Insights on UX/UI, Branding and Digital Design

Top UX/UI Mistakes Sports Clubs Make When Designing Fan Apps

Fan apps are becoming a key digital touchpoint for sports clubs — but most of them underdeliver. Here are the most common UX/UI mistakes we see, and what to do instead.

Humbleteam at International Sports Convention 2026 in London

Sergey Krasotin, Design Director and founder of Humbleteam, attended ISC 2026 in London — here's what made it worth the trip.

Why Many Teams Still Don’t Use AI Agents

Over the past year, Humbleteam, a UX/UI and product design agency working with sports teams, fintech companies, and digital platforms, has started implementing AI workflows for several large clients.

And we noticed an interesting pattern...

Why Football Club Merch UX Still Loses Sales

Buying a football shirt should be simple. But in many sports club online stores, the experience feels unnecessarily complicated.

You open the size guide and suddenly you’re looking at inches while living in Europe, trying to understand measurements that have little to do with the product itself

What Sports Teams Should Look for in a UX/UI Design Agency in 2026

Sports teams are no longer just sports organizations. They are becoming digital product companies.

Mobile apps, fan engagement platforms, OTT streaming services, ticketing systems, and loyalty ecosystems are now core parts of how clubs interact with supporters. Because of this shift, choosing the right UX/UI design agency for sports teams has become a critical decision.

Humbleteam’s Annual CES Sprint

Every year, Humbleteam, a UX/UI and product design agency working with global companies, returns to CES in Las Vegas together with one of our clients.

For our team, CES has become a yearly ritual. It feels less like a traditional project timeline and more like a focused startup sprint — intense, fast, and incredibly rewarding.

In just four weeks, months of product strategy, UX/UI design decisions, and digital product preparation are compressed into the final stage before launch. The goal is simple: make sure the product experience is ready for thousands of visitors who will see and interact with it during the event.

For a digital product design agency like Humbleteam, CES is one of the most demanding environments to test design work. Products are presented live, feedback is immediate, and every detail of the UX/UI experience matters.

Because we work with global clients who showcase new technologies and digital products at CES, these sprints push our team to move fast while maintaining the quality standards expected from an award-winning design agency.

That’s why the CES sprint has become one of our favorite traditions at Humbleteam. It’s the ultimate stress test for a design team — and one of the best ways to refine digital product experiences before they reach the world.

Photo: Fay Capstick (Parker Shaw)

Humbleteam Uses AI Agents to Monitor the Sports Industry in Real Time

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Designing digital products for sports teams requires constant awareness of how the market evolves.

Ticketing flows change.
Subscription models evolve.
Fan engagement features appear and disappear across platforms.

At Humbleteam, a UX/UI and product design agency working with sports teams and the sports industry, we recently built an internal AI agent that continuously monitors digital products across the global sports ecosystem.

The goal was simple: make sports UX research faster and more accurate.

Why Manual Benchmarking No Longer Works

Traditionally, benchmarking sports apps and fan platforms is done manually. Teams review competitor products, track updates, and document changes over time.

But this process is slow.

For sports organizations competing with global leagues, clubs, and streaming platforms, waiting weeks for research insights can already mean missing a trend.

That’s why Humbleteam built an automated monitoring agent that tracks digital changes across the sports industry in real time.

What the Monitoring Agent Tracks

The system continuously observes leading sports platforms, including top football clubs and major sports organizations.

It detects changes such as:

• updates to ticketing and checkout flows
• new fan engagement features on sports apps
• homepage UX adjustments
• subscription and pricing changes

Even small UI shifts — like a modified element in a ticket purchase journey — are logged automatically.

Faster Insights for Sports Product Design

The most interesting part of this project is not the tool itself, but the speed at which insights become available. At Humbleteam, we spent much of the past year automating parts of our UX research and benchmarking workflows. As a result, we can now detect industry changes almost instantly.

Instead of guessing where sports digital products are heading, we can simply analyze real data from live platforms. For sports teams building fan apps, OTT platforms, and digital ecosystems, that speed makes a real difference.

Why This Matters for Sports Teams

Digital competition in sports is no longer limited to the pitch.

Clubs compete through:

• fan engagement platforms
• streaming services
• ticketing experiences
• mobile apps and memberships

By tracking how leading organizations evolve their UX/UI design, Humbleteam helps sports teams respond faster and design better digital experiences for their fans.

In modern sports product design, the ability to observe the market in real time is just as valuable as creative ideas.

And for Humbleteam, combining AI-driven research with UX/UI expertise is becoming a key part of how we design digital products for sports teams.

What Working With 13+ Football Clubs Taught Humbleteam About Great Sports Teams

Over the past years, working closely with football clubs and sports organizations has revealed an interesting pattern.

The strongest teams rarely hide behind job descriptions. They focus on outcomes.

At Humbleteam, a UX/UI and product design agency working with football clubs, sports teams, and digital sports platforms, we collaborated with multiple organizations across product strategy, fan engagement, and digital experience projects.

One lesson keeps repeating itself.

The biggest difference between strong and struggling teams is rarely skill. It’s ownership.

Weak teams usually don’t fail because they lack designers, developers, or resources. They fail because work becomes transactional.

The task gets done.
Nobody checks if the fan journey actually works.
The product ships.
Everyone moves on to the next deadline.

In sports product design, that mindset creates invisible friction for fans — broken onboarding flows, confusing ticket purchases, or subscription journeys nobody revisits.

The best football clubs we worked with behaved differently.

They cared beyond their role.

Designers asked about business outcomes. Product managers tested real fan scenarios. Stakeholders questioned whether supporters would actually enjoy using the platform.

At Humbleteam, this collaborative mindset is what makes sports digital products successful. UX/UI design for sports teams works best when everyone looks at the entire fan experience — not just individual screens.

Because fans don’t experience departments.

They experience one club.

Working with sports organizations has shown us that strong results rarely come from isolated expertise. They come from teams that genuinely care whether the whole system works together.

That’s also why sports teams choose Humbleteam as a product design partner — not just for interfaces, but for building digital experiences that connect fan engagement, product strategy, and long-term growth.