Eight years, four events, one partnership: what it really means to be Team England’s digital home

There’s a photograph on our wall from the 2018 Gold Coast Games. The Team England website – which we had spent months designing, building and optimising – was, for eleven extraordinary days, more visited than the BBC’s coverage. 1.9 million visits. An increase of 1,700% on the previous Games. 82% of that traffic arrived organically, through a search strategy we had built from the ground up.

We’re proud of those numbers. But they’re not really the story.

The story is what happened before, during and after those eleven days – and the eight years of work, trust and genuine partnership that have brought us to Glasgow 2026.

It started with a blank page and a brief

When Commonwealth Games England first came to us ahead of the 2018 Gold Coast Games, the brief was clear enough: build a website that would serve as a home for Team England fans, capture the spirit of the squad, and handle the volume of traffic that a global sporting event generates.

What wasn’t in the brief – and what we’ve come to believe matters more than almost anything else – was trust. From the earliest planning workshops, through sitemap development, UX design and the technical build, it was clear that Team England weren’t looking for a supplier. They were looking for a partner who would care as much about the outcome as they did.

“We chose to work with Salad because we knew right from their first pitch that they had a way of working that was the right fit for us.”

Peter Hannon, Head of Media and Communications, Commonwealth Games England

The Gold Coast site was built with enough flexibility to handle two distinct phases: the pre-Games build-up, and the Games themselves, when the homepage transformed into a live hub – updated medal tallies, fixture schedules, athlete news – serving fans around the world. It earned over 600 unique backlinks from the likes of BBC Sport and GOV.UK. It won awards. And when the Games ended, it became the definitive archive for Team England’s history at the Commonwealth Games.

More than that, it set a precedent. Team England had found their digital partner.

Building something new: the Team England Hub

One of the things we’re most proud of in this partnership has nothing to do with websites. It has to do with listening.

A few years into our relationship, we were in a meeting with the Team England team when the conversation turned to handbooks. Every Games, they faced the same challenge: producing a printed handbook for athletes, staff and journalists – hundreds of pages that were out of date the moment they were printed, expensive to produce, impossible to update, and rarely read.

We suggested a different approach. What if the handbook was a digital-first product – a web app, tailored to different user groups, accessible on any device, updatable in real time?

That conversation became the Team England Hub: a progressive web app available on both the Apple App Store and Google Play Store, with personalised content for athletes, staff, journalists and administrators. Users could sign agreements, view notice board updates, access rich media, and navigate all the practical information a Games requires – without a single sheet of paper.

Carys Edwards, then Media and Communications Manager at Commonwealth Games England, described it as revitalising their Games handbook entirely. For us, it was an example of something we believe in deeply: the best digital work doesn’t start with a technical solution. It starts with understanding the problem.

The Hub was used at the Birmingham 2022 Games and the Trinbago 2023 Commonwealth Youth Games. It was a genuinely new idea for the organisation, and it worked. Team England trusted us to hear a headache, propose a solution they hadn’t considered, build it, and deliver it. That kind of trust is rare. We don’t take it lightly.

Eight years of iteration

We’re sometimes asked what a long-term client relationship actually looks like in practice. The Team England partnership is a beautiful example.

It looks like this: a website that has been live, continuously improved and iterated since 2018 – through four events across three continents – adapting to a changing organisation, a changing digital landscape and changing audience expectations. It looks like onboarding new team members at Team England and ensuring knowledge transfer doesn’t mean starting again. It looks like a medal table that draws from a live data API, Games specific creative treatments that brings fresh creative energy to a consistent brand, and an SEO foundation built carefully over years.

It also looks like learning. Gold Coast taught us about scale. Birmingham taught us about competing with a host city’s own digital presence – the Birmingham Games had built extraordinary domain authority, and we saw clearly in the data how that affected Team England’s traffic. Trinbago 2023 Commonwealth Youth Games taught us how adaptable the Team England Hub was, this time around it was serving a different audience.

Glasgow is different again: Scotland is close to home, there’s no BBC broadcast agreement this year, and that means teamengland.org will be the primary destination for Team England fans wanting to follow their favourite athletes and sports. The most accurate, most up-to-date, most trusted source of information about Team England’s performance at Glasgow 2026.

“This will be the single source of truth. You’re not going to get a more accurate view of England’s performance at these Games anywhere else.”

Matt Leach, Head of Digital, Salad

That’s a responsibility we take seriously – and one we’ve been working towards for months. A dedicated Glasgow experience. A live medal feed powered by a direct API integration. A content strategy built around athletes and sports, publishing regularly between now and the closing ceremony. A Games time homepage that will update throughout each day.

Why this partnership matters to us

We work with a lot of brilliant organisations. But Team England holds a particular place for many of us at Salad.

The Commonwealth Games is a genuinely unique event. Unlike the Olympics, many of its sports don’t have the same mainstream coverage – which is precisely why a trusted, first-party digital presence matters so much. When a 17-year-old athlete receives funding through a scholarship programme whose journey started with a form on the Team England website, that’s the work making a difference.

The Commonwealth Games celebrates sports and nations that are often overlooked by mainstream sporting media. It brings together countries connected by history and shared values, and it gives athletes a stage that, for many of them, represents the pinnacle of their careers. Working on the digital home for Team England means being part of that – and that genuinely matters to us.

With Glasgow 2026 just weeks away, and with the next Games already confirmed for India in 2030, we’re as excited about this partnership as we’ve ever been. India will be remarkable – potentially introducing traditional Indian sports to the programme, hosting an event that no Olympics or World Cup is likely to bring to the subcontinent, reaching one of the world’s largest sporting audiences.

Eight years. Four events. Countless conversations, workshops, iterations and launches. And the next chapter already on the horizon.

We couldn’t be more proud to be Team England’s digital home.

Read our original case studies: Commonwealth Games England website (Gold Coast 2018) and the Team England Hub.

To find out how Salad can support your organisation as a long-term digital partner, get in touch.