The topic had come up at every meeting for two seasons. This time, it is on the roadmap: your audiences will soon have a single account to buy a ticket, order from the shop and open the app. Everyone is on board. One question remains: where do we start?
An SSO project touches your service providers, your contact database, your consents and the way your audiences log in every day. The choices made in the first few weeks carry through to every journey, and fixing them after launch is far harder than discussing them beforehand.
An SSO (single sign-on) project gives an organisation's audiences one account to access all its online services: ticketing, shop, app, members' area. It brings together functional, technical and legal decisions, from migrating existing accounts and choosing the services to connect to collecting and syncing consent.
The clubs and cultural venues we work with on these projects all face the same trade-offs. Here are the 7 questions we ask them at the start.
SSO meets several needs, and they do not lead to the same project (we cover ten of them in our article on why your audiences need single sign-on). A club whose fans abandon their basket because they cannot remember their password will focus first on a smoother purchase. A venue where the same spectator uses one email address for ticketing and another for the shop will want to recognise her as one and the same person. A museum preparing a membership offer is laying the foundations of its future members' area. Rank your objectives: the first one will guide every trade-off.
Then define who the account is for. Is it for the general public only, or also for hospitality clients and partners, who need specific access rights (access to certain areas, ticket allocations)?
Finally, note a few baseline indicators (customer service requests about logins, duplicates, share of contacts who have given consent): they will be your point of comparison.
List the services that currently require a login: ticketing, online shop, mobile app, website, competitions, partner area. For each one, ask the provider: can it hand login over to an SSO using the OpenID Connect (OIDC) or SAML standards? Integration often requires development work on their side. Raise the topic early: provider availability largely sets the pace of the project.
Then comes a crucial question: do you launch everything at once or move in stages? Liverpool FC, for example, chose to move in stages. As the club explained when announcing the final phase of its SSO project, it first unified login for its online store, its LFCTV GO video platform and the MyLFC area, before adding ticketing and membership accounts in November 2024.
Also think about existing accounts. If your data is centralised in Arenametrix, your SSO starting base is already in place: your contacts are unified and deduplicated there, and can be imported directly. SSO then completes this work at source: each fan has a single login for all your services, which prevents new duplicates, for example when they used one address for ticketing and another for the shop.
Our favourite: Rugby Club Toulonnais, which switched ticketing provider in 2025 to adopt FanXP. Because its SSO and data were already centralised with Arenametrix, the integration had no impact on its marketing operations: data stayed centralised, journeys remained active and the relationship with fans continued without interruption.
An SSO project cuts across several teams with different expectations. Marketing wants reliable profiles, IT wants recognised standards and security managed in one place, the data protection officer wants consent that can be proven, and ticketing and retail want sales never to be interrupted. Appoint a single project lead who makes decisions and follows up with providers, and bring everyone together from the very start of the project.
Build the timeline backwards from a launch date, depending on the number of services to connect. Leave time for testing (account creation, forgotten password, purchase, moving from one service to another) and avoid going live the day before your season tickets or subscriptions go on sale.
Finally, think about life after launch: who will help a fan who can no longer log in? With Arenametrix SSO, the organisation can be given administrator access to view an account, understand a login error or end a user's sessions across all services.
Every mandatory field is one more reason to give up. Keep them to the essentials (email address, first name, last name) and make the rest optional: date of birth, phone number, favourite player or artist. This information can also be completed later from the personal area.
The login, sign-up and forgotten-password pages use your logo, colours and typography, so your audiences never feel they have left your brand. Also plan for a journey designed for mobile, validation emails sent in the name of the club or venue, and the languages your audiences speak.
This account also opens the door to new uses.
Account creation is often the first time a visitor shares their data with you: this is where consent is decided. One consent or several (news, ticketing, shop, partner offers)? What exact wording for each, and which purpose does each one match in your database?
The tick boxes appear at account creation and remain editable in the personal area. Every change must be applied immediately to your marketing tools, otherwise you risk emailing someone who unsubscribed that very morning. Consent is then collected at source, dated and traceable, instead of being scattered across tools that contradict each other.
For your audiences, SSO changes a habit. Present it as a service rather than a constraint. Communicate by segment, starting with those who will need it first, such as subscribers due for renewal, then recent buyers and inactive contacts. A phased rollout lets you check everything before opening it to your whole database, and an FAQ prepares your front-of-house teams for login questions.
Duplicate and inactive accounts need particular attention. Liverpool FC, for example, contacted supporters who had several accounts linked to the same email address before launch. More than a year later, the club set 9 March 2026 as the deadline to complete SSO, so that its season ticket waiting list would only contain active accounts.
Our favourite: Union Bordeaux Bègles, which launched its SSO with Arenametrix on 14 April 2026 and recorded 10,000 logins on the very first day. From the next day, the club could prepare its CRM actions based on requalified profiles: subscriber reminders, reactivation campaigns, segmentation for its partners.
The indicators to track: the share of unified accounts, the adoption rate, the post-login conversion rate, the change in customer service requests about accounts, and data quality (consents collected, addresses provided).
Compare them with your baseline at a post-launch review, then regularly. These reviews are also the time to decide what comes next: connecting a new service, enriching the personal area or launching new scenarios based on unified profiles.
Before launching your SSO project, make sure you can answer these questions:
A generic SSO mainly solves authentication. The Arenametrix SSO module is part of an Audience Data Platform purpose-built for sports and cultural organisations. It is natively connected to each contact's unified profile: every account created and every consent updated reaches the database that powers your campaigns, daily or in real time depending on the plan you choose. Our teams support the project from scoping to optimisation, drawing on deployments such as those of Rugby Club Toulonnais, Union Bordeaux Bègles and KRC Genk.