5 Ways Clubs Can Drive Fan Engagement During the Off-Season

Gone are the days when a few match highlights and post-game interviews could satiate the hunger of modern fans. Regardless of the sport, cultivating a truly passionate fanbase requires clubs to venture beyond the confines of the pitch, embracing a year-round content strategy that creates compelling narratives tailored to supporters’ evolving preferences.

Below are five content strategies you can implement to help you connect with your fans and keep up engagement and excitement levels even during the off-season:

1. Past, Present, & Future Fandom

Clubs’ video archives are a treasure trove of stories just waiting to be told. By unearthing memorable matches, legendary players, and significant achievements, clubs can showcase these moments to younger audiences while evoking nostalgia among long-time supporters.

“Our new fans need to understand the history of the club… archives play a big part,” said Pierre-Olivier Bouche, director of media, programming and operations at Tottenham Hotspur. “You’re trying to tell a story building on what’s happening now, but sometimes also from archives and it’s true that how you access the archive is complicated, but with a solution like WSC Sports, this has become simpler and simpler.” 

To engage Gen Z and younger fans, clubs should repurpose classic content that’s likely only ever been available in a traditional 16:9 horizontal ratio, and make it available in the ratio younger audiences prefer, 9:16. This vertical video helps to serve younger fans content on the platforms they use the most: Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube Shorts. By prioritizing these bite-sized, shareable formats, clubs can effectively connect with the next generation of supporters and ensure long-term growth.

2. Player POV

Fans always want to hear from the players, and they’re particularly keen to learn how a player felt about a match or a particular moment. What was their reaction to going a goal down? What were they thinking when the referee pulled out a red card? What did the coach say to the team at half-time?

With the action on hold until the new season, you can use this opportunity to repurpose your content from the previous campaign using your players to provide interesting insights for the fans. Let them pick and share their favourite individual moments and those as a team. Have them create their own highlight compilations, adding their own commentary from the perspective of someone who experienced it all first-hand. Capture their unique personalities and reactions to funny moments and have them share stories from behind the scenes—the more friendly banter between teammates, the better!

3. Promote Your International Talent

The off-season typically coincides with international tournaments such as Euro 24, Copa América, and the Paris Olympics, providing clubs with opportunities to create content tailored to these key events.

Modern squads are typically full of international talent. If one of your stars has been called up to represent the national team then celebrate that achievement with highlights showcasing their best moments from the season. Have a top player that didn’t make the cut? Create a video that shows the rest of the country what they’re missing out on. Did one of your players have a standout performance, or pull off a great bit of skill? Then create a compilation that shows the times they’ve done that wearing your club’s colours. Keep the story going with more and more great content.

4. Getting the Fans Involved

Use your content inventory to turn passive viewers into engaged users. Add polls, quizzes and to your content to turn a regular match highlight into an interactive experience. Creating this type of content for your owned and operated channels gives clubs the ability to collect valuable first-party data. This data helps clubs better understand their users and identify different fan groups, from the casual fans to the die-hards. Clubs can learn which content types these fans typically like to watch, and who the user’s favourite players are in order to better serve them more of the content they like to see in the future, as well as tailored marketing experiences and offers and deals on merchandise and tickets.

5. Away from the pitch

The off-season is a time when rumours are rife. It’s almost impossible for fans around the world not to get caught up in all the transfer speculation. Who might leave their club, and who is tipped to join? Will they lose their biggest star? Are they linked to the next big thing? Clubs need to pounce on creating content to match this level of fan excitement.

It’s also a time when interviews and press conferences are in abundance, whether it be the coach’s words ahead of the new season, your new arrival’s first words wearing your club’s colours and the first time they meet their new teammates, or all the build-up and reaction to preseason friendlies at home and abroad.

To take advantage of the multitude of conversations occurring during the off-season, you need to ensure you can identify all the interesting exchanges, from the coach’s funny comments to the captain’s inspirational leadership, and have them readily available for your fans in all formats and on all platforms.

Looking to the future, one thing remains certain: clubs connect with fans through content. The clubs that will thrive are those that recognise the power of nuanced storytelling and embrace the right technologies to craft compelling, year-round narratives that keep fans engaged.

Nobody knows your fans better than you, so make sure you are creating the right content experiences for them. You’ll need the right tools and solutions in place to easily create content at speed and scale and repurpose it seamlessly in the right ratios and durations to suit different fan segments across all your social platforms, website, and app.

This article originally appeared on SportsPro.