Stamford Bridge, home to Chelsea Football Club, has stood in the heart of west London for nearly 150 years. Hemmed in by railway lines and landmark buildings, the stadium’s urban location has long frustrated expansion plans, leaving it with a capacity of just 41,000 in a league where rivals such as Arsenal and Manchester United hold 60,000 and 74,000, respectively.
The rivals aren’t standing still either. Manchester United has unveiled plans for a new stadium seating up to 100,000, at a reported cost of around £2 billion; Arsenal is weighing an expansion of the Emirates beyond its current 60,000; and Tottenham and Everton have each moved into new grounds of their own in recent years.
Chelsea has flirted with the same path (an approved £1 billion, 60,000-seat redevelopment) but those plans have stalled, leaving the club boxed in while others pour money into concrete and steel.
Unable to grow outward, Chelsea has looked inward, turning to emerging technology to do what bricks and mortar cannot.
Chelsea’s support is overwhelmingly global and increasingly digital-first with a fanbase of millions reachable through a phone long before it ever reaches a turnstile.
The modern supporter has come to expect the same app-based, personalized experience from a football club that they get from a retailer or a streaming service. Adding seats does nothing for a fan in Lagos, Jakarta or Chicago; better software reaches all of them.
Chelsea is not alone: across professional sports, fan apps, digital memberships and data-driven personalization have become standard investments.
Earlier this year, the club joined forces with industrial AI firm IFS, which aims to help the club stay on top of its venue by using AI to predict maintenance needs, optimize schedules and keep matchday operations running smoothly. It is also helping Chelsea personalize services and deliver smarter digital experiences for fans.
The club also signed Vietnamese technology firm FPT.
“Football has historically been quite slow to adopt technology, so we saw this as a strong proof of concept — a way to demonstrate our capabilities,” FPT UK CEO Mark Scrivens told TechInformed just before kickoff on matchday at the stadium.
A digital home for 350 clubs
The firm’s first project was the supporters club platform, which had been offline since 2022. With more than 350 official supporters clubs across 100 countries, Chelsea had a sprawling global community but no centralized digital home.
The relaunched platform allows fans to search, discover and join clubs worldwide, create new ones, and engage with updates, photos and meeting locations — all through single sign-on via the Chelsea FC app.
Club administrators can now communicate directly with members through the platform, replacing the patchwork of manual methods that had previously made coordination difficult.
“The club knew they had to give something meaningful to their global membership,” Scrivens said.
Since launch, the platform has attracted more than 16,000 users and generated more than 50,000 views.
Beating the matchday queue
The second project addressed one issue that comes with a smaller stadium and a large fan base: long lines. Where a club might simply build more retail floor, Chelsea is squeezing more throughput from the footprint it has.
The “megastore,” the club’s merchandise shop inside Stamford Bridge, consistently drew long lines before kickoff, Chelsea president Jason Gannon said. Demand was especially high for personalized items such as custom shirts, but the window to serve fans was short.
“So we built Megastore Express, an app that lets fans preorder merchandise and pick it up at the stadium,” he said.
Launched in January 2026, the click-and-collect experience allows supporters to browse products, build a cart, select a pickup location and pay digitally — all before arriving at the stadium. QR codes enable smooth collection, while real-time order confirmations keep fans informed throughout.
Scrivens said the work was inspired by what FPT had done for Singapore Airlines and Changi Airport, where it automated the delivery of duty-free purchases to departure gates.
“Changi is one of the busiest and most advanced airports in the world, and we’re digitizing its supply chain,” he said.
Across both projects, FPT has embedded AI throughout its development process, from requirements definition and UX design through automated code quality checks and test generation, with the goal of allowing Chelsea to move from concept to live pilots within tight seasonal windows.
Choosing what to build next
To ensure innovation targets the most pressing challenges, FPT launched “Wrecked Ideas Hack,” a 24-hour challenge in which a client delivers a brief and three teams of six people work to solve it using technology.
The firm has run the challenge five times at the time of writing — producing apps, working prototypes and presentations.
“For Chelsea, the challenges focused on food and beverage in the stadium, as well as ticketing,” Scrivens said.
The food and beverage goal is to ease the familiar halftime rush: thousands of fans, limited time and not enough service points.
Future phases of the FPT partnership are expected to include deeper community features for the supporters club network, in-stadium digital revenue opportunities beyond retail and AI-enabled use cases aligned with the club’s governance and privacy guardrails.
Whether that proves shrewd or merely thrifty will take seasons to judge. Rivals are betting billions that scale still wins with more seats, more hospitality, more matchday revenue. Chelsea is betting that the most valuable ground left to gain is the kind you can’t pour concrete on: the attention, data and loyalty of a fan who may never set foot in SW6.