on, though the publisher's own SC Braga case study notes the deployment worked without wearables or intrusive equipment. Fans opt in with a single tap before kick-off, the AI scores their engagement during play, and a live leaderboard resolves at full time into a ranked board with one supporter crowned Fan of the Match.
The output that matters commercially is the analytics layer. Rather than demographic brackets, the platform sorts an audience into behavioural profiles it labels Fanatics, Explorers, Socializers, Casuals and Historians, and reports engagement peaks, participation levels and location hotspots. The publisher positions this as sponsor-ready evidence, arguing that measured emotional response is a better basis for an activation than impressions alone.
It has been deployed beyond football. Named clients include the football club SC Braga, the healthcare brand Joaquim Chaves Saúde, the municipal cultural event Noite Branca Braga and the Christmas theme park Perlim. Outside club contexts the same technology is sold under the name Super Fan, and PluggableAI also markets a separate white-label club app called Sports X App. A free consumer application, FanFest, is published on both the App Store and Google Play and is the app fans actually use.
Two caveats frame the product. No pricing is published anywhere — every route leads to a booked sales meeting — and the performance figures the site quotes are all first-party and unaudited.
What it does
- Measure the emotional intensity of a live crowd in real time during a match or an event
- Identify and rank the most engaged supporters and crown a Fan of the Match
- Reward recognised fans with prizes, VIP access, meet-and-greets and exclusive content
- Segment an audience into behavioural fan profiles rather than demographic brackets
- Produce sponsor-ready audience analytics from a live activation
- Drive downloads and sustained usage of a club's existing mobile app
- Give organisers post-event insight into peak moments, top locations and prime time slots
When to use Fan of the Match / When not to
A quick filter to help you decide if Fan of the Match is the right fit.
When to use Fan of the Match
- Football and other sports clubs that already run an official mobile app and want to deepen matchday engagement
- Brand and sponsorship teams looking to measure what an activation actually produced in a live venue
- Promoters of festivals, city events and cultural programmes who need audience data beyond ticket counts
- Theme parks and live entertainment venues running dense, multi-location event programmes
- Fan relationship, loyalty and CRM managers who want segmentation based on behaviour rather than demographics
When not to use Fan of the Match
- Teams that need transparent, self-service pricing: nothing is published and every path leads to a sales meeting
- Organisations without an existing mobile app, since the product is delivered as an SDK embedded in the client's app
- Purely digital or broadcast-only audiences, where there is no gathered crowd whose emotion can be measured
- Developers looking to build on a public API: none is documented and no developer portal exists
- Organisations that need the interface in a language other than English
How to use Fan of the Match
A typical end-to-end flow, from setup to results.
- Book a meeting with the publisher through the scheduling link on the site; there is no self-service sign-up
- Agree a scope, since the product is sold under contract with no published plan to pick from
- Integrate the FOTM SDK into your existing club or event mobile application
- Decide whether to add optional inputs such as wearables, external hardware or manual check-ins
- Launch a challenge to fans through the app shortly before the event begins
- Fans join with a single tap, with no setup and no separate registration
- The AI scores engagement live while the match or event is under way
- The leaderboard resolves at full time and the top supporter is crowned Fan of the Match
- Distribute the rewards attached to the activation — prizes, experiences or exclusive content
- Review the audience analytics afterwards to inform sponsorship conversations and future programming
Pros & Cons
Pros
- Named, non-anonymous client deployments including a Portuguese top-division football club
- Engagement is measured without requiring wearables or intrusive equipment on the fan side
- Delivered as an SDK inside the club's own app, so the audience is not asked to install anything new
- Segmentation is behavioural rather than demographic, which suits sponsorship conversations
- A real, free consumer app is published and maintained on both major stores
- The publisher is backed by documented Portuguese and EU public funding and has won several innovation awards
- Use cases extend beyond sport to festivals, municipal events and theme parks
Cons
- No pricing whatsoever is published, and the absence of any pricing page is verifiable rather than accidental
- Every call to action leads to a booked sales meeting; there is no trial, no free tier and no self-service entry
- All performance figures are published by the vendor and none is independently audited
- The legal documents date from 2024 and declare that they govern the corporate websites, not the platform
- The terms still name the company under a legal form the Portuguese register shows was changed in 2025
- No API, no developer documentation and no published DPA, subprocessor list or hosting location
- The interface and the mobile app are declared in English only
Pricing & Plans
No price is published. There is no pricing page on the site, and this is a verified absence rather than an oversight: the usual pricing paths return a genuine error, no pricing page appears in the site's sitemap, and no navigation link points to one. Every commercial route — Get in Touch, Book a demo, Customise to your club — leads to a booked meeting with the publisher, which indicates a contract-based model priced per deployment. No free plan and no free trial is advertised for club or sponsor customers. The only free element is the consumer-facing FanFest mobile application, which is listed at no charge on both the App Store and Google Play; that is the app supporters use, not the offer sold to organisations. Prospective buyers should expect to obtain a quotation before being able to compare this product on cost.
Data, GDPR & hosting
A consolidated view of how Fan of the Match handles your data.
GDPR overview
The publisher is established in Portugal, so it operates inside the EU and its terms are governed by Portuguese law. The privacy policy, last updated 25 November 2024, lists the lawful bases it relies on and the rights available — restriction, objection, erasure and withdrawal of consent — all exercised by email. It describes concrete security measures: encryption in transit, encrypted storage of highly confidential data, firewalls, need-to-know access and continuous monitoring. The product page carries a GDPR Safe badge. Two limits deserve attention. No data protection officer is named, and no list of subprocessors is published even though the policy reserves the right to use them. More importantly, the terms declare that they govern the publisher's corporate websites, and the privacy policy describes website visitor and job applicant data. Neither document covers the fan data the platform processes for a club.
Who owns the data?
The published documents name Pluggable as the controller responsible for personal data, as identified in clause 1 of the terms and conditions. Their reach, however, is narrow. The terms state that they govern the company's corporate websites, and the main privacy policy describes only data gathered through website forms — name, email, telephone, LinkedIn profile, CV and company name. A separate policy covers the FanFest mobile app, where identification and email are optional and location is used only to validate attendance at geo-restricted events. No document published on the site sets out who owns or controls the fan and audience data generated by the platform itself for a club or a sponsor. That contractual layer is not public.
Reuse rights
Nothing in the published terms grants an end user any right to reuse the material they encounter. The opposite is stated: accessing the site confers no rights over its content, and titles, texts, images, icons, technology, links and code remain the exclusive property of Pluggable or of third parties who authorised their use. Users may view, print and import parts of the content for private purposes or to access a service, but copying, reproducing, altering or publicly disclosing it requires prior express authorisation. Personal data is used for stated purposes only — answering enquiries, processing job applications, performing contracts, and sending service and event updates. The reuse of fan or audience data by a club or sponsor is not addressed in any public document.
Data retention & training
Hosting summary
Nothing is published. The terms, the privacy policy, the app privacy policy and the cookie policy are all silent on where data is stored, and the site has no trust or security page naming a hosting provider, a region or a jurisdiction. No subprocessor list is published either, although the privacy policy reserves the right to use service providers under contract. What can be said is limited and indirect. The publisher is established in Portugal and its terms are governed by Portuguese law, so an EU jurisdiction applies to the relationship. The marketing site itself runs on Squarespace, which says nothing about where the platform's data sits. For the mobile app, the app-specific policy makes one concrete claim: location data is used only transiently to validate presence at geo-restricted events and never leaves the user's device. Anyone with a data residency requirement should treat hosting location as an open question to settle contractually before deployment.
Things to keep in mind
Risks and trade-offs to weigh before adopting Fan of the Match.
- Measuring and scoring fans' emotional responses is intimate data by nature; ask what is stored, for how long and who inside a club can see an individual's passion score
- Gamified recognition can push vulnerable supporters toward compulsive attendance or spending in pursuit of a rank or a reward
- No public document covers the fan data the platform processes for a club, so the contractual protections around it cannot be assessed from outside
- Ranking supporters publicly creates a hierarchy of fandom that may alienate quieter or less able-bodied attendees who cannot compete on demonstrative energy
- The mobile app requests background location; although the policy states the position never leaves the device, this should be verified before a club recommends it to its supporters
- Every performance figure is vendor-published and unaudited, so business cases built on them should be discounted accordingly
- Behavioural fan segments handed to sponsors turn supporters into a targetable commercial asset, which merits a transparency conversation with the fanbase
Setup & Integrations
Technical difficulty
Moderate, and largely dependent on what you already have. The publisher describes the integration as plug-and-play — a single SDK placed into an existing mobile application, with the promise that fans notice nothing. That is plausible for an organisation with an app and a development team able to ship a release. The real prerequisite is therefore having that app in the first place; without one, the effort is a mobile project rather than an integration. Optional sensors add hardware logistics on match day. No public technical documentation exists, so the true integration effort cannot be assessed before engaging with the vendor.
Deployment
Apps stores
Supported languages
Behind Fan of the Match
Fundraising
Social
Resources
All the official URLs gathered for verification and reference.
Frequently asked questions
What exactly does Fan of the Match measure?
Does it require special hardware?
How much does it cost?
Is there a mobile app?
Is there a public API?
Who is behind the product?
What data does the mobile app collect?
Which languages are supported?
What kinds of organisations already use it?
Are the published results independently verified?
Should you pick Fan of the Match?
Fan of the Match is a focused product solving a problem most clubs recognise but few can quantify: the emotional energy of a live crowd disappears the moment the whistle blows. Measuring it in real time and handing sponsors behavioural segmentation instead of impression counts is a genuinely useful proposition, and the publisher backs it with named deployments rather than anonymous logos — a football club, a healthcare brand, a municipal festival and a theme park, all in Portugal.
The engineering choices are sensible. Delivering the technology as an SDK inside a club's existing app avoids the hardest problem in fan engagement, which is persuading supporters to install something new. Making sensors optional keeps the barrier low, and the companion FanFest app is real and maintained.
Buyers should nonetheless go in with clear eyes. Nothing about the commercial offer is public: there is no price, no plan, no trial and no self-service entry point, and the absence is verifiable rather than an oversight. Every headline figure — the returns on investment, the download multiples, the retention gains — comes from the vendor's own case studies with no independent audit. The published legal documents are dated 2024, declare that they govern the corporate websites rather than the platform, and still name the company under a legal form the Portuguese register shows was changed in 2025. Nothing is published about where platform data is hosted, whether a data processing agreement exists, or whether customer data is used to train models.
This is a young company — incorporated in late 2022, largely grant-funded, around a dozen staff — with a credible product and a commercial and legal apparatus that has not caught up with it. Worth a conversation if you run a venue with an app, but expect hard questions first.
- Choosing a selection results in a full page refresh.
- Opens in a new window.