Premium inventory sold out while the stadium ran half empty

Context

Estoril Praia sells roughly 90% of its hospitality inventory through sponsorship and partnership agreements. That structure means hospitality revenue never appears as a standalone line in the club’s accounts. It is absorbed into sponsorship income, so no one inside the club could see what any individual product earned, which seats were underperforming, or whether the pricing held.

Constraint

Because hospitality is bundled into sponsor deals, there was no usable revenue history to model from and no comparable disclosure at peer clubs to benchmark against. Most clubs do not separate hospitality from general matchday or commercial income either. The analysis had to be built from inventory, pricing and utilisation data rather than revenue, and cross-club comparison had to run on premium inventory share and product structure instead of reported income.

Approach

1. 01Rebuilt the hospitality portfolio from club-supplied data: 223 total seats, 178 sellable, 115 sold, across five distinct products.
2. 02Measured utilisation per product rather than in aggregate, which separated genuine supply constraints from products that were simply not being sold.
3. 03Benchmarked eight clubs on premium inventory as a share of capacity, product tiering and B2B contract structure, excluding clubs whose scale made the comparison meaningless.
4. 04Modelled three scenarios across three CAPEX tiers, with utilisation and pricing sensitivity applied to each.
5. 05Sequenced the recommendations so each phase had to clear a utilisation threshold before the next one released capital.

Outcome

• The per-product view changed what the portfolio looked like. Headline utilisation of 65% suggested soft demand. Excluding one product it was 88%, and both box formats were at 100% with no inventory left to sell against demand that clearly existed. The weakness sat in two specific places: a seating tier at 13% utilisation with only sponsor-allocated sales against it, and nine unsold seats in the Presidential Tribune. Neither was a demand problem. Both were products that had never been actively taken to market.
• Against an average home attendance of 2,723 in a ground with 5,094 operational seats, the club was constrained in exactly the inventory it could charge most for and unconstrained everywhere else. The recommendation was to activate and reprice existing inventory before committing any capital to construction, and to move hospitality out of sponsorship bundling into a separately priced and separately tracked commercial line.

Reflection

The first version of the revenue model counted every sold premium seat as an outcome of the investment. Most of those seats were already committed inside sponsor agreements, so that revenue was not incremental and the payback figures were flattering. Separating contracted revenue from genuinely new revenue cut the headline number substantially and made the case harder to sell, which is the point. A club board approving CAPEX against revenue it already earns is the failure mode this kind of analysis exists to prevent.

Stack

• Commercial modelling
• Benchmarking
• Scenario analysis
• Excel