The invisible impact on revenue of a never-ending engagement treadmill

A victory, a well-known player joining the club, the new season's uniform being launched, a beloved player coming back to the old arena playing for the opponents, fans signing up for an event with the team, a prize draw with memorabilia. The list of occasions that bring the fans' attention to the club is endless.

What could go wrong?

The following game is lost, the well-known player is let go against the fans' wishes, the season goes downhill and dissipates the expectations that were at their highest at the uniform launch, tomorrow no beloved player is in the opponents' ranks, the bad season brings no interest in meeting the team, the prize draw with a lot of enthusiasm today has no interest tomorrow, after a bad run.

Some sports fans stay loyal through bad seasons, transfers and rebuilds, but normally engagement grows and drops, following human emotions. If it is not captured and turned into capabilities, products and better experiences, it becomes a flash in the pan, wasting resources and missing revenue. I'm referring to the media and advertising revenue channel that a club can add to its headline sponsorship, not to the sponsorship itself. In general, this applies to the football clubs below the four or five biggest in each country, and to most organisations in other sports. They do not yet hold in-house what they know about their fans, nor the means to reach them.

The consequence is that sports organisations must build their engagement again almost from scratch, every single time. Like running on an engagement treadmill that cannot stop: the effort is constant, the club does not move forward. Without a direct connection with the fan which grows progressively, every piece of content must win its audience again on an external platform, and its visibility depends on algorithmic decisions by Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, etc. Many sports organisations then default to selling reach, the one number always available to them. To keep selling it, the club must do more each time to get the same attention: newer concepts, bigger productions, louder. What the fans expect goes up too.

On the engagement treadmill, each of those occasions is planned, produced and sold once, as a standalone proposition. The club sells a sponsor the attention that each one attracts individually, and when that moment has passed, the engagement fades away, and the opportunity for the club to monetise disappears with it. The fans who interacted with that content leave behind nothing the club holds and can build on: whatever data exists is collected by the platform or the event provider, and the club has no way of reaching those fans directly. Where they do register, for an event or a prize draw, the record sits with the ticketing or competition provider, or in a list used once and never again. Most of these opportunities depend on results, which the club cannot guarantee.

The treadmill is not the result of inadequate content, which often is outstanding. Engagement is there. It is the consequence of a strategic choice that has not been made and of an infrastructure that does not exist.

Today the cost of setting up the infrastructure to hold the fans' data and to reach and interact with them directly is weighed against nothing, because the cost of the engagement and content treadmill is already a component of approved budgets. The cost is not only in one-off productions and campaigns: producing content constantly, at a quality high enough to keep engagement at its highest, is a permanent line in the budget.

The right comparison is against what the treadmill already costs, plus the value of the missed revenue. The cost of producing content stays on both sides. The difference is whether the club keeps and builds on the registrations, consent and data of the fans who engaged with that content or lets the engagement and attention leave no trace (or a much fainter one than they could).

What the treadmill adds to content production is the escalation (louder, newer, more expensive) and the cost of paying again, at every big occasion, to reach many fans the club had already reached in the past.

Doing nothing because resources are short is not a justification. Resources are needed to make it happen, but they follow the choice: they influence the pace of implementation, not whether the choice is made. You can have a strategy progressively implemented and the infrastructure not fully up and running: not having a vision and an overarching goal, though, is not an option.

Next season, clubs will still have wins, new player signings, uniform launches and prize draws. They will also face losses and departing players. For some, the season will take a turn for the worse. Just like today, most clubs will only make money from these occasions once by monetising how many people they reach. When the following occasion happens, they will start over from zero. 

Clubs that use the upcoming occasion to start gathering their own direct fan base will approach every future occasion with the knowledge and the audience they have already secured. Even during a bad season, they will still have the products built on those assets to sell to their sponsors. Most clubs have already approved budgets to cover the costs of doing things the old way, the current way. The money they miss out on isn't tracked in any budget, so the financial waste remains invisible. 

Clubs can either build their own lasting audience products, or they can stay stuck in an endless cycle of trying to win attention on every occasion as if it was the first. Like running on the engagement treadmill.

Part 2 covers what building that audience takes and what the club can then sell.