NFL on DAZN

In 2023, DAZN became the exclusive international home of NFL Game Pass, streaming NFL content everywhere except the U.S. The deal meant migrating over 2 million existing users while building acquisition and conversion from scratch.

The rights were signed. The product to deliver them didn't exist. My team had three weeks to prove one could.

I led design across the acquisition and growth side: sign-up, freemium, conversion and the migration itself, working alongside dedicated retention and engagement designers on the wider DAZN experience.

With minimal requirements, we mapped how freemium, NFL and DAZN plans could coexist. The core challenge was entitlements: granting the right access, guiding users to the right upgrade, and making DAZN's content-based plans clear.

Feature-tiered models like Netflix and Spotify sell one product at different quality levels. DAZN sells different content, so a fan could hold an NFL pack, a football pack, or both, with no natural hierarchy to lean on. The usual patterns didn't apply, so we built our own.

Freemium was the way in for new fans, and the hardest entitlement problem on the project. A free user, an NFL pack holder and a full DAZN subscriber all move through the same product, but each sees a different version of it. I mapped those states with the team, working out what freemium unlocked, what it gated behind an upgrade, and where cross-content access would clash.

The principle we landed on: give free users enough to feel the product, a weekly live game, highlights, on-demand content, and make the upgrade obvious at the exact moment they hit something locked.

DAZN's sign-up flow was dated and stood between us and every conversion, so I rebuilt it. Branding came in through imagery and logos to make the entry feel like DAZN rather than a form. More importantly, I split sign-up into two steps, capturing email and password first.

Those partial sign-ups became freemium accounts in the back end. That single change meant a user who dropped off mid-flow was no longer lost, we had an account to follow up, nurture and convert later in the season. Sign-up stopped being a one-shot gate and became the top of the funnel.

I focused testing on comprehension first: could users understand the new NFL plans, and move cleanly between DAZN and NFL content without getting lost. From there we tested the freemium flows and the upgrade journeys that followed.

We ran around 10 studies on UserTesting, shipping one or two a week to keep pace with the three-week build. Testing at that cadence meant every major decision was evidenced before it shipped, not after.

The acquisition flows turned first contact into a plan. I designed routes for each way a fan arrived: someone chasing a single NFL game, a lapsed Game Pass user with history in the system, and a new DAZN customer with no prior relationship. Each needed to land on the right plan with the upgrade path already in view.

The work had to hold across web, native apps and TV, where entitlements and sign-in behaved differently on each. The goal throughout was the same: the shortest credible path from interest to a paid, correctly entitled account.

I worked with our retention designer so users could manage both their content packs and the underlying DAZN plan in one place.

Clear plan management, straightforward upgrades and transparent renewals, designed to cut churn and hold fans across markets and across a long, seasonal calendar.

Migration was the moment the deal succeeded or failed. I worked directly with the NFL team to map every scenario, existing subscribers, lapsed users, part-way sign-ups, so no one fell through the transition.

We used CRM integration and magic links to preserve account data and strip out friction. Existing Game Pass users could move to DAZN in a click, landing already recognised, with their history intact rather than starting over. For a migration of this size, removing that first point of failure was the difference between a launch and a churn event.

Launched to over 100 countries in late 2023, on schedule from a three-week proof of concept.

• 2 million NFL Game Pass users migrated successfully

• The system became DAZN's onboarding playbook, reused to launch later content packages including Tennis TV and MotoGP.

• DAZN later reported NFL Game Pass subscriber growth of 35% in the first season and a further 23% in 2024.

Optimisation ran throughout, not as a final polish. I built a testing programme across upsells, cross-sells and plan presentation, measuring each experiment on conversion and plan mix so every decision was evidenced before it shipped.