Fan Involvement – The next evolution

The sports industry has done a remarkable job at improving its relationship with fans and broader audiences in the past few years. The sheer number of conferences focused on fan engagement and content boggles the mind. There has rightly been an obsession with figuring out what is the best way of engaging. 

Like many industries this first started in the venue – the improvement in venues from new builds to simply making the toilets more bearable was one form. Creating proper website and apps, and progressing from Likes to shares across the social platforms has been fun to watch and be a part of.

We see more stadiums embracing Wi-Fi even as 5G is about to emerge and an acceptance that more needed to be one. MLBAM was one of the first with its professed goal to be on all platforms at all times but it has spread to the smallest clubs in lower-tier sports and that is a positive all round.

As the install base of smart devices and highspeed broadband has extended and social media has reached almost everyone possible so there has been an obsession with this content through the prism of a content business.

I am not yet sure that sports businesses are convinced that they are in the content space however much they try to produce. Partly because if they really felt that was their space we would have seen more senior hires at the Chief Commercial level of experts from companies like Disney. 

As I have often stated in the past the Sports industry is in the Community Business. Pre the industrial revolution sport was more the preparation for war, post it was about the creation of leisure time and binding communities together. These communities came together to watch their teams play and the bonds that have been created are phenomenal – especially in Football where it's remarkably tribal.

With the emergence of broadcast media and accelerated with the emergence of the internet and then again with the iPhone and smart devices, the concept of the community business vanished within Sports. The view emerging that these new technologies enabled us to reach a far broader audience than our local area and therefore was not to be constrained by the narrow definition that community traditionally would have – i.e. within 5 to 50miles of your physical location

This has led to a tremendous boom in the industry but ultimately makes two mistakes that with the benefit of hindsight we can identify.

1.      The definition of community it too lazily applied to CSR efforts (players going to hospitals at Christmas) or defining the community as something local

2.      Believing that the internet is simply an enabler for selling our content (effectively sticking to web 1.0)

As I think most people can agree, companies like Facebook and others have destroyed both of these rules. The community on Facebook is over 2bn people, is global and is made up of millions of millions of smaller communities – with people sitting across a wide range of them at any one time.

Equally, social has demonstrated that web 2.0 and beyond have emerged with the end consumer not being just a consumer of content or purchases but also the creator – be that on Instagram or on Amazon Marketplace for example.

What does that mean though for the Sports industry?

To me, it opens a world of untapped opportunities and the chance to evolve our Fan Engagement strategies for the next era.

Looking at the sector as a Community business helps me build a vision of what comes next. Clearly it changes for every business in sport as the definition of their community will differ – for Manchester United it is complex, local, global and across real and e-platforms just to mention a few. For Hartlepool, it’s a local concept. For Rugby and cricket and other sports it will also differ.

It also has me question if fan engagement, though a positive directional step, is actually the right way to move forward. My answer came through going online and looking at some definitions:

Engagement: “the action of engaging or being engaged”

This makes sense and is easily defended when it comes to how sports act with its fans. Yet it feels incomplete in the modern world. To me this corresponds well to the web 1.0 model of production of content, distributing it and counting how many people saw it and then stating that is your audience. 

You get to some amazing numbers but are they actually ‘engaged’ was there any action? It also explains why despite some insane engagement numbers the actual revenue models from this line of thinking remain in broadcast, sponsorship, and betting. Sport has had the engagement measurement model foisted on it by external parties and has largely been willing to go along with it.

If like me the definition of engagement leaves you unsatisfied then you have to keep looking. What I landed on is now informing how I transform my why (community) into my how (thank you Simon Sinek).

Involvement: “the fact or condition of being involved with or participating in something / emotional or personal association with someone/something”

Now I feel like this is more in tune with what sports has been trying to do over the past decade but brings it into the modern era. Words are important and which ones you choose, and how you use them will directly impact the result of your efforts.

If we use fan involvement it completely alters the emphasis whilst not negating the impact of what we have done to date.

Content remains pivotal as it is what binds the community and stimulates the conversation. How we involve them with that content will depend on how you have decided to define your community. 

Some people will want to be involved and have a personal link to a team by simply perusing the internet and watching live broadcasts. Others will want to lean in and participate either by creating content or playing the game or virtual version of the game. It opens up a myriad of opportunities for the industry to explore.

Critically it links into the ‘emotional or personal association with someone/something’. This is what really pushed me to this definition.

For the fans out there this is already a key component of their interaction with their favourite sport and teams. Fans will talk about their team and how they are the true owners – the actual owners are simply the custodians of it for them. They celebrate every win, tackle, try, boundary and will often cry after a loss. Sport is already deeply personal and emotional for them.

For those that are more casual and perhaps even transient in their fandom the key for any team or rightsholder and brand is to try to create that personal and emotional attachment.   As the definition of involvement makes clear it is only when we involve them in this process that the association can take root.

Fan Engagement was a massive step forward from where we were pre-iPhone. The whole industry has made a leap in the right direction. But now, more than ever is the time to reflect on where we are and how we can continue our progress.

This is a business and to keep our upward trajectory we should be looking at the community in a new light and taking engagement into the next phase - Fan Involvement. This change in mindset does not remove the need for content, websites, apps or other technologies many have already invested in but will change the emphasis on how they are created.

It will also provide a clear, holistic overarching goal and open up our business models to new opportunities to build community and of course ultimately to monetize those different communities.

Whilst in future videos and articles I will explore what the fan involvement model might require from an organization there is one example I have raised on LinkedIn previously that could be adapted pretty easily.

Joe Wicks has committed during the Covid-19 Outbreak to do a 30minute PE class every Monday through Friday aimed primarily at kids. Day one had over 800k live views and 2.4m cumulative, with over 900k live views on day 2. This will likely slip over time but as he can’t go out and be a personal trainer he is building his brand, his community, driving involvement and will have some opportunity to monetize on YouTube.

I would have loved to have seen a top tier Football Club embrace something similar (preferably long before the current circumstances required). Many of them run lucrative training camps charging a lot of money for a week of two of ‘personal’ training. This is very much a community and a model to continue. 

Yet the technology exists for a club to go to a broader audience with an online or app-based model. Here you could ‘Learn the Liverpool way’ or be part of the broader ‘La Masia’ of Barcelona. Fans around the world could train the way their idols do – defend like Van Dijk, shoot like Suarez and the examples go on.

Using the coaches, players and academies for first-hand content production and mixed in with archive footage from actual gameplay and suddenly there is something very interesting to put to work.

Clubs could turn their academies from cost centers to profit centers and utilize their expertise and appeal in a more relevant way. It would also enable them to reach an entirely different community of youth and football interested who want to learn how to play – clearly, this could work across a whole host of sports and not just limited to football.

This could be monetized via micropayments or partnerships – Coca-Cola becoming your global training partner, or AWS providing the infrastructure to grow the fanbase. A link with Apple Watch, Whoop or Catapult to build a consumer business for data and content is also possible.

On top of this, there is a mix of AR, AI/ML and computer vision companies out there that as you get people to upload data and content could potentially identify players that should be checked out by your network of scouts…which opens up another potential community to look at.

There is an underlying business model to focussing on communities and involving them and is not about simply outreach. Meet them where they are, involve them and build the content and tech stack to turn this into your next generation of fans and consumers.

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If you are interested in learning more or thinking about how your business could adapt to this model then contact me at michaelcbroughton@gmail.com