Liverpool FC is one of the most famous sporting institutions in the world. One in ten people on the planet follow them socially. Just think about that brand equity. That is 771M followers compared to less than 65,000 in the stadium. As current European Champions League winners (sixth time) they may also consider themselves to be one of the top Football businesses in the world. The club has won for the Premier Leagues best fan experience four years running so the conversation with Peter Moore the CEO is a perfect platform for trying to understand the future of fan experiences.
Liverpool Chief Executive Peter Moore waits for the start of the English Premier League soccer match ... [+]
My podcast with Peter Moore the CEO of Liverpool FC throws a whole new light on what fan experience is going to look like ten years from now. Peter came from the software gaming industries at Sega and Microsoft as well as global sports marketing with Reebok. He is technologist managing a very traditional non digital business so the combination of the magic that technology can bring, as well as the global appeal of the sport and the brand is a great platform for the future. He gets the bridge between a new digital generation and the more traditional generations that just experienced the team on the day in the stadium.
Think about four big things we talked about.
- Liverpool Football club is more known than the Beatles and the team creates over $500M in non-stadium community economics. We talk about where they could be going over the next ten years.
- The nature of engaging fans is going to be radically different in the next 10 years and the opportunities to feed the team’s performance on the field is going to be driven by more than the TV monies and how those fans are engaged with and in new and really interesting ways.
- What will make elite clubs economic giants in the future will be decided less by TV monies and more and more by how they can feed growth from all varieties of fans and how they engage with them individually.
- Sports watching has been a traditional right of passage for Boomers and older generations. However, for Gen-X, Y, Z and Alpha there is going to be a much tougher process to grab their attention in a digital first, right now world. This will put pressure on stadiums to entertain fans far beyond just the game so that it becomes an all-day experience and not a process of late entry to the stadium and a fast exit at the end of the game.
