Written by Dr. Alex Fenton
It’s been an interesting year for sports clubs and innovation. PwC’s Sports Annual Survey 2019 went with the headline “Sports industry – time to refocus?”. This came from their survey of 580 industry leaders from 49 countries on their growth expectations. 94% of these concluded that innovation was important or very important but only 47% had concrete innovation strategies. The report demonstrated that the top growing sports were classified as eSports, football and basketball. Furthermore, improved fan engagement and enhanced media offering were classed as the top two opportunities.
“Sport organisations will need to refocus on the right combination of enabling structures, processes and people to make this happen and remain relevant in an increasingly competitive and disrupted industry.” – PwC, 2019
Our current research focuses on digital innovation and fan engagement in football and other sports. This started in 2014 with my netnography PhD research on social media communities and Salford FC and concluded in 2018. From online participant observations and interviews with fans and social media managers, I found that social media targeted and managed carefully could build lasting relationships with fans around the world. However, I discovered that in order to truly engage fans in a sustainable way, football clubs needed to invest in more social media savvy people to engage more fans, build social media capital in order to receive more of a tangible benefit and engage a wider population of weakly connected fans around the world.
Beyond social media, I started to experiment with research, events and projects with Virtual and Extended Reality, eSports and sports club apps. Club smartphone apps is a particularly interesting topic for fan engagement and digital transformation. Practically every fan has an Android or iPhone and engages with their favourite clubs through their favourite social media apps such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter or YouTube. However, football clubs (like many other organisations) are afraid that they have to spend a lot of time and money on these channels, but they do not own or control the channel or data. This fact has driven some clubs to implementing data strategies such as CRM (customer relationship management) to try and get as close to a single fan view as they can in order to achieve personalised and effective marketing. Fiona Green’s book ‘Winning with Data’ is well worth a read on this topic.
Our new book Strategic Digital Transformation brings together academics and industry experts to provide ideas and inspiration for organisations to survive and thrive in a complex and disruptive digital world.
“Organisations can no longer succeed by being isolated islands of activities. The future is about the collaboration of individuals and organisations in fluid, organic, ways.” – Fenton, Fletcher, Griffiths (2020)
In some ways, it feels as though sports clubs are generally buoyant but surfing between islands and fighting against the tide when it comes to digital transformation. Smartphone apps for clubs is a case in point. Most fans own an Android or iPhone device and this creates all kinds of opportunities for clubs to join islands of data and bring together partners in order to create engaging experience and data which they own.
This is something that the richer, Champions League clubs like Barcelona, Man City and Bayern Munich have had some success with using the capabilities of the smartphone to go beyond the usual club info app. Club app’s often do little more than the club website and therefore miss out on engaging and innovative features such as Augmented Reality (think Pokemon Go), Virtual Reality, the smartphones camera, linking to other connected devices such as wristbands and other features.
“Could we see clubs invest more into wi-fi and club apps on the back of [removing the need for matchday programmes]? Getting fans to tweet, send a Facebook post or jump on Instagram throughout the match is probably part of the future of the match day experience, hopefully all being collated together on a club app featuring match day content as well as on-demand features and highlights for when you get home and during the week.” – Digital Sport.co
Many clubs (even major ones) have an official club app on the radar, but lack the time, resources, partner or expertise to be able to execute it. Furthermore, rights and politics often come into play. It is clear that what football clubs spend on player wages is completely disproportionate to what is spent on innovation or backroom staff. For example, Premier League clubs spent 1.41 billion pounds on players in 2019, but only 4 out of 20 pay the living wage to staff Premier League clubs ‘should pay real living wage’ to staff. This also relates to the gap highlighted by PwC in the importance of innovation (97%) vs those clubs that had a concrete innovation strategy (47%).
In response to all of this, we started our Fan Fit project, which aimed to allow sports clubs to experiment with the benefits of an official club app. It also tapped into the growing adoption of fitness apps and massive issue of diseases relating to sedentary lifestyles. For example, figures show you’re more likely to die of a heart attack or stroke in Manchester than anywhere else in the country.
We’ve got some exciting plans for 2020 to help sports clubs and fans to use technologies and help to remove some of the barriers for innovation which can help them. If you’d like to discuss anything in this article, please drop me a line.
