Sportsmarketing.ie, now offering web design services for sporting organisations has looked into some of the websites of FA Premier League Clubs.
The English Premier League is big money. EPL clubs are as much businesses as they are generational sporting institutions, a point proven when cumulative wage bills total £1.2bn, revenues top £2bn, and an exclusive broadcasting deal with BSkyB is worth a staggering £1.7bn. £100m is paid to each club per season from TV revenues alone, and newly promoted clubs receive a promotional bonus of £60m for reaching the top flight. And that’s just the league – domestic trophies like the Carling Cup and FA cup generate even more revenue through, as does Europe’s Holy Grail – the Champion’s League final. Winning this elusive cup equates to a further €110 million in TV rights, sponsorship, and prize money for the winner.
Looking at these figures, it’s easy to see why the Premier League is considered the most lucrative in the world. But if there’s this much money involved in the world’s fourth highest gross revenue-generating league (behind American football, baseball and basketball), why haven’t the clubs in the world’s richest football league recognized the value in the fastest-growing and most cost-effective channel available – Online – and invested accordingly?
The recent launch of Manchester City’s new website prompted me to take a look at the websites of the 19 other clubs in the top flight. City (and the agency they used for the build – www.pokelondon.com) had clearly done their research into what makes a site usable and attractive in today’s market. More importantly, it seems they spent a while looking at what’s *not* being done across the majority of EPL clubs, and I’d imagine Poke happily realized their work was cut out for them after completing their competitive analysis. Simply integrating social media across a well-built site coupled with a modern, attractive and clean interface, I have no doubt the City site will win fans not just of the team’s football, but of a better online experience.
Some recommendations
- Update and differentiate. Man City’s rethinking of what their site visitors want and need – and stripping away the rest – is welcome progress to what seems like a stagnating and under-appreciated medium for football clubs. This thought is enforced by the realization that no less than 7 of the 20 clubs are built on identical templates, provisioned by a wholly owned subsidiary of The Football League called FL Interactive (FLi). The implicit trust those 7 clubs have put in FLi – that the templates used are indeed the most effective, usable and optimized designs and layouts possible – seems worryingly naive. Surely each club’s supporter base and season ticket holders are as unique as their club’s history? They deserve to be treated as such – both online and off. Instead, these 7 clubs have limited their web channel’s potential by using an agency who uses identical templates as 6 of their competitors. Shockingly, FLi actually use the same template for almost all teams in England’s Championship, League 1, League 2 and Non-League. See the full list here.
- Become more social. Although Man City is also the first club to offer a live Twitter update feed directly from their homepage, they’re not the only club to realize the importance of integrating social media into their main sites. Liverpool and Chelsea have also highlighted their social media presence on their homepages, with Facebook and Twitter the primary networks of choice. Surprisingly, neither Man Utd or Arsenal seem to have any such presence – yet. Extending their brand name onto 3rd-party social sites allows higher degrees of interaction and helps build loyalty amongst those supporters who haven’t grown with allegiances to any particular club. This is especially true in other countries where the EPL is broadcast, and where support bases translate into huge revenues through merchandising alone.
- Question the value of 3rd-party ads. Interestingly, given the huge revenues generated by EPL clubs over a season, it seems strange that 17 clubs use 3rd-party advertising on their homepages and subpages. Only Manchester United, Manchester City and Chelsea opt against 3rd-party ads on their homepages, and it’s no coincidence these 3 clubs are currently considered the richest in England. Strangely though, most clubs tend to run ads for their own content using standard IAB ad sizes. In my opinion this contradicts a maturing web society’s user behaviour: basic run-of-site banner ads are becoming white noise due to saturation and ineffectiveness. I can’t recall the last time I clicked a banner ad, so why train users of a club website to go against their online behaviour? Improve the overall user experience for gain long or short-term revenue and lessen the reliability on ad-generated revenue.
- Improved use of white space. After a quick scroll of the list above, one main pattern emerges: the clutter. In the world of web design, white space and padding are not-so-secret ingredients to a successful layout. Proper spacing aids in the visual differentiation of a page’s content into digestible chunks for the eye. Unfortunately, the majority of the sites below blatantly dismiss the need for white space, and opt instead for cramming as much content into the each page as possible. Again, Man City’s new site leads the pack here, and the choice of sIFR typography accents the white space very effectively.
- Deliver multilingual content to a global audience. As mentioned above, EPL club websites can’t afford to assume their user base are in the British Isles only. The Big Four of the EPL have included multilingual site variants, with Arsenal and Man Utd opting for Chinese, Korean, and Japanese, whereas Arsenal and Chelsea have also translated into Russian. Both Man Utd and Man City (no surprise given their new owners) have translated into Arabic. Of the 16 other club sites, only Spurs have elected to provide translated content – into Chinese. It should however be a matter of time until the remainder of the EPL sites start translating into languages their records show are generating overseas sales.
