Smaller football clubs will struggle to keep up with digital technology, author says

Digital technologies are rapidly changing how fans engage with football, and smaller clubs are going to struggle to keep up.

This is the gist of a new book by Stefan Lawrence, senior lecturer in Sport and Health at Newman University, titled Digital Football Cultures: Fandom, Identities and Resistance.

Lawrence has been studying how rapidly changing digital technologies, such as online trolling, changing viewing habits and the Internet of Things, are affecting the ways people view and engage with football, and the knock-on effects this is having across media and football clubs.

“My concern that clubs like mine, Walsall, will find it more difficult to keep pace, while those with biggest slice of pie now will be able to buy in expertise to keep their big shares of the pie” he said.

The inspiration from the book, which will be published in autumn this year, partly came from a research trip Lawrence took to the Balkans region to understand how football hooligans organised online.

“The authorities in one particular country dismissed digital communities as nothing to worry about, but months later in the same region thousands of people took to the streets of Bucharest, protesting the government, after having organised in part online.  This isn’t directly related to my work, but it spoke to the power of digital technologies”.

Lawrence is seeing a similar disconnect closer to home, where football clubs are struggling to keep up with a rapidly evolving digital landscape, and how this is changing the ways people are engaging with and watching football.

“Clubs haven’t yet acquired formal systems and networks to bring together expertise across social media, sports science and digital marketing,” he says, “So each football club’s success depends on their individual expertise in different departments”.

Part of the reason for this, Lawrence says, is because sport is still catching up behind other industries that were professionalised much earlier on. “Sport used to be a pastime that people engaged with. Now, it’s slowly become commercialised, but there’s a lack of experts with cultural interest in the game and fans.”

Many digital innovations are happening in “smart” stadiums, such as e-tickets with unmanned turnstiles and innovations in coaching, such as the Viper pod, a small GPS device which sits between a footballer’s shoulder blades and sends heart rate and other physiological data to coaches to monitor in real time.

More widely, media companies are adapting to fans’ changing viewing behaviours, swapping watching TV over long periods of time to short video clips of the highlights.

“The accessibility of football means people can’t escape it because there’s so much on at all times, with so many spin-off, analyses and breakdown shows that say the same things over again. There’s been resistance of fans,” Lawrence says.

“Now, fans are livestreaming football. This speaks to consumers’ attitudes and behaviour changing. People are being given more opportunities to choose which sports to dip in and out of,” he adds.

This has led companies such as Sky Sports to adapt by offering an app where people can watch clips of goals that have just been scored.  And this has been exacerbated, Lawrence says, by a “status war” between the world’s media. Silicon Valley, he explains, is producing technology to help “normal people,” such as fitness coaches, to help them monetise themselves.

“Big corporations such as Sky Sports and News Corporation recognise this and see how people engage with sport, health and fitness, and that sticking to the same business models hasn’t worked because people can get it free elsewhere. Fans can type in a goal on Twitter and find clips because someone’s recorded it.”

Bigger companies can keep up, Lawrence says, because they have so much experience understanding consumer behaviour. “We’re already seeing it. Sky Sports has had its first major restructuring in how they deliver media,” he says.

But while bigger clubs with money will be able to keep up, providing fans with YouTube channels and social media accounts, Lawrence is worried that smaller clubs will get left behind.