Thursday 10 April 2008

the pin drops....

Whoopee-do. News from NMA is that ‘major Premiership football clubs are preparing to incorporate user-generated content and social networking into their sites’. Wow! There’s a novel thought, for a business that is based on what is essentially weekly social gatherings where fans all over the country watch their team play and bond together before and after the match to discuss what went wrong, what went well, how crap the ref was, who to buy/sell next; and only now do the clubs realize the value in giving fans from all over the world to share this experience that comes with following their football team even for people who aren’t lucky enough to go to the game every week or live miles away from England.

The problem is that they have left it so late now that I doubt they will be able to compete with all the unofficial forums, message boards and communities that have been around for a good few years now and who have cemented a very loyal user base. I just cant believe its taken this long for football clubs to realise the potential value in extending the match-day experience around following your team to an online world. What’s more worrying is that major clubs like Arsenal are still ‘refusing to be drawn on it’s strategy’ when asked about this, I thought we were a forward thinking club?...

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