AZ Alkmaar

Step into a football stadium and you meet many kinds of supporters, from die‑hard fans who sing for ninety minutes to families who come to make memories together. To serve this range well, on and off the pitch, AZ looked for a digital partner who could design for every fan. After a competitive process, AZ chose The Valley because our customer experience (CX) approach matched the club’s ambitions and offered the delivery strength to realise them. We drew on lessons from our earlier fan‑experience work with FC Utrecht.

Develop a future‑ready digital platform that secures a sustainable relationship between (potential) fans and AZ.

Our engagement strategy for the new platform was shaped by two insights:

1. Fans increasingly follow individual players as well as clubs. They track careers across teams and care about influence on and off the field.

2. AZ is widely recognised for a high‑performing youth academy that consistently develops first‑team players.

Bringing these together defines the brand’s essence: AZ shapes the next generation of football. The platform, content and features therefore put more weight on emerging talent to deepen the relationship between AZ and its fans.

Bringing the strategy to life online
To turn AZ’s brand strategy into a living, breathing digital experience, we focused on three connected stories, all built to deepen the bond between club and fan:

1. Player stories and live stats
Each first-team player page combines the emotion of a player’s journey with the precision of live, automatically updated stats. Supporters can see form, impact, and milestones evolve. Turning data into storytelling.

2. The academy at the heart of the club
The academy is the beating pulse of AZ’s future. Through writing, photography, and film, we gave the youth setup its own stage, showing how young talent is nurtured and how pathways into the first team are built.

3. Inside AZ
To keep fans connected to every corner of the club, we created Inside AZ, a newsroom-style hub that gathers updates, stories, and features from across the organization. From academy squads to alumni making their mark elsewhere, it’s a space where every story at every level comes together.

The site is organised into three sub‑parts: the main AZ website, the business club section and the webshop. Each uses a distinct colour to help orientation. Consistency is kept through a shared design system: the same components, interaction patterns and accessibility standards run across all three.

AZ’s visual identity was extended for digital use. We broadened the colour palette, refined typography for screen legibility and tuned spacing for clarity at different breakpoints. Photography was aligned to the strategy, with more cinematic portraits that capture individual players’ emotion to strengthen the bond with fans. A subtle pattern inspired by goal netting adds texture, and considered micro‑interactions reinforce recognition while inviting exploration.

A club’s webshop is where emotion becomes something you can hold. To enrich the AZ webshop experience, products are presented in 3D so supporters can rotate, zoom and inspect details before buying, built with our 3D partner 270 Degrees. The backend connects in real time to AZ’s inventory system, so availability and pricing stay accurate at all times.

We simplified access with single sign‑on (SSO), so one account works across ticketing, content and shopping. Our customer data platform (CDP), Nominow, integrates with the AZ site and key systems to manage real‑time data in a unified customer profile. This foundation enables personalisation, smarter service and future loyalty initiatives, all while respecting privacy and consent.

Launching the new AZ website is the first step in strengthening the bond with fans. Our collaboration continues into phase two, focusing on deeper engagement features and measurement. We will track core metrics such as repeat visits, time to find key information, SSO adoption, content consumption by player and conversion in the webshop. The goal remains the same: help fans follow today’s stars, discover tomorrow’s, and feel closer to AZ every time they visit.