Las Vegas Lights FC

Enlisting supporters to build a fan engagement platform: a case study on Las Vegas Lights FC

• To build fan engagement, Las Vegas Lights FC asked supporters to help design its 2020 kit.

• The overwhelming response warranted further fan involvement and transformed into 17 different shirts for each of the club’s 17 regular season home games.

• Challenges tied to lead time and purchase minimums with no assurances of sales led to the club selling shirt designs to sponsors.

• Club owner and CEO Brett Lashbrook underscores the value of creating a more interesting fan experience as being paramount to the success of the club beyond what is transpiring on the pitch.
  
  

When it comes to fan engagement, it is perhaps a truism that football in the second division of a major market has to work a little harder to garner attention. The solution, of course, is to find creative, out-of-the-box ways to capture mindshare. 

Las Vegas Lights FC, which reside within the United Soccer League, understand this well and embrace the challenge of creativity. The club looks to the Las Vegas backdrop for inspiration – a city often referred to as the entertainment capital of the world with its nightly aura of neon lights, beloved singers and magical, death-defying feats that continue to capture the imagination of people from all corners of the globe, says club owner and CEO Brett Lashbrook. 

In 2019—year two for the club, Las Vegas Lights FC launched a jersey initiative designed to engage fans and capture new ones. The club issued a directive requesting fans to help to design the 2020 kit. Receiving close to a thousand submissions, the response was overwhelming, says Lashbrook.

Following some reflection, club executives decided to take the initiative further. The 2020 jersey challenge transformed into 17 different shirts for each of the 17 regular season home games. Las Vegas Lights FC encouraged fans to continue submitting their ideas to a dedicated web address, LightsFC.com/JerseyDesign, and also made a limited number of jerseys available for purchase during each home game.

Ideas sprang from an elementary school-aged child, a high schooler who created a jersey as a school project for a graphic design course, the head of one of the club's supporter groups and a fan from another country that follows the club on Twitter, all of which made it onto the slate for production. 

Lashbrook says the programme took its lead from what some of the big clubs overseas, like Chelsea FC, FC Barcelona and Manchester City, were doing. They were seen sporting different-coloured jerseys frequently, which was confounding and refreshing all at once. For Las Vegas Lights FC, the only proviso was that the shirts had to remain true to the team’s colours: shock blue, neon yellow and neon peach.

Initially, an American online shoe and clothing retailer based in Las Vegas, served as the kit sponsor. The club recognised that the company (now owned by Amazon) had a penchant for the local art scene and could be an effective partner in capturing the essence of what the club stands for as a proud Las Vegas team. The first jersey sported a neon tube, leaving fans either loving or hating it, but with the sense of wanting more.

Challenges were tied to lead time and having to purchase minimum quantities, with no inkling of whether or not the shirts would sell. Those sorts of issues get amplified at the minor league level, says Lashbrook. One solution was to sell the shirt design to sponsors. These included the Nevada Donor Network, which encourages the Hispanic community to donate their organs upon death.

This resulted in the creation of a dedicated kit that featured various human organs to promote awareness. The club followed up with a shirt nod to the Vegas Golden Knights, a Las Vegas hockey team that plays in the National Hockey League which launched around the same time as Las Vegas Lights FC (2017-2018). On the heels of the hockey team experiencing a wave of success, a football shirt that resembled their uniform was manufactured and called the “Golden Knights’ Lights Night”.

Other shirts were created for breast cancer awareness, National Hispanic Heritage Month, in support of the National Football League’s (NFL) Las Vegas Raiders as well as to celebrate American Independence Day, with a 4 July red, white and blue jersey that replicated the “famous” 1994 US men’s national team’s denim jersey.

But COVID-19 caused production to stop halfway through. Las Vegas Lights FC managed to produce eight shirts in all before having to put an end to the initiative. 

Lashbrook describes programmes such as these as a means to help build the soccer narrative and culture. It is about the importance of focusing on everything that happens outside of the 90 minutes on the pitch. He underscores the value of creating a more interesting fan experience as being paramount to the success of the club.

“We can't guarantee wins and we can't guarantee goals,” says Lashbrook. “But what we can guarantee are smiles and laughs.”