New Podcast: 12 Experts, 4 Topics, 1 Hour
Overthinking the sports business, for money
Today’s podcast was recorded on stage at the inaugural ECA Club Connect event, which brought together over 350 directors and operational leaders from more than 200 clubs.
The session format: 12 experts, 4 topics, 1 hour.
Have a listen:
See previous note: Brain dump from Madrid for more details.
The income of football clubs is split between the usual suspects: central media income, commercial, tickets and match day. To that you can add player transfer income.
Very quickly you get to some hard questions, about where to invest precious resources.
Do you put your faith in content strategy, Club as Netflix, which comes with decisions of building out in-house media capability. The Ryan Reynolds case study that grows and monetises a global, long tail audience for your club.
Then there’s Club as Amazon, the customer data route, which calls for investment toward the utopia of personalisation at scale.
Or, do you favour Club as Football Club - stick to the knitting of making money on player trading, buy cheap sell high, and wait for Todd Boehly to call with a stupid offer.
The big clubs can do everything all at once.
But the majority of the ECA’s membership is not in that position.
‘We can’t afford expensive data consultancy fees’ said more than one of the panellists.
Many clubs are, to borrow Ebru Koksal’s phrase, ‘prisoners of geography’, meaning there’s a ceiling on their commercial growth.
The ECA is at an interesting moment.
It’s growing rapidly, with 620 clubs signed up as members as of last week’s event.
So what is it, what role does it want to or will be allowed to play across the club game?
This from Fran Jones suggested a route forward.
As mentioned previously, the sensible move forward would be a hybrid model of US and European models.
Meanwhile…fans following next year’s European club competitions will need a packet of Solpadeine and an Excel spreadsheet.
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