Closer to Mainz 05 football, on and off the pitch
FSV Mainz 05 is a German Bundesliga club founded in 1905, with a rich history and tradition it wants to continue building and deepening with its fans not only at the stadium, but online too. Today, the club has approximately 28,000 members. Its ambition was to create a truly smooth and simple user experience that would leave fans and investors with an unequivocally positive impression and keep pace with the digital world in the long term. For these exact reasons, the club chose the brand-new Xperience by Kentico, a platform bringing content management, marketing tools and smart integrations together.
What needed to change
Mainz 05 play in Germany’s top football league and, under manager Jürgen Klopp, reached the Bundesliga for the first time in the club’s history in 2004. Since then, the club has built a strong fan base, which today comprises approximately 28,000 members. The club wanted to continue developing this history and tradition not only at the Mewa Arena, which has a capacity of more than 33,000 spectators, but also online, where it faced a fragmented digital solution without centralised data management.
The aim was to find a platform capable of unifying data management and monitoring in one place, providing a scalable solution for marketing and content automation, connecting e-commerce (fan shop), and ensuring fans enjoyed an uninterrupted customer journey regardless of the technology or medium they were using, from the website and mobile devices to social media.
What Mainz 05 needed
• Centralised management and monitoring of data on one platform
• Scalable solution
• Marketing and content automation
• E-commerce integration
• Seamless customer journey — without changing technology or media
• API-first approach and modular design
How we approached it
We built a website for Mainz 05 on Xperience by Kentico, a product built entirely from the ground up with the future in mind and a headless content model that enables content to be distributed across websites, applications and other channels from a single location. We designed the solution with an API-first approach and modular design, including integration with the Shopware ERP system for e-commerce, the official Bundesliga API for live scores and statistics, and social media integration.
The delivery also includes a DXP platform with content personalisation, user segmentation and newsletters—tools that enable the club to communicate differently with various groups of fans according to their interests. Technically, the solution is built on .NET 7 and ASP.NET Core 7, with on-premises Ubuntu hosting. Algolia powers search, while CI/CD pipelines enable fast and secure deployment of changes. Cloudflare CDN, together with automatic image optimisation, ensures fast content delivery to fans worldwide.
What the project delivered
We created a modern digital platform for Mainz 05 that brings content management, marketing tools and integrations together in one place—exactly what the club expected from its new technology. The collaboration does not end at launch: together with AG Kühlhaus, the agency managing the client-facing side of the project, and Kentico, we are planning continuous development focused on new features and improvements through close three-way collaboration.
For a club with a tradition dating back to 1905 and currently playing in Germany’s top division, this represents a long-term investment in its digital relationship with fans—one that keeps pace with changing ways of following sports clubs and buying merchandise from them.
Delivered services
- We don't stop at launch; we continue developing websites according to business needs.
- Content personalisation, user segmentation and newsletters for targeted communication with different groups of fans.
- A tool that lets editors build and modify forms themselves without developer intervention.
- Complete solution development, from the user interface to server-side logic.
- Connecting the website to the Shopware e-commerce system, the official Bundesliga API and social media.
- Operation on the client's own infrastructure instead of the public cloud, according to their requirements for control and security.
Technology
- A powerful, modern foundation for the entire application, running on Linux.
- Fast and accurate full-text search across website content.
- Standard frontend building blocks enhanced with SignalR for real-time communication (e.g. live results).
- Automated deployment of changes, enabling rapid and secure development without extra manual work.
- Global content delivery network for fast content delivery and automatic image optimisation.
- The latest generation of the Kentico platform, enabling content distribution across multiple channels from a single location.
Successful websites of our clients on the Kentico platform
