Transforming the Home of Cricket into a Globally Connected, Commercial Sports Brand

The Potential:

Lord’s is more than a cricket ground. It’s a living museum, a global sporting stage and a year‑round events venue that welcomes members, domestic and international fans, touring teams, corporate clients and tourists.

But as audience expectations, commercial models and digital behaviours shifted, the existing Lord’s and MCC website and digital experience were no longer keeping pace. A legacy CMS and dated information architecture made it hard to serve on‑the‑go, global audiences.

Ticketing, scoring, fixtures, hospitality and tours sat in separate systems, forcing users through fragmented, discontinuous journeys. Behind the scenes, critical processes like player fixture selection and box‑holder catering ran on paper forms, spreadsheets and phone calls, which were slow, error‑prone and hard to scale.

It was clear we needed to evolve Lord’s from a historic venue with an informative website into a modern sports brand built on a connected, commercial digital platform. One that could convert passion into ticket sales, hospitality bookings, tours and deeper membership engagement.

The Insight:

For modern sports brands, the experience around the game is as important as the game itself.

Fans now expect live scores, personalised content, frictionless ticketing and mobile‑first journeys as standard. Corporate clients expect consumer‑grade digital tools for hospitality, catering and venue hire. Members, players and debenture holders expect services that respect their time and status. At the same time, MCC needed to preserve the unique heritage and character that make Lord’s unlike any other ground.

We saw that the challenge wasn’t just “a new website”, it was about joining the dots and connecting fan‑facing journeys (fixtures, tickets, scores, content) with the behind‑the‑scenes operations (fixtures, hospitality, catering, tours) that keep the club running.

The most powerful move was to design the digital estate around complete journeys, from discovering a Test match to sitting down in an executive box, and to digitise the operational workflows that sit underneath, so every interaction could feel simpler, smarter and more connected.

The Idea:

Reimagine Lord’s as a unified digital platform and digitise the workflows that matter most.

MCC partnered with Brand Potential on a multi‑year transformation programme to:

• Re-develop the Lord’s and MCC websites on a modern CMS, with responsive templates and a tile-based interface that balances heritage with the expectations of today’s fans and hospitality buyers.
• Integrate core business systems – ticketing,scoring, fixtures, tours, hospitality, debentures and box holder tools – into coherent, end-to-end journeys.
• Introduce personalisation and a phased move to Single Sign On (SSO), laying the foundations for richer, data-driven relationships with members and fans.
• Build bespoke applications such as the MCC Fixture Manager and a digital hospitality catering portal, turning manual, error-prone processes into streamlined, upsell-ready online experiences.

The vision was to create one connected digital estate that can support marquee events like the Ashes, everyday county fixtures and year-round hospitality – all while staying true to the history and character of the Home of Cricket.

The Technology:

We delivered a connected digital ecosystem for the Home of Cricket built on a modern Digital Experience Platform, using Kentico as the foundation for stability, flexibility and rapid evolution.

We introduced a contemporary tile‑based interface and flexible templates that could surface fixtures, scores, hospitality journeys, ticketing and tours in a way that made sense to fans and commercial audiences alike.

A major focus was the technical stitching‑together of the systems that sit behind the Lord’s experience. Using Kentico as the central hub, we connected ticketing, cricket scoring, eCommerce, tour booking, hospitality management and box‑holder systems into a single, coherent ecosystem. This ensured that live match data, availability, content and commercial actions could be surfaced in real time, giving fans, members and hospitality clients a unified experience no matter where they were in their journey.

We also put personalisation, analytics and identity at the core of the platform. A phased introduction of Single Sign On allowed users to move seamlessly between ticketing, members areas and bespoke applications without friction, creating the foundations for deeper segmentation and future data‑driven experiences. The platform now supports clear measurement across traffic, engagement, conversions and match‑day behaviours, enabling MCC to make better decisions and continuously improve.

Together, this created a robust, scalable digital infrastructure capable of powering marquee events like the Ashes, supporting day‑to‑day cricket operations and delivering year‑round commercial performance, all while preserving the character and heritage of the Home of Cricket.

The Impact:

The reimagined Lord’s and MCC digital platform delivered immediate, measurable performance gains across engagement and experience metrics:

• 18% increase in overall site traffic and an 11.5% uplift in site engagement.
• 26% faster page speeds, significantly improving the experience for mobile users.
• 300% growth in mobile engagement within the first three months.

Beyond the data, the transformation has repositioned Lord’s as a digitally mature sports brand. The platform underpinned exceptional commercial demand, including a 500% over subscription for Ashes ticket sales, while the bespoke catering portal delivered a 50% reduction in administrative overhead for the hospitality team.

By connecting heritage with a high-performance digital ecosystem, MCC now has the tools, data and flexibility to serve the global cricket community with confidence, ensuring the Home of Cricket remains as relevant in the digital age as it is on the pitch.