Why Winning Comes Second to a Full House

Every year, an estimated 40 million football seats across Europe go unsold. What would it take to turn that empty space into revenue, loyal fans, and a stronger club?

In this episode of Don't Forget Your Tickets, host Carl-Erik Michalsen Moberg sits down with Jim McCarthy, founder of Impresario Strategic Growth Service in Pasadena, California. Jim's career stretches back to the earliest days of e-commerce, from managing Amazon's partnership at GeoCities in the 1990s to building Goldstar into one of the leading platforms for unsold live event inventory, helping more than 25,000 rights holders sell tickets to over 2 million events.

This is a wide-ranging conversation about what it actually takes to fill a stadium. Jim traces his path from the dot-com boom through two decades running Goldstar, and explains why he decided, after selling the business in 2021, to found Impresario and focus specifically on the roughly 1,950 professional football clubs in the world that are not among the top 50. He speaks candidly about the scale of the problem across European football, and why filling the stadium matters more than winning.

Carl-Erik and Jim also explore how ticketing technology has changed since the days before apps and APIs, why so many clubs have lost the art of personalisation they once practised, and why a ticket should be treated as raw material rather than a finished product. They discuss revenue per seat as the real measure of success, and why the conversation about unsold inventory needs to reach the owner's desk, not stay buried in the ticketing department.

In this episode, we cover:

• From GeoCities to Goldstar: How Jim's early years managing Amazon's e-commerce partnership shaped a career that would later take him into live event ticketing.
• Building Goldstar Events: Using machine learning to match fans with events, working directly with major ticketing systems including Ticketmaster, and turning unsold inventory into a business that lasted nearly twenty years.
• Then versus now: What ticketing technology could and could not do before apps and APIs existed, and why some of the old lessons in personalisation have been forgotten.
• Why Impresario exists: What Jim learnt from a year of conversations with club owners, and why 40 million unsold seats a year in European football became the problem he wanted to solve.
• Revenue per seat: How Impresario's Match Day Multiplier programme measures success with clubs, and why filling the stadium is, in Jim's words, more important than winning.