Kids, clubs, and fandom

I love sport, so when an opportunity came to run a short sprint exploring how can we drive fan engagement with professional sports teams i grabbed it and ran with it.

I spent a week talking to sports fans across Canada and back home in UK. A word to the wise: approaching random people in sports bars can be a dicey strategy for customer recruitment. A whole host of interesting insights bubbled up- especially how North Americans and Europeans see sport differently. I might cover a few of them in future posts, but I want to keep this one really simple – about kids, sport, and fandom. Two things really stood out:

Insight 1: There is an age window where children either do or don’t embrace sports fandom. Between 7-11 we decide which sports we like to watch and which teams we’re going to support. Peer & familial pressure, big player personalities and the proximity of your local teams all play a role, but nothing beats going to a game itself for getting you hooked. There’s just something in the air at live sports matches, unless you’re at the Emirates that is.

Insight 2: Parents told us it there are a bunch of pain points relating to taking children to live matches. Transport, profanity and cost came up a few times, but the biggest was that young kids just don’t have the attention span to watch an entire game of Baseball/Cricket/American football, or even Hockey. Nothing ruins the nail-biting end to a match like your ingrate offspring tugging of your shirt sleeve every 3 minutes asking if they can go home yet. 

So having a strategy for engaging kids at that age feels like a no-brainer for sports teams. It’s got to be light touch though, they have small brains and short attention spans.

A couple of ideas:

 1: What if we could design digital experiences for children a sports matches that help them gain a deeper engagement into the game & team itself. Live player and match stats, highlights, interviews, peer-to-peer games etc. When their interest wanes just plug’em in. The purists are going to hate it, ‘suck it up and watch the match’ they say, but I saw a kid using an iPad in the cinema the other day – this is 2018

 2. Take it a step further, build in feedback mechanisms and let them democratize elements of the matchday experience themselves, live. Let them vote on pre-match and half-time entertainment, design the Mascot’s halftime show, vote for man/woman of the match.

Both of these open up touch-points to engage these kids before and after the matches too, increasing the chances of securing them as loyal fans for life. Give the kids more reasons to want to go, so they’re dragging their parents to matches rather than vice versa. 

Just spit-balling, but let me know what you think