Web Entreprenuer Turned Club Chairman: ‘Football Doesn’t Understand The Internet’

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Web Entreprenuer Turned Club Chairman: ‘Football Doesn’t Understand The Internet’

The Premier League may be one of the most-watched and lucrative sports competitions in the world, but most English football clubs are sorely lacking a real digital business strategy. But Lee Strafford, chairman of Championship side Sheffield Wednesday and co-founder of the Plusnet ISP, has a plan to change all that. In an interview with the Telegraph, he gives both barrels to the current footy online business model and declares that “Football… doesn’t understand the Internet”.

So what’s the answer? It’s millions of fans watching via mobile worldwide via club-managed transactions. The revenue football gets from TV revenue—about $1 billion annually, says Strafford—is not enough: “It’s way down per head when compared with baseball, gridiron and basketball. It should be $10 billion a year but the internet is not valued.”

But it’s not BSkyB (NYSE: BSY) or ESPN (NYSE: DIS) that are going to profit from this shift to online viewing but the clubs themselves: “The amount of money English football gets out of Sky is going to look like chicken feed 10 years from now as we move to hundreds of millions of Indians and Chinese with mobile phones having a one-to-one relationship with Manchester United or Wednesday.” Sky should be “scared”, he says, because clubs don’t need TV to broadcast themselves around the world.

Strafford practices what he preaches and since joining the club last year has launched the club’s own social network, Our Wednesday, to solidify fan relationships. Through that and the club’s Facebook page he says the Owls will “expose a huge amount of new content through that environment.” He estimates there are up to 900,000 Wednesdayites around the world willing to pay a “couple of quid” to keep up to date on the team’s (currently abysmal) progress.

When the content producers revolt against the incumbant content distributors, using new technologies to create their own low cost one-to-one platform, that’s when you get a revolution. The Football League and Premier League would do well to listen to Strafford and start innovating to diversify their revenue streams while giving fans what they want.

Disclosure: I am a Wednesday fan, a former season ticket holder at Hillsborough and I watch the team whenever I can. For what it’s worth, I’d be more than happy to pay a few pounds to watch a game online or on mobile…

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Patrick Smith

@psmith Dec 11, 2009 10:10 AM ET

Photo: Wjarrettc

Posted In: Entertainment, Sports, Media & Publishing, TV, VOD

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Having been involved in digital marketing for nearly fifteen years and worked with some very high profile clubs on ground breaking projects I think that you are right that clubs don’t get the Internet but I would add that many clubs have a flawed business model for the new century. The prevailing attitude seems to be for a club to sell the rights to absolutely everything for a fee whether it be the stadium, the goals scored at the ground, photographs of players or anything. This doesn’t just affect the Internet it affects how Football does business.

I couldn’t agree more with you about the statement that clubs don’t need TV but it was the clubs themselves that lined up to sell their souls to Sky and have continued to do so. Football in the UK now doesn’t have the loyal fanatical fan base that previous generations took for granted and whilst very few fans of a winning side will ever be able to watch a match played in person, a side that is not doing well cannot count on a customer base to see it through lean times.

A move such as this would not only be good for internet and the clubs but also a much needed positive step for football in general, where building a one to one relationship with the fans could bring back the passion that has been missing.