Keishi Matsuyama, in January 2018 was hired by Valencia CF as the Digital Transformation Director to lead the Digital Transformation journey of the Spanish club. He currently holds the role of Strategy Director at Valencia CF. What does a digital transformation and strategy role look like in a modern football organization? How did the club start its journey to become modern and digital-ready, and what challenges did the club face due to the COVID-19 lockdown? Read on to find out more.
1. Keishi, you have led the digital transformation journey at Valencia CF, what is digital transformation for you?
The digital era has meant a huge social change making the environment much faster and tougher for all kinds of organizations, including the sports industry, that faces a much more diverse competition and a significant digital gap in its operating model. Many key players in the sports organizations and management tend to think either that digital is social media mostly and/or technology platforms, so their approach to “digital transformation” is just the implementation of some of these, and that doesn’t actually work in my opinion. Technology has become a necessity because we already live since the advent of widespread connectivity, mobile and cloud computing in a totally different paradigm about a digitally enabled society. So putting in place the technology foundations that anyone has available from leading digital services providers (FAANGs) does not represent a key differentiation point but starts bridging a gap to avoid total irrelevancy because of a competitive disadvantage.
For me, Digital Transformation is to change the organization culture and capabilities, to adopt more agile operational frameworks, to optimize processes with a focus on customer experience while making sound sustainable decisions, and to adopt this as the strategic fulcrum to compete and thrive in the current socio-economic environment. The sports industry is part of the content and entertainment business, and people’s taste and desires are constantly evolving or even changing radically at a very fast pace, so the sports business and its leadership has to be nimble to read the environment, analyze trends and adapt quickly to any given situation.
The digital transformation journey at Valencia CF is focused on enabling a direct relationship with the fan and a more competitive entertainment and services experience, based on human-centered design combined with data analytics.
2. What has Valencia CF done to keep engaging with its fans and brands during COVID-19 when there were no live games happening?
The COVID-19 situation has accelerated the digital transformation journey for most organizations. For us, because we made the strategic decision about 2 years ago to build our digital foundation as fast as we could, we were in a place of advantage and we were able to deliver alternatives allowing us to adapt quickly to the situation. Our already tested capabilities have taken a stress test in terms of workload. VCF MEDIA, our production arm that was set as part of the Digital Transformation roadmap I designed for the Club, has worked even harder than in a normal season, serving our fans and partners and enabling the club to be close to them during these tough times. It has also given us the opportunity to project even more our brand values and to show our Corporate Social Responsibility towards society and the world as an aspiring international brand. So, for my team and myself, this has been a much busier time than normal.
During the lockdown period, to keep our fans entertained, we re-broadcasted some matches that had an emotional meaning for our community. We introduced some of our current partners into the rebroadcasting to help them get the exposure they were not getting because of season interruption during the lockdown. As an example, during the game when Valencia scored a goal, the same partner branded asset that would normally appear on the pitch, we made it appear too in the old reruns.
3. What was the main reason behind Valencia’s decision to invest in its digital transformation journey? And what have been some of the positive impacts of it?
In the digital era, the way we all work changes, the tools we use change, and the way we live changes. Our President had made up his mind to make VCF a digitally enabled organization. With my background in enterprise tech services and as senior executive and consultant helping companies get digitally-enabled I joined Valencia CF with the role of Digital Transformation Director with the mission to build the foundations starting right away (agile delivery) and completing an integrated ecosystem in 2-3 seasons. I can proudly say that we achieved our goal of leveraging internal talent and people willing to embrace change and empowering them and joining forces with a key strategic partner for our platform’s delivery.
We changed the club’s business model, content production and delivery, decision-making processes (data-driven), and set up new areas that now are business as usual. At that point, we decided to make the digital department per se disappear and all the functions that were temporarily under my umbrella (IT, media, business intelligence, data analytics, platforms development, digital sales and marketing) are now led by a mix of new and old people in the organization and operate as business as usual areas. There is no digital, the club is digital. A digital transformation must eventually make the digital attribute irrelevant because it is now part of everyone’s mindset in the organization.
As a result of the digital transformation journey, we now have the tools to directly engage with our community, we have increased our business, we have been able to have business continuity in the face of the pandemic and we have been able to meet internal and external commitments.
Through our mobile app, our fans have easy access to our content, they can buy merchandising, can order food from it while they are in the stadium, and we have been able to collect very insightful data from it.
4. What has been the biggest challenge for you during this journey?
One of the most common challenges that organizations face during their digital transformation is the cultural shift. Many see digital as a different department when it should be a way to operate that impacts everyone. Another challenge is to understand the way monetization works. In our case, we understood fully that monetizing digital investments is a journey, it does not happen overnight or in a straightforward direct way, digital is a strategic enabler that brings income indirectly and directly. So those who are leading a digital transformation journey in a football club must coach all team and business leaders, involve them in the process, and make sure they understand why we are all doing the transformation, what we are trying to achieve as a club, and where each of them is headed within that strategic context.
5. What is next for Valencia CF?
What is next for the club has a lot more to do with the usage, embedding and maturing of the new processes rather than building platforms in themselves. When we first started this immersion journey two years ago, we built a new Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and an e-commerce offering in order for us to have the control of all the data touchpoints to have a better single view of the fan; we built these from scratch. Now we need to keep maturing the way we operate following and measuring customer journeys and keeping a fan view rather than going back to a departmental way of working.
We have set a strong digital foundation, but now we need to really blossom our content, our data insights, and our sales. Because of immersing in our digital transformation journey some time ago, now we can segment fans based on their interests, journey, and demographics, we can communicate with them more directly and we can produce more relevant and engaging content faster.
6. What is your advice to those football clubs who are starting their digital transformation journey?
I cannot stress enough the importance of writing down a strategy before anything else. A strategy needs to be followed immediately by a development roadmap to have a clear point of view, to have a clear mindset and to know exactly what you are working for. Make sure you have the right people on your team and that they know and understand your strategy and the roadmap.
Also, make sure you get external help when needed, most of the time there is external talent outside of your organization that can really help you accomplish what you want to accomplish.
We hosted Keishi during one of our online Meetups entitled Football Innovation: The Power of Digital Transformation, you can read more about it here and watch the entire session.