Grand LIA
Sports

Wisła Kraków FC's fanbase remained fiercely loyal following relegation, but the club needed to strengthen that connection further at a critical moment.

In Polish football culture, community identity is built matchday by matchday — through shared rituals, shared belief, and shared presence. Deepening that community required more than marketing; it required a mechanic that made every fan feel personally counted.

Sports marketing in Polish football has traditionally relied on ticket promotions, discounts and standard loyalty schemes.

Wisła Kraków FC's challenge was to find something genuinely new: an innovation not borrowed from other markets, but built specifically from an insight unique to football fan psychology and the club's own compliance data.

To strengthen fan engagement by giving every attending supporter a personal, ongoing stake in the club's fortunes — measurably increasing participation, loyalty and community cohesion at a moment when consistent fan support was essential to the club's stability.

To pioneer a genuinely new mechanic in sports marketing — the first statistic of its kind measuring individual fan luck — demonstrating how existing club data, new technology and a long-standing cultural belief could be combined into an entirely original marketing model with applications beyond a single club.

Average stadium attendance reached 26,183 — the highest in the league, 5.4x the league average of 4,857, and a 42.2% increase on the club's previous season average of 18,419. The initiative generated 228 media publications reaching an estimated 7.7 million people.

Artificial intelligence — primarily Anthropic's Claude — was used as a tool supporting the design and development of the system: assisting with architecture planning, algorithm design, data analysis and implementation support (coding, debugging, iteration). The most important decisions regarding concept and algorithm architecture were developed by the team, with AI providing substantial support in their analysis, structuring and translation into a mathematical model. The data used was exclusively real, from two sources: Wisła Kraków's internal attendance data and a licensed match-statistics API. No synthetic or AI-generated data was used — AI's role was limited strictly to analysing and processing data created by people. The algorithm itself was developed iteratively, with the team contributing football and business domain knowledge, and AI supporting its formalisation and refinement into a working model.