lessons learned / best practices
In May 2015, sports biggest team Real Madrid partnered with Microsoft in a move that announced to the world how much the sports industry had changed.
At their partnership launch, Real Madrid CEO Jose Angel Sanchez announced that Los Blancos are now a ‘fan company’ serving 450 million global fans.
On the same stage Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s CEO, declared sport to be ‘the most disrupted of all industries’.
These observations were to be the starting point of 18 months of research culminating in ‘Sports Strategy in Digital’ an online course on the iSport learning platform.
These are the top 5 things that I learnt along the way.
1.
‘Every sports franchise is now a software company’ is how Bill McDermott, CEO of SAP views sport’s disruption as innovation becomes core business.
So, why is sport the most disrupted of all?
The simplest answer I offer is that the ‘product’ of sport is analogue in a world gone digital. Every sporting moment is a purely athletic exchange. This means that everything else around the contest has to evolve since fan consumption habits have shifted to on-demand and always-on mode.
Nowadays the most popular activities are digital, i.e. social media, video streaming and gaming. These are sports new competitors, not other teams and leagues - this is a game changer.
Each sports business now has digital-age responsibilities that include being a media publisher, data manager, software developer, digital retailer and experience provider.
To stay relevant analogue sport is now surrounded by a dashboard of digital tools for each fan to tailor their own experience from. The smartphone and other second screens are sports remote control to the game that includes social media for sharing, a game-day app for better live experience and the gaming version for greater immersion.
Sport really is the most disrupted of all industries