With a career spanning many sports rights holders, commercial partners and governing bodies, Luis brings a deep and broad understanding of the way money flows in the sports industry. We spoke to Luis before the current setbacks of COVID-19, but Luis’s comments offer long-term insights into the state of the sports industry, which we hope will be as relevant as ever when the world of sports fights its way back from the current crisis. The overall economic and financial integrity of the ecosystem is at risk, which will necessitate a deeper reflection and wider consultation than the sports industry has typically taken up to now. In this interview with Luis, we look at some aspects such as fan behavior, content consolidation, monetization. We also check back in with Luis in April to discuss how Luis and Eleven Sports are working to navigate the current crisis.
1. Today there are lots of platforms that we can use to consume content, some of them are linear platforms other are digital platforms. We are fans and we are admirers of the sports industry. Where is our future headed as consumers? Do you think that we are headed to a position where we are looking for consolidated content in one consolidated platform? Do you think we are looking for as many solutions on as many platforms as possible?
Many sports organizations today understand the power of being together, of thinking together, and trying to aggregate as much as possible to a single destination. There might be some platforms that have decided to work together and create a super platform but I think the solution is not to take anyone from where they are and from the ecosystems they like to use. We need to be able to give any user what they want, whatever device they have, wherever they are located, whatever age group they are, which is basically what we are trying to do today at Eleven Sports.
We are in 10 markets and in every market, we work in a different way, as we are the only true agnostic player. So it’s almost like a tailor-made offering for every market with a big ambition to democratize distribution. We work with telcos, we work with Linear TV, with Pay-TV, Cable, all Social Media Organizations and also we have our own DTC distribution.
¨We need to be able to give any user what they want, whatever device they have, wherever they are located, whatever age group they are, which is basically what we are trying to do today at Eleven Sports¨.
2. You have worked with lots of right holders in the past. And now you’re working in the sports media. What do you think are some of the opportunities that right holders need to keep in mind as they are looking to address the fragmented sports media space as it is today?
The challenge today is how are we going to move from a securitized zero risk business model to actually a more innovative model where for the first time the industry moves to a risk-taking position. New business models are being created, and the old ones are starting to shift in order to adapt to the ever-changing landscape. Now, there is a need to work with the entire ecosystem, from commercial partners to data companies to investors.
By working with data companies, one can create and build that direct relationship with the fans and focus on the end-user, which is very different from the previous iteration of sports, because in the sports industry we have always claimed to care about the fan, but we are not always actually delivering up to the expectations of fans.
Something else to take into consideration is that we also live now in a bi-directional world. Fans now have massive power and reach. For many years, only big sports had the profile to be shown on linear TV, but today every sport can have a voice, every fan can have a voice and every athlete can have a voice, so fans and athletes today have massive importance as content creators, beyond what happens on a matchday.
The Sports Industry still has in the vast majority of cases, a very old-style attitude towards external investment. If we could look at profitability and the cash generated by sports, we could all see that sport cannot actually change itself because it doesn’t generate enough cash to do so on its own. That’s why leading investment companies will play such an important role in the transformation of the sports industry.
3. What does the fan of the future look like? Who is the fan of the future?
Heavily used vanity data from the top 20 football clubs in the world suggest a combined number of fans substantially bigger than the total world population! We need to start looking seriously at this. There is, of course, a large community of people around the planet willing to give time and attention to sports. That should be the defining criteria for a fan qualification by the way!
Sports is a global business but the truth is that there are many markets that have not been explored yet. So there are actually a lot of potential fans, a massive untapped and unidentified community out there that we have not reached yet.
I’m a huge believer that traditional sports have a massive opportunity in esports and that traditional sports will become a very important piece of this virtual ecosystem. I’m convinced of this coexistence between vSports (virtual sports) and eSports.
vSports is an interesting “hybrid” community. There is a massive amount of people that are football fans that play the FIFA game because they are football fans, and there are a massive amount of gamers that are playing the game because they are gamers. But there is actually a lot of convergence from gamers into real football fans that actually discover and play the real game on the pitch. So this is telling us that there is a massive opportunity to converge all these new communities.
Companies like Zwift and Peloton are really moving towards the power of the virtual arena, and only people that want to be blind will not see it. We are on the verge of a massive transformation where live sporting events are still going to be important but also new sports that live and breathe on a digital ecosystem will be created by this interaction.
4. Talking about new markets and opportunities, what are some key markets that Eleven Sports is looking at? Or which ones do you think have a lot of potential?
Overall China, India but also Africa are a massive opportunity for sports. I believe in 5-6 years from now, Africa is going to be much more advanced in terms of connectivity and will have state of the art virtual infrastructure. They will have the chance to build up their offering based on the latest tech available and benefiting from massive investments by the largest tech companies globally, bypassing our own legacy systems. I think it is one of the largest untapped audiences for football. Africa is actually the continent where we can see the largest proportional spending of available income in football content in the age group below 35. This is because the younger population is spending almost all their income to actually try to consume football content, as we know mostly through telcos’ data packs. So this is a massive opportunity for the industry and is also a massive social responsibility and solidarity piece. Because once and for all, we need to make sure that there is a collective effort to ensure that content can get to that incredible committed and loyal audience. And this is not something that only one organization can solve.
For Eleven we are of course looking at new territories for expansion across Asia, Africa, Latin and North America. We have defined over the last months new and more efficient expansion models as well as a new fully revised content strategy that is going to expand into multiple new areas for us.
¨Sports is a global business but the truth is that there are many markets that have not been explored yet. So there are a lot of potential fans, a massive untapped and unidentified community out there that we have not reached yet.¨
5. What does the future of Eleven Sports look like?
Right now our focus is to be bold and positive, to continue servicing our fans and to find innovative solutions to the challenges the sports and media industry is facing in a world without live sports content. More than ever the different players and components of the sports industry need to work together to find new synergies. Archive, behind the scenes content, dedicated interviews, or recreations of historical archive matches with the celebrities of yesterday and today are all important. As well we are looking at an acceleration of our strategy to enter seriously into vSports & eSports, including creating our own formats and IP.
We are also very encouraged by the very recent return of live sport in Taiwan, one of our main operations in Asia. In Taiwan, live baseball and basketball have returned in recent days and we have looked to really maximize that through democratizing that content and making it available to every sports fan globally via Twitter with dedicated English commentaries. That has had some interesting results and created a real buzz, with over 7 Million views for our live and replayed programs in the first week alone.
In addition, we’re in the fortunate position to be part of the Aser Ventures family, and so we have access to a great network of media platforms and studio businesses, such as Whistle and One Football. Aser has also just announced a new venture with the talent production studio OTRO, which gives ELEVEN the opportunity to create new content and also access to some fantastic premium existing content with the David Beckham, Neymar Jr, Messi, and others.
Another important focus for us at the moment is to use our network to make a difference for good. As well as working to entertain our fans while they are stuck at home – we are also supporting the work of the World Health Organisation and helping them to spread vital health messages across our channels.
We also want to continue to plan for the future post Covid-19, and there are a number of longer-term areas of strategic focus for us that will become more visible over the next months. I would bracket these into four areas:
The first one is the continuous commitment and development of additional ways of servicing more fans. We are not afraid of standing for innovation at all times and we believe there are still lots of new ways of playing with live content. We know that the older generations are still consuming the full event in a more traditional experience, which we deliver in a really premium way. In addition, we have been registering a lot of success in creating different products around live with a focus on younger fans. A good example recently came with the launch of our Champions League live video service on WhatsApp, which shares the biggest moments from games with fans on Whatsapp and has been a big success already. There is certainly more way to engage much more this younger audience and to keep delivering them content in new and fresh ways that fit with how they naturally want to consume their favorite sporting moments. I don’t think anyone in the industry is so obsessed as we are at continuing to improve and enhance the experience of every single consumer or potential consumer. Step by step we will keep developing and adding to our offering.
The second one is to find new and more efficient ways to open new markets and as well expand into new communities, new sets of rights, and ultimately achieve global distribution. We are working very hard in these areas and believe me, we are not afraid of re-writing the playbook. One interesting example in our organization comes from our Eleven Sports Italy operation. We operated since launch a reverse content pyramid model by adapting Football Serie C as our main anchor content in clear opposition to the traditional model of launching in a new market which tells you to start with premium content as your anchor content. We went the opposite way and we created a very successful monetization model around it which has been supported by a large subscriber base and a loyal community of fans of Serie C and Serie D clubs. We really tested and understood the potential of micro-communities in football and built quite an interesting success story as a result. We believe that there are thousands of micro-communities around the world that actually are so eager to see some pieces of new tail content that are very relevant to them. This trend is something we will keep seeing happening and hopefully, more communities around the world will be served with the sports content they have been wishing for, for a long time and they will also become content contributors as they tell their stories and their experiences around the sport they love.
The third one, which for me is key, is our full commitment to become a data-centric organization – a true data company. We have +20m users around the world and we will expand on that. But more importantly, we will expand our knowledge about our current and future fan communities, step by step, day by day. Our big ambition is on how we can create, very quickly, a bidirectional relationship with all of our users. We will be standing more than ever “For The Fans” but also be moving and standing “By The Fans” as our content and experiences offering is crafted and personalized by actionable data points. We know sport is the largest community in the world and we are sure that Eleven will play a role in untapping and nurturing this growing community in all the markets in which we operate.
¨Our big ambition is on how we can create, very quickly, a bidirectional relationship with all of our users. We will be standing more than ever “For The Fans” but also be moving and standing “By The Fans” as our content and experiences offering is crafted and personalized by actionable data points¨
And the fourth one is our commitment to influence the creation and development of new sports, and the advent of new categories. We want to provide a voice and relevance for many sports and mass participation communities that today are considered to be marginal. We believe in the massive power ahead for organized mass participation events. Whether ‘virtual’ or ‘real’, we believe that we can help draft a new script that will be unveiled by billions of actors that love to play, to participate and to compete in the physical or virtual activities they love. We believe authentic, amateur related competitions will become progressively more important and capable of attracting the hearts and minds of large communities around the world.