Abstract
Football clubs can be considered global brands, and exactly as any other brand, they need to face the challenge of adapting to digital communications. Nevertheless, communication sciences research in this field is scarce, so the main purpose of this work is to analyze digital communication of the main football clubs in Europe to identify and describe what strategies they follow to make themselves known on the internet and to interact with their users. Specifically, the article studies the characteristics of web pages—considered as the main showcase of a brand/team in the digital environment—of the fifteen best teams in the UEFA ranking to establish what type of structure and what online communication resources they use. Through a descriptive and comparative analysis, the study concludes, among other aspects, that the management of communication is effective, but also warns that none of the analyzed team takes full advantage of the possibilities of interaction with the user offered by the digital scenario.
Highlights
Sports have a huge influence in our current society: sport activities occupy an important percentage of people’s leisure, becoming both economically and culturally crucial
The aim of this study is, to analyze what strategies main football clubs in Europe use to make themselves known in the cyberspace and interact with their users through their webpages
Clubs have been selected according to UEFA’s (Union of European Football Associations) ranking, listing the best clubs in Europe for their performance over the last five seasons, acknowledging that the best performing clubs may not be the clubs with the highest amount of followers/traffic
Summary
Sports have a huge influence in our current society: sport activities occupy an important percentage of people’s leisure, becoming both economically and culturally crucial. With more than 200 million active players, football has become one of the most lucrative leisure industries. If globalization can be defined as the historical process of global integration of the political, economic, social, cultural and technological fields, which has made the world an increasingly interconnected place [5], football is a clear example of globalization. Boniface points out that football is the “first truly global empire and, unlike others, it has spread throughout the planet in a peaceful way and without the need to impose itself” [5]
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