If it's true that Man Utds biggest star, Cristiano Ronaldo, is paid £150,000 per week, and that official club mobile wallpapers cost £3, then the club would have to sell 2.6 million of them to pay the bronzed Portuguese for a year.
It puts into perspective the relatively paltry amounts that mobile content can contribute to top-level football clubs in the current highly-inflated financial environment.
And yet Man Utd, along with the other top UK clubs – and the bigger European outfits like Real Madrid – are taking mobile more seriously than ever. Even the smaller clubs have rolled up mobile into broader new media activity.
The digital agency Perform Group, for example, represents Aston Villa, Newcastle United, Middlesbrough, Fulham, Sunderland, West Ham United and others.
Man United’s mobile service is managed by Infomedia, which now has a stranglehold on the UK soccer sector thanks to deals with Liverpool, Arsenal, Everton and Chelsea. For all of them it creates, re-purposes, delivers and bills for the usual content products and information alerts.
But perhaps more interestingly, it is also working on services that make mobile a central component of communications with fans. And it’s here that the real upside could be realised.
Michael Tomlins, commercial director of Infomedia, explains: “At the moment team sheets are circulated to corporate guests on a piece of paper hurriedly photocopied. It would make more sense to text it to the head of the party – and welcome every guest with a free club animation as well. These are the kinds of ideas that clubs want to explore.”
But that’s not to say that the revenue from content products is insignificant. Although the clubs sign away some rights for big money, there are others that they can monetise like no one else. Alerts are one example.
Tomlins adds: “Team news, signings – these are the areas that the clubs will self-evidently know about first. And the fans are willing to pay to know these things. Since we’ve started marketing them properly, alerts are up across our base by between 40 and 140 per cent a year.”
Of course, it’s video that excites most interest in observers of the space. Sky has promoted its 24/7 highlights package hard over the last year – with some success.
But these rights revert back to clubs after 12 hours, which means a club like Man Utd can sell subscriptions that include clip highlights that go live early on Sunday morning (after a 3pm Saturday kick-off). It’s also at liberty to package historical video, press interviews and so on.
The increasing autonomy of the clubs is accelerating the drift of football off-portal. And with so much traffic on these sites, there’s considerable potential for advertising.
Mike Dunphy, the former head of MUmobile who now runs MD Media Consulting, is aware of the opportunity, but knows it won’t be easy to mine. He says: “The clubs will have to be careful because of all their endorsements. They cannot endanger these relationships.”
The money paid by these sponsors can be huge. But they can be amenable. O2, which is the official telco of Arsenal for example, is happy for Infomedia to take its products to other operator decks.
Meanwhile, other sponsors seem uninterested in the mobile content option. Samsung pays Chelsea £13m a year for shirt sponsorship and has content rights outside the UK and Ireland. Yet it doesn’t embed any Chelsea content in its handsets or even offer products on its Fun Club mobile portal.
But then Chelsea doesn’t have any fans or history, so why should it?*
*Tim Green is a sour Tottenham Hotspur fan, which explains his bitter editorialising here.
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