How OneFootball Builds a Habit of App Engagement with Compelling Short-Form Content

OneFootball is the largest football media platform in the world, with 200 million monthly active users and 7 billion app sessions annually. Through their native apps, website and connected TV app, OneFootball delivers unparalleled worldwide football coverage, offering everything from breaking news and highlight clips to live streaming matches and providing real-time commentary, analysis and stats.

With the average human attention span at just 47 seconds and app sessions lasting just 1-2 minutes, OneFootball uses short-form content, community-driven elements and live social experiences to keep customers engaged and drive repeat app usage. With more content and commentary than any other football media platform, the resulting sense of community OneFootball builds keeps fans close to the action. 

With this strategy in mind, OneFootball set out to delight users with a personalized experience that emulates the excitement and engagement of its fan base, focusing on speed and action. 

Personalized Experiences At Scale

In less than two weeks, the team quickly developed an End-of-Year Wrap-Up feature that showcased personalized engagement stats through multiple interactive screens. This feature offered a dynamic, tailored experience reflecting each customer’s activity throughout the year.

For this project, OneFootball excelled in cross-team collaboration and set the pace for delighting customers. The results of the campaign demonstrated the power of integrating vertical, story-like content into the app without a heavy resource investment:

• 25% Scene completion rate in the first week
• 50% engagement on both Android and iOS platforms
• 40% of app users reported being “very satisfied” with the new format

No-Code Proof of Concept

Airship’s no-code Experience Editor enabled quick deployment of the personalized Scene, rolling out to Android first, followed by iOS. This proof of concept test allowed them to gather early engagement metrics, minimize risks and ensure a smooth rollout. Completed in just nine days, this project was OneFootball’s first large-scale, data-driven personalization effort and validated the hypothesis that customers would intuitively engage with swipeable, portrait-style content without explicit instructions. 

Building on the Wrap-Up‘s success, OneFootball introduced a new Daily Digest feature, offering snackable, vertical content similar to Instagram Stories. This new feature allowed users to share, react and explore the biggest news of the day, and was optimized using Airship’s A/B testing capability and no-code Surveys for customer feedback.

Read the full success story here. If you’re looking to create more compelling app + web experiences without heavy resource investment, don’t hesitate to get in touch. We would love to discuss your 2025 goals and how we can help you achieve them faster.