vivenu Secures Exclusive Ticketing Deal With MLS-KKR Soccer Venture
Ticketing technology provider vivenu has secured a long-term exclusive agreement with Hometown Soccer Holdings (HSH), the venture established by Major League Soccer and investment firm KKR to expand MLS NEXT Pro's commercial operations. The partnership will bring ticket sales, customer data and analytics onto a centralized platform while allowing individual clubs to maintain their own branding, pricing and inventory.
12, covers clubs and venues operated through Hometown Soccer Holdings rather than the entire MLS NEXT Pro league. Financial terms, the number of participating clubs and the implementation timeline were not disclosed.
Under the arrangement, vivenu will provide the underlying technology for ticketing operations across HSH's growing network of professional soccer clubs. Each organization will retain a branded purchasing experience, while the centralized system will support season tickets, group sales, customer analytics and integrations with marketing, customer relationship management and sponsorship platforms.
The agreement is designed to give HSH a consistent technology infrastructure as it expands into new markets without requiring participating clubs to adopt identical ticketing storefronts or surrender local control over pricing and inventory. For fans, that means purchasing tickets through an interface branded to their local club, even as ticketing operations and customer information are managed through technology shared across the broader organization.
HSH CEO Tom Glick said the partnership reflects the venture's emphasis on developing professional soccer clubs with strong connections to their communities. "We are building professional soccer clubs with real roots in local markets, and that begins with a fan's experience purchasing their ticket to a match," Glick said.
The agreement also makes vivenu a central component of HSH's artificial intelligence strategy. The company says its AI technology will help participating clubs analyze sales and attendance data, identify revenue opportunities and develop more personalized marketing campaigns based on customer behavior.
Vivenuintroduced its ticketing-specific AI capabilities in July, including tools designed to generate reports, analyze purchasing patterns and support targeted customer outreach using information already held within its ticketing platform. The HSH partnership extends those capabilities into a multi-club operating model, where individual teams could potentially benefit from customer insights and business practices developed across other markets.
Simon Hennes, CEO of vivenu, emphasized the importance of allowing individual clubs to retain control over their businesses within the larger platform. "Every club keeps its own brand and owns its own data," Hennes said.
That combination of centralized reporting and club-level data ownership is a key feature of the agreement. HSH will have access to consolidated operational information across participating clubs, while vivenu says individual organizations will maintain control of their first-party customer data.