Our supporters don't follow this club because we have a great Facebook page. They follow us because they're Rabbitohs. Bringing the community into our own app means the relationship lives where it belongs, with the club and the supporters who have carried it for more than a century.
The South Sydney Rabbitohs have roughly 28,000 paying members and around 1.8 million fans across third-party platforms, and until recently no direct line to either group. Every exchange between the club and its supporters ran through someone else's feed, someone else's ranking, and someone else's rules about who was allowed in the room. So the club built the room itself. Rabbitohs Social opened as a Members-only community inside the Rabbitohs App, and more than 16,700 members came through it in the first week.
<sprscript-green>The Challenge<sprscript-green>
A supporter relationship built on rented ground
The Rabbitohs are a foundation club of Australian rugby league with 21 premierships and a European-style member-owned model that gives supporters a genuine stake and a say in the club's direction. Their digital relationship worked the opposite way. Supporters who part-own the club met each other in spaces the club neither owned nor shaped, alongside rival fans, trolls, and people who had never watched a game.
The club's own framing was blunt. Social media was supposed to bring supporters together, but anyone can pile in. For a club anchored in community, ownership, and a working-class and indigenous heritage that runs through more than a century of the game, a mediated relationship was always a poor fit.
The commercial cost was just as concrete. Without an owned environment, the Rabbitohs had no first-party data on supporter intent and behaviour, no control over moderation, a dependence on third-party ranking for reach, and no direct channel for membership, merchandise, ticketing, and sponsor activations. None of those travel cleanly through someone else's feed.
<sprscript-green>Why social.plus<sprscript-green>
Ownership of the data, the moderation, and the design
The club weighed two alternatives before deciding: adopt the league's shared infrastructure, or carry on with third-party social platforms. Both left the supporter relationship mediated by someone else. The Rabbitohs chose a third path and built their own app, with social.plus as the engagement infrastructure underneath it.
Full ownership of the supporter relationship was the deciding factor, which meant holding the data, the moderation, and the design end to end rather than renting attention on a network the club does not control.
The club's digital leadership pointed to five things behind the decision: a controlled, safe environment for supporters to connect in, first-party data collection, experiences aligned to the Rabbitohs brand rather than a template, platform flexibility to support custom features that fit their wider digital strategy, and a collaborative team through the build.
<sprscript-green>Implementation<sprscript-green>
Building the Members' stand, online
Work began in mid-2025. The Rabbitohs built Rabbitohs Social on the social.plus TypeScript SDK with the React Native UIKit, and shipped it across both surfaces supporters already use: the Rabbitohs App and the club website.
The club describes the result as the Members' stand, online. Every supporter gets a profile and a feed, can create or join interest-based communities including private and hidden ones, can share photos, videos, polls, and stories, and can follow and message other Members directly. Live match day chat runs alongside the game itself.
The detail that makes it feel like the club rather than a generic community product is status. Membership tier, tenure, and badges are all visible on a supporter's profile, so loyalty that previously existed only in the club's own records is now legible to other supporters. Members holding a 2026 Membership were already in at no extra cost. For everyone else, Digital Membership opened the door at $60 a year with a 14-day free trial, bundled with live Q&A sessions featuring Rabbitohs Old Boys and Legends, early team lists, and merchandise and ticketing benefits.
<sprscript-green>The Results<sprscript-green>
Over half the member base in seven days
More than 16,700 members onboarded in the first week of public launch, over 60% of the club's paying member base inside seven days. For a community that asks supporters to move a habit out of a platform they already use, that is an unusually fast on-ramp.
Live game-day chat emerged as the standout feature. Supporters react to plays in real time alongside one another rather than in a feed shared with every other brand competing for the same attention, which turns eighty minutes of football into eighty minutes of participation.
Membership tier being recognised inside the social experience also changes what the club can see. A paying Member is visible as one to other supporters and to the club, and every interaction now generates first-party signal about what supporters care about, held by the Rabbitohs themselves.
<sprscript-green>What's Next<sprscript-green>
From community to commercial foundation
The Rabbitohs treat Rabbitohs Social as the foundation for the commercial side of the club rather than a finished feature. The platform is positioned to support memberships, ticketing, merchandise, and future digital revenue, and it creates new inventory for sponsors inside an environment the club controls.
The club has also made the community part of how it governs itself. Polls and conversations inside Rabbitohs Social feed directly into Club decisions, which is a natural extension of a member-owned model into the place where most supporters now spend their time.