Developing a strategy that drives fan engagement begins firstly with understanding what motivates the consumer and why people enjoy your product. For many sports organizations, the growth of digital consumption – and predominantly among younger demographics – is pressing them to look to the future of their business operations and inspiring new and creative marketing strategies.
This includes the digitalization of their internal infrastructure, to enable the creation of more compelling, digital-first content that attracts global audiences. Furthermore, it also makes it easier for sports properties to adopt digital communications technologies into their ecosystem, helping to reduce operational costs and create alternative fan-revenue streams, including online ticket and merchandise sales.
As the industry navigates winds of change, there is one element at the heart of every sporting organization that remains unmoved. While digital media and technology are changing how sports and fans engage with one another – including the acceleration of mobile-supported viewing experiences – valued at north of US$40 billion globally, the live event continues to be sport’s most valuable commodity amongst an increasingly fragmented media landscape.
According to research carried out by the London-based sports marketing agency Two Circles, the value of live sports rights will grow at a rate of 18.7 percent to surpass US$49.1 billion by 2024. However, despite representing a fraction of the industry’s net income, highlights are growing at a faster rate with the influence of digital media.
For example, in-play clips are expanding at a rate of 76 percent and estimated to reach US$1.7 billion in 2024, while short-form video highlights rights are growing at a rate of 101 percent and are likely to surpass US$3.2 billion in the same window.
Needless to say, live sporting occasions underpin the industry. Nevertheless, it’s important to recognize how the digital transformation of sport can help amplify your organization’s core product – and the different ways this can be achieved depending on the behavior of your wider audience and the digital maturity of your business operations.
Digital driving audience growth
Just as men’s football, for example, has traditionally thrived on the sale of pay-TV broadcast rights per market, direct-to-consumer (D2C) media strategies present teams and leagues with options to expand their audience reach. This is giving many rights holders food for thought in seeking to develop a customer relationship management (CRM) toolkit that offers meaningful insights into how and why fans spend money on live sports, whether that be matchday tickets, a pay-TV subscription, or over-the-top (OTT) coverage.
For women’s football, on the other hand, historically speaking, its roots have traditionally run less deep – meaning that the women’s game is granted more flexibility and room to pivot than its male counterpart in the age of digital media. This can be demonstrated by the audience reach during the 2019 FIFA Women’s World Cup, which attracted 1.12 billion viewers worldwide – of whom 481.5 million accessed coverage via digital platforms.
While the eighth iteration of the women’s tournament saw in the region of 1.13 million tickets sold in the build-up and throughout the month-long campaign, despite disruption caused by Covid-19, the organizers for the upcoming 2023 FIFA Women’s World Cup in Australia and New Zealand are confident the tournament will sell more than 1.5 million tickets, citing 2019 as a revolutionary year for the popularity of women’s football.
Demonstrating women’s football’s digital opportunity, the World Cup’s recognition advocates a deliberate shift in recent years which has seen football’s regional leagues and federations establish its women’s competitions as standalone commercial entities – separate from the men’s game.
In doing so, UEFA is leveraging its digital footprint to help grow women’s matchday attendances, and appears to be coming to fruition as, 100 days out from UEFA Women’s Euro 2022, due to take place in England between July 6th and July 31st, tickets for the final at Wembley Stadium sold out less than a day after going on general sale.
This is pertinent since Euro 2022 became the first female football tournament to deploy UEFA’s SecuTix-powered digital ticketing system – available across all 10 venues in nine host cities – and has also seen two of the Lionesses’ groups games against Norway at Brighton & Hove Albion’s Amex Stadium and Northern Ireland at Southampton Saints’ St Mary’s Stadium completely sell out within 24 hours.
Whereas previously ticket sales for Women’s Euro tournaments were organized locally, Chris Bryant, the head of the Football Association’s (The FA) tournament delivery, told The TicketingBusiness that its transformation is indicative of the growing interest in the female game, including the acceleration of digital growth and mobile-ticketing adoption among fans.
This trend is cited in the FIFA Benchmarking Report: Women’s Football, published in June 2021, which outlines the global governing body’s first comprehensive overview of elite women’s football, including a survey with 30 leagues and 282 clubs on sporting governance, finance, and fan engagement.
As part of FIFA’s strategy to accelerate the growth of women’s football, it outlines four pillars including: competition reform; the modernization of women’s development programs; the professionalization of the women’s game; and enhancing the game’s commercial values through “an innovative digital strategy”.
Speaking about the report, FIFA president Gianni Infantino said that an “in-depth understanding of the elite women’s football landscape” is essential for “boosting the development and growth” of the women’s game more broadly and presents stakeholders with a strategic overview for “maximizing its big potential” across the sector.
FC Barcelona sets women’s football attendance record
A recent example of how women’s club football is capitalizing on the growth of the women’s game came during FC Barcelona Femení’s UEFA Women’s Champions League quarter-final second-leg fixture against Real Madrid on March 30th 2022, which drew a new women’s football record 91,553 fans to the 99,354-capacity Camp Nou, thanks largely to a sophisticated digital marketing strategy.
As part of an ongoing campaign, the Catalan club initially made tickets available exclusively to FC Barcelona’s 147,000 “socios” members within 24 hours of their launch. Each socio had the opportunity to claim up to four free tickets as part of their purchase – contributing to some 35,600 tickets sold within the first day of the sale.
Thereafter, on January 13th, FC Barcelona released the tickets for sale to the general public, priced in the region of 9-15€. A further 50,000 tickets were sold within three hours of the general sale going live and surpassed 70,000 tickets sold within two days.
By announcing the ticket sale two months out from the fixture, which saw FC Barcelona beat Real Madrid 5-2 (8-3 on aggregate) to advance to the semi-finals, the club optimized its digital footprint by promoting the offer to its membership database, then capitalizing on a level of interest usually associated with FC’s Barcelona’s men’s fixtures.
Elsewhere, during the same round of second-leg matches, the Parc des Princes also set a stadium record for a women’s football match as Paris Saint-Germain Féminine’s 4-3 aggregate victory over FC Bayern Munich Frauen drew more than 25,000 fans – albeit didn’t adopt the same digital marketing tactics FC Barcelona demonstrated ahead of is “Clásico” clash.
The reverse leg saw a stadium-record 13,000 fans attend the Allianz Arena in Munich on March 22nd. Although a fraction of the crowds at Camp Nou, FC Bayern’s CEO Oliver Khan described it as a “milestone” and expressed optimism for the future of the club’s women’s product.
The last time more than 90,000 fans attended a women’s football match came during the 1999 FIFA Women’s World Cup as 90,185 witnessed the United States defeat China on penalties at the Rose Bowl Stadium, in California, setting a new international attendance record.
By comparison, the previous attendance record for a women’s European club match was held by Atlético de Madrid Femenino, whose home clash versus FC Barcelona attracted a record 60,739 spectators during the 2018/19 season, held at Atlético’s 68,000-capacity Wanda Metropolitano stadium.
The club executed a marketing campaign that promoted Atlético’s best players around the Spanish capital. On that occasion, 56 percent of tickets were distributed free of charge to members of the home supporters club, while the remaining 44 percent were sold to the general public.
Atlético also excelled on the digital front with nearly 413,000 viewers tuning into the match via a free-to-air platform organized by the club.
WHAT'S N3XT
Women’s football is finding new ways to generate revenues through digitalization, while a hybrid broadcast model that features both traditional and D2C rights agreements is helping to reach new audiences and promote the female game as its own independent entity.
In our recent report – Enabling Women’s Football to Disrupt the Industry – N3XT Sports laid out the opportunities digitalization presents to women’s football, including its ability to improve visibility for the sport and to generate revenue, including the commercial opportunities associated with growing digital viewership and matchday attendances.
Discussing strategic fan engagement, Pedro Malabia, the director of LaLiga’s Women’s Football department, explains the importance of a well-structured digital communications strategy in order to promote and maximize women’s football’s commercial appeal.
Meanwhile, non-executive director for the Professional Footballers’ Association (PFA) and former CEO of Galatasaray S.K., Ebru Köksal, says that women’s football “could skip traditional broadcast” altogether in order to leverage new digital opportunities.
“Women’s football is not CSR – it is a great standalone product,” she expands. “If we do not increase the fan base, the viewership figures, then there will always be the argument whether the investment makes sense, as a brand and as an investor.”
In summary, women’s football has a unique value proposition and, with the proper promotional strategy in place, rights holders have the power to bring tens of thousands of people to the stadium.
Understanding your fans is the first step to achieving this goal and requires the implementation of a digital-first strategy that’s fluent with your operating models. Our team of experts at N3XT Sports can help your organization set out a digital roadmap for maximizing the potential for women’s sport inside your organization.
To find out more about what N3XT Sports can offer your organization, please fill out the form below and we’ll be in touch. We look forward to hearing from you.