Last year Real Madrid president Florentino said: "We have to analyze why 40% of young people aged 16 to 24 are not interested in football." They said the game was too long. "Whether you like to admit it or not, Florentino does reveal a reality – people's enthusiasm for football, for traditional sports is declining.
However, in this fast-paced era, people have lost patience with many things, but football is still a very influential IP in this world. E-sports is also indispensable for many young people at the moment. In recent years, more and more professional teams have begun to involve in the field of e-sports, they have their own e-sports teams, and participate in various e-sports competitions organized by FIFA. Obviously, the football game has long been less simple than the "play live, FIFA" at home that people used to think, and has become a new competitive event.
So, in today's era when young people are gradually losing interest in traditional football and e-sports are booming, how to combine the two organically to find a new path for football?
Raising awareness through esports?
At present, there are three major football e-sports events in the world - the E-sports World Cup, the E-sports Club World Cup, and the E-sports National Cup. The competition modes of these three events are different: the World Cup is for the general public and is an individual competition that anyone can participate in; the Club World Cup is a simple 2-a-side, 1-group match, there is no team; and the National Cup is a country(region) competition. In order to participate in these competitions, more and more teams have now formed their own esports teams, such as the familiar Manchester City, Paris Saint-Germain, Schalke and so on. In Japan, there is even a new esports team that is not born out of any traditional professional team, Blue United eFC (hereinafter referred to as BU).
Not long ago, BU decided to reach a partnership with the "City Football Group (CFG)" that operates Manchester City, New York City, Melbourne City, Yokohama Mariners and other teams, forming a fantastic linkage between large professional team operating companies and e-sports clubs, which is unprecedented.
Usually, the purpose of deciding to run an e-sports team is nothing more than the following two - first, for the purpose of competition, to pursue victory on the field of competition, and then win the event prize money to maintain the operation of the future. Second, the e-sports team is regarded as a tool to open up the market and enhance the awareness of its original team. In areas where the team has not been able to reach so far, we will open up a new fan base and improve the fan structure. The cooperation between CFG and BU, considering its particularity, takes into account the above two purposes.
As we said at the beginning of the article, even in the traditional football powerhouse in Europe, the enthusiasm and attention of young people for football games are declining year by year, and the post-95 and post-00s groups have grown up in the context of the rapid development of the Internet, and their cognition and participation in traditional sports competitions have a huge difference from the past. In this way, CFG hopes to expand its influence. In fact, as the sign of CFG, Manchester City entered the field of e-sports very early, and the team is also the first European team to enter the field of Chinese football e-sports.
BU was founded in 2018 and won the East Asian championship of the Club World Esports Cup in just 3 years, which can be said to have grown very rapidly. But the team's management soon discovered its own limitations – although the team reached the top in East Asia, it was very different from the esports teams under the European team in terms of operation and expansion. The teams can't get out of Japan, out of the small circle of East Asia, and they are eager to be more international.
As a result, the two sides hit it off, CFG was responsible for expanding and operating BU's business around the world, while BU took advantage of the popularity and reputation accumulated in FIFA games in the past few years to build "Blue United eFC" into an international brand that can represent Japan.
Professional teams participating in esports has become a fad
In fact, avid fans always have the illusion that football is the world's number one sport, so the attention in the world is extremely high. Yes, football's influence is unmatched by other sports. For example, according to FIFA, 1.12 billion people around the world watched the 2018 World Cup final in Russia at the same time. But also as a model for professional sports events, the 2022 NFL Super Bowl will only be watched by more than 110 million people worldwide, a 10-fold gap between the two. But that's only in the category of sports.
As one of the most popular games around the world, Fortnite has exceeded the 350 million player mark worldwide, but correspondingly, FIFA20 can only maintain 35 million players more than a year after its release. The recent hit "Eldon's Ring of Law" has dominated the list on the Steam platform for 3 consecutive weeks, and the work sold 10 million copies in the first week. Higher popularity will naturally lead to a larger market, and the "Fortnite Esports World Cup" held in 2019, the champion of single competition can get a reward of $3 million. In the same year's FIFA Esports World Cup, the champion only earned $250,000, and the gap was very obvious.
However, as more and more professional teams decide to cross-border into esports, people see the possibility of this phenomenon being broken.
CFG is not limited to the esports team that develops football games at this stage, in the hit "Fortnite", the group's Manchester City also has a team specializing in the game. There are a total of 23 teams worldwide that have partnered with the game. In addition to Manchester City, there are juventus, AC Milan, Inter Milan, Wolves, Borussia Moncheng, Schalke, Celtic, Sakura Osaka, Sydney FC and other teams. In general, however, this cross-border is still niche.
The niche now does not mean that the future will remain niche, and Manchester City is at the forefront of European teams in esports. In 2019, they reached a cooperation project with the North American e-sports team "FaZe Clan", which has super popularity around the world, and the two sides have made a lot of cross-border joint products, which have effectively enhanced each other's popularity in their respective fields. Some people may think that CFG's move is just "everything looks at money", but in fact, their logic lies in expanding the influence of football in the world through the broad base of e-sports, and avoiding the risk of future football fans being embezzled by e-sports fans.
Operate virtual content to promote football in reverse
CFG's esports division has been recruiting talent in the past year or two, constantly upgrading its business. It is now a team of 25 people, including producers, marketing leaders, content producers, psychological coaching, and tactical analysts. In addition, there are employees who are specifically responsible for streaming content on the Twich platform. There are many restrictions on the operation of traditional sports, but IP at the virtual content level has greater freedom and development space. Especially in the context of the new crown epidemic in the past three years, people are more aware of the importance of working virtual content.
In the past, people would think that the best way to make the little ones in the family or friends around them love football was to take them to the court. But at a time when information media is highly developed, there are other ways. For example, there are a lot of sports-related documentaries on Amazon Prime and Netflix, or biographical videos of players, which is a very good channel. Imagine, when a person knows Guardiola through the documentary "All or Nothing" on Amazon Prime, gets to know Manchester City, and then with curiosity about this person, for this team, to understand football, to understand the Premier League, to understand the Champions League, and then to see a Manchester City game, it will be a very interesting experience.
It's like in the past, when we used a newspaper, a magazine, or a game of football to get us to get an initial interest in the sport and decide to take the time to learn about it. However, in the current era of digitization and informatization, it is more urgent and important to increase efforts in virtual content and enhance its role and status in the process of promoting the influence of football. Similar to the creation of art and design, football and other sports can also use NFTs (non-homogeneous tokens) and virtual spaces to maintain their exposure and influence in the 21st century.
One advantage of football games over other types of games is its durability and popularity. The general game may be much less playable after the level, but the football game will not; other games may have restrictive content, but the football game will not; other games may give people a feeling of detachment from reality, but the football game will not. MlS is looking for ways to expand the league's visibility through FIFA games. Successful examples of expanding popularity through games, the following story will be more convincing.
Fifa games are known to contain low league teams and will have real jerseys. Burger King saw the opportunity and bought the chest ad for England's lower league side Stevenage at a very low price. As a result, we can see that the team in the game appears in Burger King jerseys every game. When players helped the team introduce superstars such as C Ronaldo, Messi, Neymar, Mbappe and so on, the footage of them wearing Burger King jerseys and playing together quickly circulated on foreign networks. Soon, Burger King's business got better, and Stevenich's jersey sales were impressive.
Perhaps, some traditional football fans and sports fans still have a scornful attitude towards e-sports, but times are changing, and football and sports also need to progress. If it were just static, football would not be the world's number one sport today.
Text/Supine Braces - Yangyuan Zhang