Why your fan zone shouldn't close after the final

How big fan zones have got

Think back to Qatar 2022. The FIFA Fan Festival in Doha's Al Bidda Park recorded 1.86 million fan visits, and 146 artists played 162 hours of live music there. Even an exhibition on site, the FIFA Museum presented by Hyundai, drew more than 170,000 visitors.

Four years later, the format had grown again. More than 9,017,000 people attended FIFA Fan Festivals across 13 host cities at the 2026 World Cup, the highest figure since 2006. The festivals hosted 113 commercial partner activation spaces, and festival content generated 811 million digital video views. Those last two are the figures I'd show a commercial director, because they prove a fan zone can sell space and make content. Nor is it only a men's World Cup story: host city fan zones at UEFA Women's EURO 2025 in Switzerland welcomed more than 1 million visitors.

Commercially, a fan zone is a venue in its own right, with its own content, its own audience data and its own sponsorship inventory. The match is the reason people come, and the music, food, culture and partner experiences are why they stay. That museum exhibition shows what a partner can buy: a piece of the programme with its name on it. And that audience data is first-party insight worth using, because knowing who came, when, how long they stayed and what they queued for tells you what to programme next.

What gets lost when the site comes down

Most fan zones are built for a single event and taken down afterwards, and the partners, the audience and the know-how scatter with them. Next time, you're building all three again from scratch. That's a costly habit, because sponsorship effects build over time.

Take the fan zone down after the final and you're throwing away the audience you've just built.

Channel 4's fifteen-year Sponsorship Rocks study, which analysed nearly 240 sponsorships and more than 400,000 viewers, found that sponsorships that ran for over two years saw a 20% higher boost in consideration than those that ran for one to two years. Its conclusion was that sponsorships improve with age rather than wear out. That evidence comes from broadcast sponsorship, but the logic carries over: a partner that comes back to the same place, with the same fans, every season builds memory that a one-off can't.

What a year-round platform looks like

That's the case for turning a fan zone into a platform. Keep the site, the brand and the partners, and run it around every derby, final, concert or national day as well as the big tournament. Give partners year-round rights so they can plan, build and measure over time. Use the quieter weeks for community events, school visits and cultural programming, so the place never feels closed.

The same thinking works for rights holders of every size. A club can turn its car park into a match-day village, a festival can run a winter series in the same space, and a museum can open its courtyard on big nights. Each one becomes a regular home for fans and a recurring asset for sponsors.