Digital fans represent football’s future so should clubs start listening?

In 2020 the European Club Association conducted research into what it called the “Future Fan”. A survey across seven countries asked 14,000 people about their interest in football and how they interacted with the game. The survey recorded that among all fans only 40% regularly watched professional football in a stadium. Meanwhile 51% said they played Fifa at least once a month.

This research caused a degree of consternation in the ECA, especially with its then president, Andrea Agnelli, who believed that “many traditional assumptions about fans need to change” and that the game may need to adapt to meet them. Within months, however, Agnelli’s thoughts had been rendered moot because he had been forced out of the ECA for embracing that most radical of changes: the European Super League.

For many, concern over the “future fan” was simply a cover for some of the biggest clubs wanting to abandon traditional structures in search of more money. But the ECA’s research was not inaccurate and the questions raised were legitimate. As football has grown into a global form of entertainment so those who call themselves fans have changed too. The majority no longer watch football live in person but digitally through a screen. Has the sport come to terms with that shift?

Certainly clubs know more about their digital fanbase than they ever did about those clicking through the turnstiles. “The most sophisticated clubs have data coming from a lot of sources; I’d say more than a dozen,” says Roger A Breum, the head of marketing for Hookit, which specialises in tracking the digital footprint of sports teams and their sponsors. “Each of the social platforms they’re on gives them individualised data, then you probably have a social listening