From fixtures to footfall: a Craft CMS agency success story
Roughly a 5 minute read by Adam
Sport London is a growing collection of pubs and kitchens across the capital, brought to life by the team at ETM Group. Already a go-to for must-see matches, we spotted an opportunity to help them show up for the less obvious ones too.
As part of building the initial website, we were keen to make the most of the systems they already had in place. One of those was Fanzo, a platform that helps fans find which venues are showing which fixtures. It takes the guesswork out of matchday planning and gives bar managers a simple admin tool to select exactly what games they’ll be screening.
Crucially, Fanzo also provides a fixture feed on a per-venue basis. Which got us thinking…
What if we used that data to generate pages automatically? Every time a manager selects a fixture in Fanzo, the website would spin up a new page for that match, competition, teams and sports, all handled in Craft CMS.
That meant for the big-hitters - Champions League knockouts, Six Nations, the Super Bowl - the site stayed fresh and up-to-date, the moment the fixtures were live.
But it also meant we could start winning traffic for the quieter ones, such as lesser-known leagues, niche competitions, and long-tail searches. Areas most competitors wouldn’t bother covering, but fans are still Googling.
Kicking off the Craft CMS development
We kicked things off with a custom console command to fetch fixture data from Fanzo’s API on a regular schedule. It pulls in the latest feed for each venue in Craft and processes it behind the scenes, building out a tidy list of every entity involved.
Instead of relying on standard Entries, we opted for a custom element type to represent each fixture. This gave us all the benefits of first-class content, full templating control, clean URLs, and structured data, without clogging up the CMS with content that’s here today, gone tomorrow. Fixtures are ephemeral by nature, so this approach keeps things efficient and elegant.
To keep pages rich with relevant content, we tagged other sections of the site, including editorial and user-generated content (UGC), with the custom fixture elements. This meant articles, previews, and posts could be associated with one or more fixtures, automatically surfacing where relevant. It gave the site a sense of authenticity, kept things feeling fresh, and allowed the team to feature or prioritise key content around bigger fixtures, ideal for spotlighting high-profile games or surfacing UGC.
To round things off, we added a light dusting of AI-generated content, short intros and contextual snippets to give each fixture a bit of extra flavour. But we kept it restrained. The goal wasn’t to fake editorial, just to add a helpful layer of interest without veering into “robot match report” territory.
And when a fixture calls for more of a human touch? The team can optionally link it to a manually curated Entry. That gives them total control to add bespoke previews, richer copy, or tactical campaign content, without having to reinvent the wheel every time.
The end result is a flexible, scalable setup that handles both the Champions League Final and Latvian table tennis with the same level of care, all powered by Craft CMS.
Post-match analysis
As the fixture feed began powering real content, we made a few smart adjustments to keep everything running smoothly and ensure the experience stayed relevant. Some fixtures included “TBC” placeholders, which weren’t much use to search engines, so we filtered those out to avoid clutter and keep the pages meaningful.
We also paid close attention to how team data was structured, particularly when distinguishing between men’s and women’s teams. By introducing consistent naming conventions and URL suffixes, we ensured both were treated equally and clearly, without one being folded into the other. A small detail, but one that reflects the broader goal: building a platform that caters to every kind of fan.
The focus on SEO and dynamic content paid off, with a +27% increase in organic rankings for key terms, drawing in more relevant, high-intent traffic across both headline fixtures and long-tail searches.
That visibility boost translated into results, contributing to a +2% uplift in conversion rate and an £8 increase in average spend per booking. Crucially, much of this can be attributed to attracting more qualified leads through those niche fixture pages, the kind of fans who already knew what they wanted to watch, and were ready to book.
None of this would have been possible without the flexibility and extensibility of Craft CMS. From custom elements to console commands, relational tagging to editorial overrides, i
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