Scoring Football’s D2C Opportunity: How To Build A Winning Digital Fan Experience

By Judd Goldstein, Head of Fan Engagement at Genius Sports

In an increasingly saturated entertainment landscape, football leagues and clubs cannot take their fans’ engagement for granted. Why should fans turn to your owned & operated (O&O) properties when there are a myriad of other digital destinations vying for their attention by tapping into their interest in football? Fans have a growing list of options to get their football content fix – such as scores apps, traditional news services, broadcaster OTT platforms, video games, and new-age football content on TikTok, Instagram and other social platforms. For rights-holders to compete, they need to put time, thought and care into how they acquire and engage their fans on their O&O properties.

However, leagues and clubs have a secret weapon – and that is that other entertainment formats can’t compete with the connection that fans have for their favourite teams and players. This puts leagues and particularly clubs in an enviable position to build loyalty and engagement on their own platforms, because if you can create a memorable and authentic digital experience for your fans, they will give you their attention.

In recent years, football leagues and clubs at all levels have built huge digital audiences, predominantly through social media. However, if these fans aren’t registered in your database, you are severely limited in how you can nurture and foster that relationship. Without acquiring fans’ first-party data and learning about their behaviours and preferences over time, you miss the opportunity to deliver for them a personalised and high quality experience – all of which ultimately restricts your commercial upside in the long-term.

So how do federations, leagues and particularly clubs overcome this imbalance to build deep, meaningful connections with their fans? The key is delivering tailored, interactive content and experiences on O&O properties, that prioritise and reward fan loyalty and capitalise on football’s unique emotional pull.

Delivering a meaningful hook through gamification

Fans genuinely care what their favourite sports organisations have to say and offer. And they want more regular and meaningful ways to engage.

In the same way content creators, brands and streaming platforms cater to shortening Gen Z attention spans and rising short-form video content formats, forward-thinking sports organisations are enjoying success with premium gamification strategies to capture sports audiences. Major football leagues and federations have stolen a march on clubs here, building robust and bespoke gamified experiences that engage and retain fans while collecting valuable fan data.

There’s no better example than FIFA, who in partnership with Genius Sports, and in preparation for two World Cups in the space of nine months, launched the FIFA Play Zone, a unique gamification hub for football fans around the world. This ecosystem of ever-evolving integrated games and experiences has drawn in millions of fans over the past 18 months. For fans, the opportunity to test their knowledge of global football in new unique ways, while competing with friends and having the chance to win prizes, provides a value exchange for them to be happy to share their details and be exposed to sponsored content. This built daily engagement habits and retained ongoing interaction with FIFA’s app and website, including during the long gap between major tournaments.

There is no one-size-fits-all approach to a successful gamification strategy. Each rights-holder has an opportunity to create a bespoke and premium experience for its fans that is true to their unique brand and identity.

Personalised loyalty

Deloitte’s recent research says two-thirds of sports fans expect more interactive experiences by 2030. This means deeper, more personalised and connected relationships between the individual fan and their chosen league, team or tournament.

First-party audience data makes this possible. Knowing each fan’s engagement history, favourite teams and players and geographical location creates the opportunity for personalisation. From there it is about building an integrated digital solution that leverages the power of personalisation to reward fans’ engagement, driving sustained loyalty and, ultimately, commercial outcomes. For example, tailored ticket and merchandise offers, bespoke on-platform notifications, personalised videos and other 1:1 experiences to keep all types of fans engaged on-platform and feeling valued.

Personalised loyalty is a digital membership programme taken to the next level. Other entertainment destinations like streaming services or social media apps deliver personalised content recommendations through complex algorithms. Sports organisations can do this simply and adeptly through a digital loyalty solution that lets fans engage with the federation, league or team in their own way, creating touchpoints that engage and immerse fans while encouraging them to keep interacting through an authentic rewards system.

A winning combination

The time is now for football federations, leagues and clubs to win back their fans’ digital engagement from other competing offerings. Through a combination of personalised loyalty, premium gamified experience and fresh unique content, the opportunity is there to turn your O&O platforms into THE destination your fans turn to first, and most often.

On Wednesday November 29 (2:45pm CET) at SportsPro Madrid, I’ll be discussing this in even more detail alongside Manchester United, Chelsea and M&C Saatchi Group in a session titled ‘Going direct: How soccer is approaching D2C’.

Image: Tobias on Unsplash