Roblox is an important digital touchpoint for young prospective fans, who demonstrate more varied sports consumption habits. Fans want to feel connected, craving entertainment from brands 24/7. Clubs with growing global fanbases have significant audiences that will never visit the stadium. Manchester City will not play a regular season match in any of the club’s top 10 geographic markets.

For Blue Moon, the brief was to create an immersive, exciting, safe and inclusive experience, that young people across the world could enjoy together. We created a metaverse-native space, allowing fans to enjoy shared, social interactions that couldn’t be replicated in real life.

The overarching objective was for Manchester City to be the most popular club for the next generation of fans, leading the industry in entertaining this demographic in an authentic and fun manner. Success would mean engaging new audiences, who would spend time on Blue Moon and return regularly.

The concept comes from the heart of Manchester City – our anthem "Blue Moon" and our mascots "Moonbeam and Moonchester". Highly popular with the target demographic, the mascots hail from ‘planet’ Blue Moon.

Blue Moon on Roblox features space-related, football-themed infrastructure, designed with a metaverse-first creative lens. The concept combines interesting elements that ignore real-world limitations such as gravity, while integrating IP in an authentic manner.

Three key elements of the brand are actively expressed in Blue Moon:

1. Man City aesthetic presentation: colours, materials and wording from our brand

2. Man City Brand Vision: Improving lives through football, raising awareness of the club’s charity - CITC

3. Safeguarding: football should be a safe place, for everyone: we worked with the safeguarding team to implement appropriate measures

The inclusion of core messaging into the underlying design of the experience has amplified the brand messaging.

One of Manchester City’s target audiences is Generation Alpha. 90% of this generation define themselves as gamers (Marketcast and GWI) with gaming at the epicentre of the media mix to reach young audiences.

Our ambition to provide regular “lean-forward”, community focused content, led to the club’s strategic pivot towards virtual worlds. This allowed the cultivation of a branded environment - meeting the needs of Gen Alpha and appealing to a range of their interests – music, fashion, art, gaming and sport.

Roblox provided an ideal canvas for a virtual world, with >100M monthly users within the demographic, creative freedom to express our brand, and no other football entities – tapping into the Gen Alpha theme of trendsetting.

Insights from Robloxians guided our community building approach. We understood that young people play together, so we included multi-player gameplay loops. We leveraged Discord and Roblox communities for testing and managing feedback.

Blue Moon has performed superbly across the board. Within one week, City had more visits on Roblox than the Etihad stadium receives all season. Total visits stand at >7 million from 3 million unique users. 65% of these visitors are within the target demographic. 20% are newly exposed to Man City. The Roblox “Group” has approximately as many members as City Seasoncard holders.

Blue Moon has engaged audiences worldwide, allowing fans to be entertained despite geographical boundaries.

The activation has aided junior fan membership growth, 830 Junior "Cityzens" have been identified as Robloxians, while “Blue Moon” contributed towards 50% increase in Junior Members since July. The 3rd kit release was claimed 130,000 times, raising awareness to support record physical sales.

With a dwell time of >10mins per user, and an average of >15,000 DAUs, this activation has achieved its objectives and continues to deliver value for fans and club alike.