Global Fútbol

As digital content becomes ever more valuable in the football industry, it is also increasingly important for clubs to work hand in hand with their players. This was the main point raised during a discussion at the 2022 World Football Summit (WFS) in Seville, at the talk titled ‘Content evolution: How to engage with the next generation of fans?’. There, representatives from LaLiga Santander clubs RC Celta and Real Betis, as well as former Atlético de Madrid and Real Valladolid goalkeeper Roberto Jiménez, shared their thoughts.

Jiménez explained that most footballers are willing to help the communication departments of their clubs, so long as they understand the benefits. He explained: “Collaboration with the players is fundamental. I think players need to be educated. Clubs should invest time and show the players that the success of the club and the success of the player requires collaboration in this sense. It’s true that it’s difficult to cross the line of the dressing room and convince the player that it’s necessary to invest half an hour in doing a reel or in collaborating in an activity with a sponsor, but it’s also true that sometimes the player doesn’t understand the benefit that all this can bring for him and his personal image or for the club.”

Workshops about social media best practice

This is something that LaLiga clubs are successfully starting to change. Many clubs are holding digital content workshops with their squads and RC Celta are one of them. As Marco Rocha, the club’s director of communication, said at WFS: “At RC Celta, we hold two workshops per year with the players, talking to them about communication and social media. This year, during our tour of the United States, we spent two hours with them showing them how each platform works, how to generate more content, how we can help them grow and how they can help us grow.”

At Real Betis, they hold workshops too and even at youth team level. The Real Betis director of communication Julio Jiménez Heras also spoke at the conference and said: “We work a lot with the academy players. We hold workshops in the youth academy so that they understand. They’ll reach a point where they have to make the jump to professional football, where communication, social media and dealing with the media are important.”

Support and resources for the players

The players are also supported in practical ways, by their clubs and by LaLiga. For example, LaLiga makes the Players App available to all the competition’s footballers and there they can receive information that helps them to plan social media posts, while they are also sent high-quality images of themselves in their matches, which they can use on social media.

As Jiménez Heras revealed: “At the end of each match, each Real Betis player has an app where they can download their photos from the match so that their posts on Instagram aren’t only of the best photographic quality but also so that the sponsors, the stadium, etc. are displayed well. They can't dedicate too much time to this, because their fundamental job is something else entirely. But, showing complicity, offering support and providing the players with professional resources is key.”

The Real Betis director went on to repeat that idea of “complicity” when explaining how a communication department can build trust with the playing squad. He said: “You always have to be attentive because a joke from Joaquín, a gesture from Borja Iglesias or anything Sergio Canales does could go really viral, yet you don't know when that’s going to appear. You have to be with them and keep your phone ready. For this, it’s essential that the footballer feels calm, that he is at ease, that he sees a complicity with the club's professionals making this content, and that he feels protected.”

At RC Celta, they also understand the need to find this balance to earn the players’ trust and time. As Rocha stated: “There are times when something purely organic, like a player firing shots into the top corner at the end of training, can go really viral. It’s a balance as you can’t just rely on the moments that come out of training and you can't bother your players all the time.”

Collaboration between departments

As well as the collaboration between staff and players, it’s also vital for different departments to be aware of the content strategies. Rocha explained: “Eight or nine years ago, you would sign a contract with your main sponsor and it would be 20 or 25 pages, but maybe the digital part took up just one page, just saying that the brand had to be displayed at the bottom of the website. Now, in a 25-page contract, the digital part can be six or seven pages, mentioning all kinds of activations. There is a large part of my work, a very high percentage, that is coordinated with the commercial department.”

This is only going to become more and more the case as clubs use the Boost LaLiga funds to invest in industry professionals, making the communication and commercial departments even more professional and even more unified. As the RC Celta director added: “Now, through Boost LaLiga, a series of new horizons are opening up, where we provide the content part so that the commercial side can add the economic value.”

This investment is already making a difference and even the players, such as Roberto Jiménez, are noticing this. As he concluded: “Clubs are caring more and more about collaboration. You can see that clubs are investing money on improving their departments and on creating improvements in digitalisation and social media, and that there is a lot of communication and connection.”