Die-Hard Sports Fandom Has Reached the Afterlife

Would you pay nearly $6,000 to have your ashes stored at your favorite team’s stadium?

Some Jacksonville Jaguars fans already have as a result of a novel agreement between the NFL team and a company called Eternal Fan, which specializes in designing large-scale artwork that functions as shared memorials.

As the Jaguars’ “official fan memories partner,” Eternal Fan is creating a roughly 14-foot-by-14-foot installation that will be placed on the plaza outside the team’s “Stadium of the Future,” currently under construction and slated to open ahead of the 2028 NFL season. Fans can purchase dedicated space within the memorial—dubbed the 904Ever Club, a nod to Jacksonville’s area code—to store memorabilia and personal items, including sealed cremains.

Design details are still being finalized, but current renderings show a blockish structure topped with a giant football bearing the Jaguars logo and the 904Ever Club name. It will be made of bronze or granite.

“Would I say it’s a brick on steroids? Yeah, maybe,” Eternal Fan founder Matt Linn tells Front Office Sports. “But at the end of the day, we’re creating a type of fan engagement—fan legacies—that’s kind of never been done <a href="https://comicvibe.com/8-stars-who-were-cut-from-famous-tv-shows-before-they-ever-aired/” title=”8 Stars Who Were Cut from Famous TV Shows Before They Ever Aired”>before.”

Linn has spent nearly 30 years in the funeral industry and currently owns and operates a funeral home in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. The idea for Eternal Fan came from decades of listening to end-of-life planning conversations. “So many people talk about wanting to be at their ‘happy place’,” he says, “and so often that has something to do with a sports team.”

Eternal Fan was founded in 2015, but the Jaguars are only the second sports property to embrace its thesis. The first was Richmond Raceway in Virginia, which installed a 21-foot stainless steel memorial shaped like an engine piston on its grounds in 2018.

The Jaguars partnered with Eternal Fan out of a desire to “create a lasting tribute to the unwavering commitment” of their fans the team’s SVP of corporate partnerships. He tells FOS the monument will be accessible 365 days a year once finished, though Eternal Fan will control when customers can open and fill their “fan spaces” with approved items

The Price of Forever

The 904Ever Club’s highest membership tier, the $5,904 “Founders Level,” provides fans with a private space within the memorial and perks such as invitations to special events. Two lower tiers, priced at $2,904 and $904, offer access to communal storage spaces, where fans can keep items in “living memory pouches.”

Eternal Fan sets the prices and keeps all revenue. But it also bears all costs of construction and operation, including annual fees to use the Jaguars’ brand marks and stadium grounds. All told, Linn says the installation will cost “well into the six figures.”

The company’s CMO Brad Zimmerman says a portion of each sale goes into a “stewardship account” to cover ongoing maintenance, security, and insurance, as well as any costs associated with relocating the memorial if the Jaguars ever move cities. (Of this situation, he says: “It’s a hypothetical right now, but I believe we would give people the option to stay or go.”)

Zimmerman declined to specify how many fan spaces have sold, but says purchasers tend to fall into two categories: those buying to honor their own fandom and those buying to memorialize a Jaguars fan who has already died.

Sizing the Afterlife Market

Funeral homes and funeral-product makers FOSreached said they don’t formally track sports-related end-of-life requests, but acknowledged they are made with some regularity. A spokesperson for Batesville Casket Company, which provides caskets and cremation urns, said: “Families today want a memorial that reflects who their loved one really was, and for many people, a favorite team is a big part of that identity.”

It’s also not uncommon for prisoners facing execution to use their last words to call out support for a beloved team, and some fans have even gone so far as to write already-wealthy athletes into their wills.

Zimmerman and Linn see these trends as proof that Eternal Fan’s offerings have a market, and they point to rising cremation rates as another reason to make alternative memorial options more visible. “It sounds crazy, but everyone knows there’s very few guarantees in life, and [death] is one of them,” says Zimmerman. ” A big part of our marketing moving forward is going to be to get this conversation out in the open and make people more comfortable and familiar with it.”

For now, Eternal Fan is targeting partnerships with other NFL and college football programs—these have the most devoted fan bases and college, specifically, is always searching for more revenue. But the company eventually aims to expand into other properties like concert venues, amusement parks, and golf courses.

The Jaguars deal is a major stamp of approval, and Linn says a second engagement with a “major Division I university” is also nearing the finish line. Still, he’s realistic that the concept may not ever go fully mainstream.

“This ultimately isn’t for everyone,” Linn tells FOS.“Maybe it ends up being right for half of Division I schools and half of the NFL. We want to make sure we can service everything properly, and we want to pick the right partners. This is a permanent piece of fandom—you have to get in there with [teams] and make sure they’re really going to be deeply connected.”

The post Die-Hard Sports Fandom Has Reached the Afterlife appeared first on Front Office Sports.