If you’ve spent any time on social media in the last few years, chances are you’ve seen a baseball player moonwalk after a strikeout, a pitcher dance mid-windup, or a stadium erupt because a hitter arrived at the plate riding a golf cart shaped like a banana. Behind all of it sits one company: Fans First Entertainment. What started as a struggling summer-collegiate baseball team in Savannah, Georgia, has grown into a sports and entertainment powerhouse, and its name now stands for a specific promise — that the people in the seats always come before everything else. This review breaks down what Fans First Entertainment actually is, the features that set it apart, and the real benefits it delivers to fans, families, and casual sports viewers alike.
What Is Fans First Entertainment?
Fans First Entertainment is the parent company behind the Savannah Bananas, the barnstorming baseball franchise famous for inventing “Banana Ball,” a faster, looser, more theatrical version of the sport.
Today, Fans First Entertainment has expanded well beyond a single team. The organization fields multiple professional teams that compete in the Banana Ball Championship League, runs its own ticketing and marketplace platform, manages its own merchandise operations, and has built a nonprofit arm dedicated to supporting foster families. Rather than relying on outside investors, the company has grown entirely through reinvested revenue, and by most industry estimates it has become one of the most profitable organizations of its size in professional sports.
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Core Features of Fans First Entertainment
1. Banana Ball: A Reimagined Game
The signature product of Fans First Entertainment is Banana Ball itself. It keeps the basic structure of baseball but strips out the parts that tend to slow the game down.
2. In-Game Entertainment and Choreography
Every Fans First Entertainment game leans heavily into performance.
3. In-House Ticketing and Marketplace
One of the more practical features of Fans First Entertainment is that it controls its own ticketing infrastructure instead of outsourcing it to a third-party platform. The company built and maintains the Fans First Tickets app, which lets fans view and access tickets, transfer them to friends or family, browse a resale marketplace for available seats, and check in quickly on game day. Because the company manages this system in-house, it has been able to avoid layering on the extra service fees that fans typically encounter with third-party ticket vendors.
4. All-Inclusive Game-Day Experience
Many Fans First Entertainment events include all-inclusive food and drink packages bundled into the price of admission, removing one of the more frustrating parts of attending a live sporting event: constantly reaching for your wallet at the concession stand.
5. A Genuine Community and Philanthropic Arm
Beyond the games themselves, Fans First Entertainment operates Bananas Foster, a nonprofit initiative focused on supporting the foster care community.
The Benefits of the Fans First Entertainment Approach
No Hidden Fees
Because Fans First Entertainment manages its own ticketing and marketplace rather than routing sales through outside vendors, fans generally see fewer surprise charges at checkout.
Predictable, Family-Friendly Pacing
Traditional baseball games can run long, which makes them a tough sell for families with young kids or casual fans with limited patience. By capping game length and packing each inning with scheduled entertainment, Fans First Entertainment has built an experience that’s easier to plan around and easier to enjoy from start to finish, regardless of whether you consider yourself a baseball fan at all.
A Product Built Around the Audience, Not Tradition
Most legacy sports organizations optimize around the sport first and the fan experience second. Fans First Entertainment inverts that order. . This willingness to prioritize the audience’s enjoyment over convention is arguably the single biggest differentiator of the brand, and it’s the throughline connecting every feature on this list.
Consistent Sellouts and High Demand
The benefits of this approach show up directly in attendance numbers. The organization has sold out every game it has hosted since its earliest seasons, and it has drawn crowds well into the tens of thousands at NFL and MLB stadiums across the country, including a record-setting turnout north of 100,000 spectators at a college football stadium. For fans, that translates into a genuinely electric atmosphere; for the organization, it validates the entire fan-first model as a sustainable business strategy rather than a gimmick.
Strong Digital and Social Presence
Fans First Entertainment has built an enormous following across social media platforms, driven largely by short-form clips of in-game dances, trick plays, and celebrations. For fans who can’t make it to a live game, this gives them an ongoing way to stay connected to the brand, and it has become a significant driver of new ticket demand as clips circulate and introduce the product to people who had never previously followed baseball.
Financial Independence and Long-Term Stability
Unlike many entertainment or sports ventures that rely on outside investors, Fans First Entertainment has grown using its own reinvested profits. For fans, this matters more than it might initially seem: an organization that isn’t beholden to outside investors has more freedom to prioritize the fan experience over short-term financial pressure from shareholders, which reinforces the sustainability of the fan-first approach rather than treating it as a temporary marketing angle.
Potential Drawbacks to Consider
No review would be complete without acknowledging the rough edges. Some users of the Fans First Tickets app have reported friction during account setup, including issues with password autofill and account recovery after switching email addresses. Others have noted that certain marketplace features rolled out later than initially announced, leading to some frustration among fans trying to buy or resell tickets at the last minute. These are the kinds of growing pains that come with a company managing its own technology stack rather than outsourcing to an established third-party platform, and they’re worth keeping in mind if you’re relying on the app under time pressure, such as trying to secure last-minute seats.
Additionally, because demand for events run by Fans First Entertainment is extremely high, tickets for major stadium shows can be difficult to secure and sometimes require entry into a lottery system rather than a straightforward first-come, first-served purchase. For casual fans hoping to attend on a whim, this can be a real limitation.
Is Fans First Entertainment Worth It?
For anyone who loves the atmosphere of live sports but has grown tired of the friction that often comes with it — long games, expensive concessions, unpredictable ticketing fees, and a sense that the fan is an afterthought — Fans First Entertainment offers a genuinely different model. The company has essentially proven that an organization can build a sports and entertainment brand from scratch by treating audience enjoyment as the primary product rather than a byproduct, and it has done so while remaining financially independent and expanding rapidly across new markets and stadiums.
The ticketing platform itself is still maturing, and some of the technical hiccups reported by users suggest there’s room for improvement on the software side. But the core in-person experience, the pricing transparency, and the sheer consistency of sold-out crowds all point to a company that is delivering on the promise embedded in its own name.
