As digital technology develops and impacts the way in which we live our daily lives, it’s also bringing about rapid change and disruption to the world of sport. For football fans, the impact on their enjoyment of the beautiful game is no exception.
There are now vastly more ways to access and engage with their favourite teams, players, pundits, and fellow fans. Football clubs are becoming more accessible, available on multiple platforms and channels, allowing fans to interact at any minute of the day.
Purchasing (mobile) tickets, digital club subscriptions, hospitality, and merchandise on digital platforms is very much the norm. Digital marketing techniques are key components of commercial activity within football clubs at all levels of the game.
Hand in hand with marketing and sales goes a need to collate their data on fans and maintain regular dialogue to develop further loyalty. As a result, clubs are also becoming ever-more sophisticated content creators and content marketers.
Gone are the days when producing a match programme plus perhaps a season round-up video would be main content challenges for clubs. Sights have been seriously raised in recent years thanks to digital technology and delivered in the name of fan engagement. Whole teams of people are involved in the effort now.
Whether it’s in Amazon Prime’s All Or Nothing series, maximising rights and sponsorship activations, multi-lingual news and features for different target markets, or delivering meticulously planned transfer reveals on Instagram, it’s clear that clubs are major content marketing players in their own right. Even clubs at the furthest reaches of the football pyramid now have some form of social media output.
We at Digital Sport North are fascinated by all this change prompted by technology but also concerned to understand how these trends are impacting the traditional deliverers of football news and content. We are curious to establish if the clubs are now on a collision course with broadcasters and publishers, so long the lifeblood for coverage of their sport.
We would like to know what the long-term horizon looks like, not least for the sports and media industry but particularly for the potential impact football fans and wider sports audiences. Maybe the two sides really need each other but equally could the trend be towards a future where the clubs seek to completely control the narrative and rights, don’t need to court the media and ultimately to the world of Super Leagues?
Well to find out as part of Leeds Digital Festival we’re putting on a whole evening entitled ‘Football And The Media: A Complicated Relationship’ dedicated to this thorny topic. At 5pm, Thursday 27th April at Belgrave Music Hall in Leeds you will find regular Digital Sport North host, Rich Williams, introducing a fantastic panel of experts who are working right at the heart of this debate.
We are welcoming Liverpool FC’s Matthew Quinn to give us the clubs’ side, with BBC Sport’s Ben Gallop and broadcaster Tanya Arnold taking the case for the media. It promises to be an excellent, insightful session and will be a great chance for hundreds of attendees working in and around the sport and digital technology worlds to meet and network.