What your 2025 season reveals when fan voice and fan behavior are read together

Recommendation summary

The full operational roadmap is detailed in Section 6. The headline recommendations below align Tier 1 / Tier 2 / Tier 3 timing with specific cohort anchors and the underlying evidence.

The attendance × spend curve

Across the linked member base, both average shop spend and the share of members who buy anything at all increase steeply with match attendance. The first activation threshold is visible at 3–5 matches, where spender share climbs from 21.7% to 29.0%. The second inflection appears between 10–15 and 16+ matches, where average spend roughly doubles from ¥29,198 to ¥48,258 and the spender share crosses into 64.8%.

Player-led merchandise demand is concentrated

Within the shop sales corpus, one of the cleanest commercial signals is which players drive the most physical product demand. The player-number replica jerseys form a tight ranking with one dominant player and a clear top-five. The implication for retail planning is direct: production volumes, in-stadium stocking priority, and player-collaboration marketing should be weighted to this demand structure.

Beyond the player-number jerseys, the largest single physical product line is the 2025 Replica Uniform 1st. At the FC-member discount tier, the uniform moved 4,831 units (¥91.5M revenue); at the annual-pass-holder tier, an additional 2,688 units (¥48.2M revenue). Together the replica uniform franchise produced over ¥140 million across the two pricing tiers — making it the single largest physical-product revenue line in the corpus. The 2025 and 2026 DAZN annual viewing passes generated ¥164 million combined.

The 2025 revenue calendar — and what it tells you about staffing

Shop revenue concentrates dramatically in a small number of months. January 2025 alone generated ¥235.7 million — roughly 35% of the entire 13-month period. The other peaks (June, October, December) sit between ¥51M and ¥56M. The implication for staffing, customer service capacity, and digital infrastructure is operationally specific: the system needs to handle a 4–10× volume spike in January each year, not an even monthly load.

The January spike maps to the simultaneous launch of the new season's replica uniform, the 2025 DAZN annual pass, and the FC member presale window. December produced a meaningful secondary peak (¥51.9M) coinciding with the final home match, FESTA, and the December gifting season. October's spike (¥55.8M) suggests a third operationally relevant window — possibly tied to autumn match densities and the launch of the 2026 season pass presale.

An eight-segment view of fan value

The attendance ladder is necessary but not sufficient as a segmentation model. Some fans concentrate their value on merchandise; others on the live experience. The portfolio framework below pairs the attendance spine with two behavioral overlays — Spending Specialists and Stadium Specialists — that the club can use to differentiate retail and experience programs.

Survey voice vs. attendance-file reality

The in-stadium survey speaks for engaged, committed supporters more than for the full attendance population. This is a critical methodological caveat that strengthens the report's findings rather than weakening them: it tells the operations team the survey voice systematically under-weights the lighter-engagement audience that the growth strategy depends on reaching.

The practical consequence: when this report shows what fans say they care about, that voice represents the most-connected audience. Operating decisions designed for the lighter, less-connected audience should be tested against that bias rather than assuming the survey speaks evenly across all attendees.

The 423,225 attendance records outside the linked frame

The linked commercial base of 33,507 members is the cleanest analytical foundation for attendance × spend behavior. But it does not represent the full stadium. The attendance file contains 423,225 rows (roughly 35.7% of attendance volume, representing approximately 72% of unique attendees) that do not match into the One-Touch Pass bridge. Those fans are physically present in the stadium, but functionally invisible to cross-channel measurement and targeting.

This matters operationally: every conversion program built on top of the linked portfolio applies only to a portion of the live audience. Until OTP registration grows, the rest of the stadium remains unaddressed by the segmentation logic.

The relationship is monotonic and steep

The pattern is not a binary "follow or don't follow." Every additional Gamba account followed correlates with a higher attendance probability and a stronger NPS. The relationship is monotonic across all five engagement bands, which is the strongest possible descriptive evidence that the underlying signal is real rather than artifactual.

Why this matters operationally

Three things make this finding load-bearing for the 2026 operating plan:

First, SNS engagement is something the club already operates. Unlike attendance frequency (which is the outcome the club wants to influence), SNS following counts are the result of activities the club's marketing team controls — content publishing, cross-platform promotion, follow campaigns, member onboarding. This is an actionable input, not a structural property of the fan.

Second, the directional logic supports a clear hypothesis. Engaged digital followers see more match content, more matchday reminders, more player content, more behind-the-scenes material. Each of these touchpoints is a low-cost reinforcement of the decision to attend. While this report does not claim a causal mechanism (the relationship is observational), the directional pattern is strongly consistent with digital touchpoints reinforcing attendance behavior.

Third, the lighter-engagement cohort is uniquely addressable. The 773 fans following only one Gamba account are the operational growth target — they are already engaged enough to take one survey, but their digital depth has clear headroom. Targeted cross-platform follow campaigns (designed to convert single-account followers into multi-account followers) are a low-friction operating motion with measurable outcome.

Which platforms matter most

The five primary Gamba Osaka official channels show different engagement profiles. The 10+ match attendance rate is highest among Facebook (56.9%), X (56.3%), YouTube (56.3%), and TikTok (55.8%) followers — channels typically associated with deeper or more deliberate content consumption. LINE has the broadest reach (1,783 followers in the survey, 78.7% of respondents) but a lower attendance lift at 49.1%.

The implication is that platforms with deeper content (X, YouTube, Facebook) correlate more strongly with attendance behavior than platforms optimized for broadcast reach (LINE). This does not mean LINE is less valuable — it has 74.4% reach in the survey and is the broadest awareness channel. It means the operating job is different: LINE for reach, X/YouTube/Facebook for deepening committed engagement.

Top-cohort confirmation

The 15+ match cohort — the club's most committed in-stadium audience — confirms the pattern from the other direction. Of the 635 fans in that cohort, 91.6% follow 3 or more Gamba SNS accounts. Single-account followers make up only 16.5% of the cohort. The most-engaged in-stadium fans are also the most-engaged digital fans, almost by definition. The growth opportunity is not at the top of the ladder — it is at the bottom, where single-account followers represent the convertible base.

The dominant pain themes

Across the survey corpus, four pain themes were most frequently coded from free-text responses. These are counts of sessions where the fan explicitly articulated the issue in their own words — not Likert dissatisfaction scores. The signal is sharper because the fan chose to write about it rather than tick a box.

Because the survey skews toward more committed supporters, these counts likely understate the friction experienced by lighter-frequency attendees. The committed core is more practiced at navigating the stadium. When even committed fans repeatedly articulate the same operational problems, less-experienced fans are encountering them more sharply.

The audibility issue is an inclusion issue, not just an AV issue

One of the most consistent themes in the corpus is that fans want to participate more, but cannot reliably hear what is being communicated to them. The pre-match HEAT UP TIME program is mentioned repeatedly as audibly hard to follow, and supporter chants are described as difficult to learn for those not already inside the participation core. This is not just an audio engineering issue. It is a fan-development issue — newer fans become repeat fans when the match feels coherent and joinable. When sound does not land reliably across the seating bowl, the club's atmosphere investment under-converts from production effort into felt value.

The family-with-kids cohort is large — and operationally distinct

32.6% of survey respondents (781 of 2,395) attended matches with family including children under 18. This is the largest single companion segment in the survey, larger than solo attendance (24.8%), couple attendance (18.2%), or friend-group attendance (13.6%). Their NPS sits at +48 — meaningfully higher than solo attendees (+32) but lower than friend groups (+52) or family-without-kids (+52). This is the cohort where queue friction, audibility issues, and pricing concerns have the highest compound impact, because each problem affects multiple people in a group with different needs.

The solo NPS finding deserves emphasis: solo attendees show the lowest advocacy intent of any companion segment, by a meaningful margin. This is an under-appreciated retention risk — solo fans are often committed (they came alone) but they are advocating less.

Queues drag the total day, not just one moment

Queue complaints surface across food, merchandise, family activations, and crowd flow. The frequency is high enough that queueing should be treated as a system-level design problem rather than a per-station fix. Fans mention online ordering, earlier opening times, and clearer line management as desired solutions — practical, repeatable suggestions the club can implement without large capital investment.

Well-being Park is a strategic asset, not a problem area

One of the strongest positive themes in the corpus is fan voice on the Well-being Park outdoor activation zone. Based on coded free-text, fans praise both the food offering and event booths far more often than they criticize them, and they actively request more programming variety. Combined with the queue and operational findings above, the operating implication is clear: Well-being Park is a concept that already works, but operational throughput and programming depth are the constraints on how much value it currently produces.

Communication reached the audience — awareness was excellent

The Dec 6 promotion was extensively communicated and broadly known. 89.9% of December respondents said they knew about it before arriving, and only 5.7% said they did not know at all. The club's communication engine successfully reached the in-stadium survey audience — confirming that for committed in-stadium fans, the existing campaign channels work.

But the awareness gap widens dramatically among less-connected fans

While awareness in the committed core was nearly universal, the lighter "neither" cohort showed a substantially weaker awareness profile. This is the cohort most likely to need a clear reason to attend in the first place — and the cohort the club's growth strategy depends on reaching.

The 15.2% of December "neither" fans who did not know about FESTA represents a meaningful communication gap. Because the broader attendance population is over twice as heavily weighted to this cohort as the survey suggests, the stadium-wide unawareness rate among less-connected fans is likely significantly larger than 15%.

The influence question — was FESTA a reason to attend?

Awareness alone does not drive behavior. The December survey directly asked how the promotion influenced attendance decisions, and the answers were honest: most fans treated FESTA as a good thing without it being the reason they came.

The satisfaction lift question — chi-squared on Sep vs Dec F&B

The cleanest test of whether a pricing promotion adds operating value is whether it lifts the relevant satisfaction outcome. Comparing the September baseline (no FESTA) to the December wave (FESTA active), the F&B satisfaction signal moved slightly in the wrong direction. The decline is not statistically significant — meaning the data does not support a strong negative claim — but the test also fails to find evidence of a lift.

The -9.2 pp directional decline in the "neither" cohort — the lighter-connection audience — is the most operationally interesting cell, even though it does not reach significance. If FESTA was specifically designed to reach less-engaged fans through accessible pricing, the data does not show that it succeeded. The cohort moved slightly in the opposite direction, possibly because pricing relief was overshadowed by other operational frictions (queues, throughput, communication) on a busy promotional day.

What FESTA did succeed at — brand alignment

A separate but related finding: the broader brand alignment data shows that 46.6% of survey respondents either strongly agreed or agreed with the statement that Gamba Osaka is working toward the "JAPAN'S BEST SPORTS EXPERIENCE BRAND" promise (1,115 of 2,395). Only 2.4% disagreed. The remaining ~50% sit in "don't know" or "neutral." Combined with FESTA's 64.6% "good initiative" rating, this suggests the club's brand-effort communication does land — fans see the work, even when individual promotions don't move specific satisfaction metrics. The brand is broadly trusted; the operational execution is where the remaining lift sits.

The three operating motions

Cross-functional workstream summary

What the platform does

The Dimension Labs platform extracts structured intelligence from unstructured fan voice — open-ended survey responses, reviews, transcripts — and joins it with structured behavioral data. Traditional survey analysis stops at Likert scores: how satisfied are fans on a 1-to-5 scale? Dimension extraction goes further: WHY fans are satisfied, what specifically they are complaining about, which players or events they mention, what they want changed — all coded automatically across the entire corpus into queryable categories.

The 30-dimension schema, in six clusters

Six additional free-text "evidence" dimensions preserve verbatim fan voice in the original Japanese — short representative phrases used as quotable evidence throughout the report. These are how the report can show what fans actually wrote, not just how the platform categorized them.

Statistical discipline

Every comparative claim is anchored by four elements: an effect size (lift in percentage points or ratio), a denominator (sample sizes for both sides), a chi-squared significance test, and a confidence tier — Strong, Moderate, or Suggestive. The platform uses descriptive language throughout (associated with, predictive of, consistent with a mechanism where) rather than causal language. This PoC engagement did not run formal causal methods such as propensity-score matching or difference-in-differences, so no claim should be read as a causal proof.

What was and was not measurable in this PoC

The survey is anonymous, which means survey voice and member behavior cannot be joined at the individual fan level — only at the aggregate cohort level. The shop sales records are month-precision (not day or hour). Approximately 35.7% of attendance records do not link to the One-Touch Pass identity system. Each constraint is observed honestly in the report — sample sizes are stated, limitations are surfaced, and findings are bounded by what the data supports. An ongoing engagement with broader data access would lift these constraints and extend the analytical depth substantially.

What this PoC demonstrated

Over the course of the engagement, the Dimension Labs platform processed 2,395 fan survey responses, 1,184,826 attendance records, and approximately 84,000 shop sales transactions to produce four headline findings and a six-recommendation operational roadmap. Each finding is anchored in real fan data, supported by either structured behavioral evidence or chi-squared-tested comparative analysis, and tied to a specific operational lever the club can act on. The full analytical foundation — the dimension schema, the cohort framework, the design system, the statistical methodology — was built during the PoC and is reusable.

This is what one engagement produced. The same methodology, applied continuously, produces a fan intelligence layer that compounds in value with every additional data point.

Three concrete questions the next engagement would answer

Appendix A — The 30 dimensions used in this report

Appendix B — Operational lever × segment map

Appendix C — Method notes and honest limits

This report is descriptive and statistically anchored, not causal. Where percentages are shown, sample sizes are included. Where lift-style language is used, it is presented as comparative observational evidence rather than proof of mechanism. The survey is anonymous, so survey voice and member behavior are compared at the aggregate cohort level only. The shop sales records are month-precision (not day or hour). The attendance-to-spend portfolio applies to the One-Touch Pass-linked member universe only (33,507 members); the outer attendance population is observable in count but not linkable to commerce.

The Section 3 SNS analysis uses the survey's self-reported follow data and compares it to self-reported attendance buckets. The relationship is observational, not causal — fans who follow more Gamba accounts may attend more matches because of digital engagement, or they may follow more accounts because they already attend more matches. The chi-squared significance establishes that the relationship is real and unlikely to be due to chance; it does not establish directional causation. The operational implication is robust either way: a population of fans showing both high digital engagement and high attendance is identifiable, and a sub-population with low digital engagement is identifiable and addressable.