Are Wolves leading the Premier League Pack for Digital Communication?
It doesn’t take a football fan to know that the Premier League is a hostile arena. Likewise, it doesn’t take an economist to understand why twenty participating teams vie each year for varying degrees of footballing success. The aim? To earn a greater allocation of the £2.64 billion payout seen in 2018/19.
Whether financially motivated or not, clubs also want to be the best at providing for their respective fanbases. Having fans rather than just consumers is an enormous asset to the clubs — the extent of loyalty implicit in supporting a team is likely to increase the number, frequency, and intensity of interactions a typical consumer would normally demonstrate. Consequently, many clubs have addressed the challenge of providing for their fanbase through the use of various digital technologies.
‘Ref, that’s full-time surely?’
Social media platforms have enabled fans to interact with their club way beyond the 90 minutes of the actual matches themselves. Most clubs are now allowing fans to follow the progress digitally of their team’s activities at all times; Q&A’s with the players, day-in-the-life type vlogs, and videos from training sessions are all common examples. The use of digital technology in this regard has therefore given clubs opportunities to extend hours of interactivity with their fans, and create more convincing, organic relationships between the organisation and consumer.
Using digital technologies, clubs are able to ensure that the match never ends, which is great for keeping their consumers consuming from a business perspective. Even minutes after full-time, players can be seen tweeting and interacting with fans online (highlighted in the Tottenham FC manager’s instagram [below]). This is just one example of how generating around-the-clock digital content has allowed for Premier League clubs to consolidate and provide for their fanbase using digital technologies.
Tiki-Toka
The thriving application TikTok has led to many football clubs creating their own accounts for fans to follow. Despite a number of contenders, few come close to the presence Wolverhampton Wanderers have acquired. Amassing 4.4 million likes on their posts at the time of writing, the account’s mainly comedic content references activities of players during matches (such as failed skills, or their manager’s reactions to events). The shareability of these videos has consequently provided enormous publicity to the Wolves FC organisation off the pitch. Because TikToks are often quickly dispersed to alternate social media platforms such as Twitter and Instagram (where new consumers have the opportunity to engage with the brand), the club have manufactured a cult-like status online.
Connecting to Fans
Fanbases of Premier League clubs are vast; the greatest being the 1.1 billion follower base Manchester United have accumulated globally. As a result, a significant challenge facing these clubs is to generate a fully personalised experience for their consumer fanbase, in the same way that companies such as Netflix are able to adapt and tailor webpages based on customer demographics. This hyper-targeting has been made easier through the use of digital technologies.
As fans interact with their club’s online content, “[they] leave a significant trail of data as they pass by”. I would propose that clubs should continue to increasingly capture and harness this digitised activity. Accordingly, each organisation can generate a holistic view of their fan base while delivering a fully personalised experience to individual fans. The ubiquity of the internet, and the intrinsically related rise in IoT (Internet of Things) connected devices, has meant that more fans are consuming footballing content through screens than ever before. By expanding upon consensual data collection, clubs will able to reach more people, in a more personal manner, than they were able to in the past.
Fantasy Premier League
Taking a broader look at the Premier League as its own organisation, they too have to keep the attention span of consumers beyond their televised fixtures. Furthermore, the Premier League continually aims to attract new consumers to their organisation; it is an imperative of sport to “appeal to the widest demographic in order to maximise revenue”. They have addressed both of these challenges through the use of ‘Fantasy Football’, which poses more questions into how I believe the Premier League organisation can further implement elements of digital interactivity into their business model.
The Fantasy Premier League is a virtual game which follows the real-life events of the Premier League. By allowing users to create their ‘dream team’ of real-life players who score points for their team based on in-match performances, the Premier League organisation can ensure that players of this game keep up to date with real life events in their sector. This interaction keeps fans interested in the genuine Premier League throughout the week; the best FPL players have to track squad and player activity on social media platforms in order to get ahead of competitors. I would argue that this interactivity should be further addressed using digital technologies, and this could begin with VAR.
Voting Audiences, Really?
One of the latest and more controversial implementations in the Premier League has been the Video Assistant Referee, a.k.a. VAR. I would propose that in order to address both the controversy of this decision, and to enhance the interactivity we see through FPL, the Premier League could address this challenge with an interactive function on one of their many digital applications. By providing fans with the opportunity to engage with live refereeing decisions made in the match, ultimately inconsequentially, fans could feel a greater sense of inclusion from behind a screen. This format has been successfully implemented in the past; for example, The X Factor app which made each user a 5th judge.
Conclusion
Now more than ever, both the Premier League and the clubs themselves are faced with a serious challenge — the implications of the recent pandemic has prevented fans from showing in-person support at the games. I would argue that by keeping fans consuming and supporting their teams virtually, this sector is already more equipped to deal with physical limitations than most… but more can be done.
