Every football fan believes they bring luck to their team. The one who always watches from the same seat. The one who wore the same shirt to every match during the run of wins. The one who is quietly convinced that things go wrong when they are not in the stadium. Wisła Kraków and VML Poland decided to stop treating that belief as superstition and start treating it as data.
The Brief
Wisła Kraków is one of Poland’s most storied football clubs, founded in 1906 and based in Kraków. Like many historic clubs operating in competitive domestic leagues, it faces a persistent challenge: converting general support into active, measurable, and commercially useful fan engagement. The brief was not about brand awareness. It was about deepening the relationship between the club and the supporters who already showed up, making each individual fan feel personally connected to the team’s outcomes rather than simply part of a crowd.
The Platform
The Lucky Fan Index is an AI-powered platform that assigns every Wisła Kraków supporter a personalised luck score based on a specific methodology. When a fan attends a match, the platform cross-references their presence against more than 200 match statistics and events, including goals scored, match-winning moments, offensive and defensive performance metrics, game control indicators, and statistical anomalies. When Wisła achieves results that exceed the pre-match probability, fans present in the stadium receive a higher luck score, because the algorithm calculates that their attendance correlates with the team performing above expectation.
The system analysed nearly 250,000 fan profiles across 63 home matches. Every fan who has attended a Wisła Kraków home game is included in the dataset. Every one of them has a score. Every one of them can access a dedicated digital platform that shows them their personalised ranking alongside the transparent methodology behind how it was calculated.
Why This Works Commercially and Emotionally
The Lucky Fan Index solves a structural problem in fan engagement that most clubs address through loyalty programmes, merchandise, and matchday experience improvements. All of those interventions treat fans as a collective audience. The Lucky Fan Index treats each fan as an individual participant whose specific presence is measurable, whose contribution is recorded, and whose luck is genuinely different from every other supporter in the stadium.
That shift from collective to individual is what makes the platform commercially significant. Fans who know their luck score have a reason to attend more matches, not because the product has improved, but because their attendance is now part of a data set they can see and compare. Attendance becomes engagement. The emotional belief that every football fan privately holds, that they personally make a difference when they show up, is validated with a number.
Jarosław Królewski, CEO of Wisła Kraków, has been one of the most forward-thinking executives in Polish football on the question of data-driven fan relationships. The Lucky Fan Index is the most operationally direct expression of that philosophy the club has produced. VML Poland’s Chief Creative Officer Piotr Osiński and the agency’s Warsaw team built the platform and the product’s creative framework.
The Cannes Recognition
The Lucky Fan Index was included in the 2026 Cannes Lions Winners collection as recognised work within the Experiential and Design categories, alongside its placement in the collection of notable entries from the 2026 festival. For a campaign built around attendance data at a Polish domestic league club, reaching Cannes-level recognition confirms that the underlying idea, quantifying a fan’s emotional contribution to their team, translates across every sports culture and every level of competition.
The broader opportunity the campaign surfaces is significant. Every professional sports club in the world has attendance data. Every sports fan in the world believes, to some degree, that their presence matters. The Lucky Fan Index is a proof of concept that those two facts can be connected into a product that serves both the fan’s desire to feel personally significant and the club’s commercial interest in deeper engagement.
Campaign Name: Lucky Fan Index
Agency Name: VML Poland, Warsaw
Brand Name: Wisła Kraków Football Club
Location: Kraków, Poland
