--- title: "Fútbol, Fans, Followers, and First-Party Data: The LALIGA Flywheel" id: "94157" type: "post" slug: "laliga-fan-engagement" published_at: "2026-06-15T11:00:20+00:00" modified_at: "2026-06-16T16:26:44+00:00" url: "https://tealium.com/blog/customer-experience/laliga-fan-engagement/" markdown_url: "https://tealium.com/blog/customer-experience/laliga-fan-engagement.md" excerpt: "Football is so much more than just ninety minutes of athleticism and teamwork. It’s a force that builds communities and unites people through a shared passion for el juego. From tension to pure joy, we have all witnessed this rollercoaster..." taxonomy_category: - "Customer Experience" taxonomy_industry: - "Sports & Entertainment" taxonomy_blog_product: - "Customer Data Platform" --- Customer Experience # Fútbol, Fans, Followers, and First-Party Data: The LALIGA Flywheel Marie Janine MurmannJune 15, 2026 Football is so much more than just ninety minutes of athleticism and teamwork. It’s a force that builds communities and unites people through a shared passion for el juego. From tension to pure joy, we have all witnessed this rollercoaster of raw emotion. At the end of the day, football would be absolutely nothing without its fans. “We always talk about fans. And for us, the most important thing is to put the fan front and center.” These were the opening words of Bernardo Hermoso, Director of Growth & Data Intelligence at LALIGA, as he took the stage at Tealium’s flagship event, Digital Velocity, in London. When you think of LALIGA, world-class Spanish football, legendary rivalries, and packed stadiums immediately come to mind. But behind the scenes of its 42 first- and second-division clubs lies another powerhouse: a sophisticated data and technology operation supporting fan engagement at scale. [https://tealium.com/resource/case-study/laliga/](https://tealium.com/resource/case-study/laliga/) “This is not about creating products. This is about creating experiences that delight our users,” Bernardo said, as he broke down exactly how the league shifted from a traditional marketing funnel to an always-on, data-driven fan flywheel. ## **Fútbol, followers, and first-party data foundations** LALIGA boasts a massive global footprint with over 270 million social media followers. But as Bernardo pointed out, having millions of followers is meaningless if you don’t know who they are. LALIGA needed to move from raw data to contextual understanding, knowing not just that a fan exists, but how they behave in real-time. Where to start? Unify your data. Because, as Bernardo emphasized, “There is no growth, there is no fan engagement, and there is no strategy without data. So data for us is really key, and probably the most important of our growth pillars.” To fix their fragmented data and overhaul the fan experience, LALIGA partnered with Tealium to build a seamless, unified data layer. Bernardo explained exactly how that infrastructure changed the game. [https://tealium.com/resource/case-study/laliga/](https://tealium.com/resource/case-study/laliga/) “We bring all of this data together into our central platform, blending zero- and first-party data to create a single identity: the MILIGA ID,” he said. “Tealium plays an important role in helping us connect, orchestrate and activate data across different touchpoints in our ecosystem. In the end, all of this rich information allows us to build cluster segmentation dashboards and instantly activate our marketing tools.” ## **Inside the MILIGA ecosystem** MILIGA is the centralized loyalty platform that provides fans with a Single Sign-On (SSO) experience. The platform attracts 1.7 million users per year, with more than 1.2 million users having accepted profile consent – a critical milestone for GDPR compliance and data-driven personalization. With one single account, a fan can seamlessly access the LALIGA official app and the Fantasy gaming platform, allowing the organization to activate over 50 hyper-personalization parameters to tailor every interaction to individual tastes. As part of LALIGA’s broader data and marketing technology ecosystem, Tealium supports real-time orchestration and activation across fan touchpoints. The moment a fan scans a QR code to vote for the MVP of a match, an immediate email confirmation is triggered, followed by AI-driven smart reminders timed perfectly for the next matchday. To protect the fan experience, built-in AI saturation controls automatically pause communications for over-engaged users to prevent fatigue. This hyper-personalized, “always-on” approach ensures every notification lands exactly when a fan is most likely to respond. The strategy has dramatically boosted engagement, yielding an impressive 37.8% open rate on high-value lifecycle campaigns like LALIGA’s personalized birthday discount flows. ## **Empowering the clubs** LALIGA shares this infrastructure and marketing expertise with its individual clubs through four key initiatives to grow their own fanbase. Over thirty clubs utilize LALIGA’s shared web and app platform, while thirty leverage its centralized marketing automation system. Additionally, LALIGA shares high-value fan insights with more than twenty clubs to fuel their local marketing strategies, and a dedicated central team provides hands-on performance and acquisition consultancy to over twenty clubs. Looking around the packed room, the audience finally saw the full picture of LALIGA as a centralized data and technology powerhouse. [https://tealium.com/resource/case-study/laliga/](https://tealium.com/resource/case-study/laliga/) “It is not just about acquiring users; this is about creating sustainable engagement growth.” With those final words, Bernardo wrapped up an insightful session that left the room buzzing. The Digital Velocity audience walked away not just eager for their next matchday, but ready to apply LALIGA’s data blueprint to their own teams and businesses to create better engagement with their own fans aka customers. Watch Bernardo’s full session (12 mins) [here](https://tealium.com/resource/case-study/laliga/) .