Biometric Ticketing System for Manchester City FC

Manchester City FC — Biometric Ticketing & Matchday Experience

Redesigning how 53,000 fans enter the stadium — with their face as the ticket. Role: Lead Product Designer · Team: 1 PM, 4 no-code devs · iOS & Android.

Manchester City FC had a structural matchday problem: 10-15% of paid tickets ended up empty on game day. Scalpers resold unused seats outside the stadium, and counterfeit QR codes were slipping through the gates. I joined during discovery — before any screen existed — as design lead for the platform's first Premier League-tier client, with a hard deadline: the season opener.

Fans arrive in heightened emotional states, with a two-minute tolerance for any hiccup. 53,000 people stand behind every gate — one failure becomes a press incident. And banking biometric patterns assume you're solo, indoors, with time. Stadium queues break every assumption.

Instead of layering identity verification on top of the purchase, we rebuilt the flow so verification happens once, at the moment of buying — and never again. By the time fans arrive at the gate, their face is already their ticket

Preventing fraud at the gate solves only half the problem — the other half lives in the seats that never get used. Fans who can't attend release their tickets back to the platform, and verified buyers receive them in real time with biometric identity already linked. No resale outside official channels, no empty seats on matchday.

Shipped to production. Following launch, ticket reselling and counterfeit entries were significantly reduced, and the seamless biometric flow recovered thousands of seats per match through the optimized Ticket Exchange. Every Figma file was precise enough to build without interpretation — I worked as designer and project coordinator for a team of 4 generalist no-code developers. (Manchester City Group, 2024. Visuals recreated for portfolio.)