Long Live Sport: Stay at home content Week 11 — Sport and the “New Normal”
Sport around the world continues to come to final decisions over whether to cancel their respective seasons, or whether to return to action. Notable decisions from the past week included the Euroleague deciding to cancel the 2019/20 season, while the English Premier League and Italy’s Seria A (football) announced dates in late June upon which they will return.
But even as sport returns, it is far from business as usual. Games will take place in empty stadiums or in makeshift campuses designed to provide minimum exposure to the outside world. “The new normal” is a phrase being used to speculate on the long term impact of Covid-19, but the experience to date from sport’s perspective has been anything but normal.
Following the example of Wuhan, many locations have repurposed facilities designed to hold large scale sporting events into temporary hospitals. From the USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center in New York City, the iconic Maracanã stadium in Rio de Janeiro, the Rizal Memorial Sports Complex in Manila and the Santiago Bernabéu in Madrid — the experience is shared around the world.
Technology designed for sport is also being repurposed. Sensors that usually help teams monitor the performance of NBA or NFL Athletes are now being used in factories to help maintain appropriate distance between staff. So while how ‘normal’ the situation is moving forward can be debated, we are certainly likely to see a shift in some areas, likely coming from an acceleration of existing trends.
Covid-19 and Sports Content
Sport is an industry that relies on its predictable seasonality, and live games are what drive the business. The unpredictability of a live event creates an unequalled opportunity to create memorable moments and events for discussion and interpretation. The undivided attention paid to sporting fixtures by large scale and loyal fanbases is also what allows sport to be such an attractive proposition to sponsors.
But sport has had to exist these past months without its prized asset in live games. What has been clear is the advantage that sporting properties with a developed archive has over others. Whether it’s FIBA making use of old games:
Formula 1 revisiting iconic moments:
Or even ESPN making waves with The Last Dance documentary focusing on the 1990s Chicago Bulls… Nostalgia is a powerful motivator for sports fans, but the first step is always on capturing content. Not a problem for sport’s top tier as we’ve seen, but for the middling and grassroots tiers of sport, ensuring an affordable and scalable production solution is available will be crucial moving forward.
Social Media and Community
It is unsurprising that in looking for news, with potentially more time on their hands and wanting to find remote ways of communicating, people have been spending more time using social media. As an example, Twitter reported a 23% increase in usage in Q1 2020. But it’s not simply usage numbers increasing either.
Australia’s NRL reported a huge increase in social interaction as the competition resumed and this will likely be the norm across sports and geographies as sport returns. As some countries start to turn a corner, sport has the opportunity to reaffirm and strengthen its relationship with fans.
Fans perceive and use social media channels as an authentic engagement opportunity and sport must respond in kind. Driving conversation, pushing highlights, streaming full games, enhancing remote fans with “second screen” offerings during games and empowering fans to create their own content are all key pillars for sport to focus on as it returns.
Prioritise Innovation
Sport has endured and continues to endure an incredibly difficult period. But as we edge ever closer to a large scale return to whatever the “new normal” turns out to be, we encourage all sports teams, leagues and competitions to prioritise thinking about how technology can help maximise their return.
Atrium Sports is changing how sport is organised, played, commercialised and experienced around the world.
Atrium Sports puts best practice technologies within reach of sports at every level, to enable them to create new content, engage fans and open commercial opportunities that help grow sport.
