LaLiga Returns to Bars: The Impact of Football on the Hospitality Industry
Some goals are celebrated from the sofa. Others end with you hugging someone you didn’t even know five minutes earlier.
Football has never been just about football. It’s meeting up with friends, arguing over the lineup, ordering another round before the second half starts, and hearing a goal a few seconds before it reaches your table from the bar next door.
And a big part of all that happens in bars. With LaLiga back, stadiums are filling up again, but so are many hospitality venues that, for 90 minutes, stop being simply somewhere to eat or drink and become a small stand in the crowd.
In addition, LaLiga’s return comes at a particularly interesting time for the hospitality industry. After the summer months, and especially in cities and towns that are less dependent on tourism, football once again provides a regular reason to go out, meet up and spend time away from home.
In fact, LALIGA has been strengthening this connection for some time through LALIGA BARES, an initiative that describes these venues as football’s “second stand” and that this season has once again put the spotlight on bars as meeting points for every matchday.
But what does football really mean for the hospitality industry?
Bars remain one of the places where football is truly experienced.
You can have a 70-inch TV at home, every streaming platform subscription, and a fridge full of food and drinks. Even so, there are some matches you just want to watch somewhere else.
According to a study published by LALIGA in 2026, 57% of fans say they go to a bar at least once a month to watch football matches. And among those who regularly watch matches in bars, three out of four tend to return to the same venues.
There’s something important in that. Customers aren’t simply looking for a screen to watch the match on. They’re looking for atmosphere, company, and a place they come to associate with the experience.
That’s why football and hospitality have such a strong relationship: the match gives people a reason to go out, get together and spend. And it’s not just during a Madrid-Barça or a Champions League final. Every matchday brings fans of dozens of teams looking for somewhere to watch that afternoon’s game.
The question comes up week after week in thousands of group chats and conversations:
“Where are we watching it?”
And behind that question lies an opportunity for bars and restaurants that know how to make the most of it.
Football changes the way we consume.
A match night doesn’t work quite the same way as an ordinary Tuesday. Customers can arrive at almost the same time. They come in groups. They want to be seated before the game starts. Orders pile up before kick-off and again during half-time.
And, above all, a particularly interesting type of consumption emerges for the hospitality industry: the shared order that happens naturally, fuelled by football fever. A plate of patatas bravas for the table. Some wings. Another round. Shall we get another plate of wings?
Football turns food into part of a shared experience.
According to figures published by LALIGA, venues that broadcast sporting events can see increases of up to 50% in footfall and up to 40% in spending per customer during matches.
These figures come from LALIGA itself and will obviously vary depending on the venue, the match and what it has to offer. Still, they help put into perspective the opportunity that sport can represent for certain hospitality businesses.
However, filling the bar is only half the battle. The other half is making sure you can serve a packed room properly without reaching breaking point.
A full table can also mean a more demanding service.
More customers means more orders, more questions and more decisions happening at the same time. “How are the patatas bravas?” “Does this burger come with fries?” “Is the portion big?” “What would you recommend for sharing?”
These are all perfectly normal questions. The problem comes when a waiter has to answer them over and over while ten other tables are trying to order before the ball starts rolling again.
In moments like these, any tool that helps customers make decisions also helps the front-of-house team. Speeding up service doesn’t always mean running around faster. Sometimes, it simply means making sure customers know what they want to order before they call the waiter.
The match starts long before kick-off.
Plus, the decision of where to eat or drink doesn’t start when the customer walks through the door.
Let’s go back to that group of friends who are still deciding where to watch today’s match. Chances are, one of them will search on Google, another will check Instagram, and many will open the menu to see which dishes look most tempting, read reviews, or even look for special offers.
Within minutes, several venues are competing for that group without any of them knowing it’s happening. And that’s where a restaurant’s digital presence matters. A good rating helps. Photos and videos help. A well-designed website helps.
But when it comes to food, there’s something particularly powerful about being able to actually see what you can order.
It’s not the same to read “Patatas bravas with house-made sauce” as it is to see the size of the portion, how it arrives at the table, how it’s presented, and that sauce pouring over the potatoes.
And this is where a video menu starts to make a real difference.
A menu that does some of the work too.
The idea behind Gourmeats starts with something extremely simple: if we so often eat with our eyes, why do restaurant menus still rely solely on text and photos?
With a video menu, customers can scan a QR code and watch short, real videos of the dishes before deciding what to order. And on a football night, this has a very practical application. A table of six friends doesn’t need to imagine what a portion will look like. They can see it. One person spots some wings and shows the video to the others. Someone else sees a dessert they probably wouldn’t even have considered from the name alone.
Suddenly, the menu stops being just a list of products and starts playing a part in the decision-making process.
It doesn’t replace the waiter, nor is it meant to. Quite the opposite: it saves them from having to visually explain something the dish itself can show much better.
And the busier the venue gets, the more valuable it becomes to remove those little points of friction. The goal is to make service run more smoothly.
From “What should we order?” to “Get another one of those.”
There’s also something particularly interesting about sharing food: decisions are contagious. Someone orders a dish because they’ve seen it, someone else tries it, and eventually the whole table decides to order another.
This happens all the time in hospitality, but a visual menu can spark that desire even before the first dish reaches the table. The difference may seem small, but the behaviour is completely different.
It’s simple: reading informs, but seeing makes you hungry. During a match, customers’ attention is on the screen, their friends and everything happening around the table. They’re not going to sit there reading through a menu full of long descriptions.
Seeing makes you hungry. And if there’s one setting where food decisions are made as a group, quickly and impulsively, it’s a table gathered around a football match.
The best bar for watching football isn’t just the one with the biggest screen.
LALIGA has summed up its commitment to the hospitality industry this season with a telling phrase: “Matchday starts in bars.” And it probably has a point.
For many fans, the match starts when they meet up with friends, find a table and order the first round. The screen matters, of course, but so do the atmosphere, the food and drinks, the speed of service, and how easy it is to decide what to order.
Football can get a customer through your restaurant’s door, but the experience they have there will determine whether they come back the following weekend. Because, in the end, what keeps a restaurant going isn’t just attracting new customers it’s giving them a reason to come back.
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