A revenue analytics platform for a hockey club

Most of my background is in banking, not sports. This suite exists to answer a fair question: without a sports background, can I still do the modeling a club’s revenue team needs? The questions are real ones: will season-ticket holders come back, what should each game cost, what are partnerships worth, which fans are worth finding. Five models are built and interactive for a hypothetical Buffalo franchise; the rest are specified on the roadmap.

#55

Nielsen DMA

637,090 TV homes

16,421

Avg attendance, 2025-26

~86% fill · 31st of 32

19,070

Arena capacity

playoff dates sell out

~38k

Telecast audience

4.0 household rating

1st

US local NHL ratings

highest of any US market

The models are calibrated to the same public market data. The figures that matter most sit at the ends of the row: the country’s best local hockey ratings out of the 55th-ranked media market, against a building near the bottom of the league in fill. The audience is there; much of it watches from home. Most of these models end up working that gap.

Ticketing & attendance

Season-ticket renewal risk

Live

85.0%

baseline renewal across a 2,400-account book

Scores every account, ranks the call list, and sizes the retention program.

Open the model

Game demand & variable pricing

Live

+$3.87M

per season vs. a flat $85 ticket

Demand curves by opponent tier and day of week; prices the slate for gate plus per-caps.

Open the model

Predictive buying & lead scoring

Roadmap

Ranks the CRM pipeline by conversion likelihood: single-game buyers to plans to memberships.

Cross-sell & upgrades

Roadmap

Next-best-offer for existing accounts: plan upgrades, lower-bowl moves, playoff priority.

No-show forecasting

Roadmap

Predicts scan rate per game for staffing and as an early churn signal.

Corporate partnerships

Sponsorship valuation

Live

1.12×

delivered value vs. rate card, default package

Prices 30 partnership assets by media equivalency, structures the term, and suggests the ask.

Open the model

Sponsor renewal risk

Roadmap

Delivery against contract, engagement, and category health for every partner account.

Category whitespace

Roadmap

Unsold and underpriced sponsor categories against comparable markets.

Executive

Revenue scenario model

Roadmap

Team-performance scenarios carried through attendance, ratings, per-caps, renewals, and sponsorship into a P&L range.

Live-model figures are each model’s output at its default settings.

Why this order

These are hypotheses about sequencing from outside the building, not a prescription; a team living with the real data would know where they break. My read: coming off a losing stretch, renewal risk leads, because the season-ticket base is the largest forecastable revenue line and the data already exists. Coming off a breakthrough season, the order flips. Demand is doing the retention work, so lead conversion and pricing jump the queue, and the renewal model’s job becomes preparing for the year-two cliff, when new cohorts churn hardest. Sponsorship valuation seems useful either way, putting a checkable number beside the rate card.

The roadmap items wait on foundations: identity resolution before lifetime value, holdout experiments before uplift models, clean spend data before marketing ROI. And each model is built to end at a decision a revenue team could act on: a call list, a price sheet, an ask.

The club and its books are simulated; market inputs are public data. Not affiliated with any professional team.