Global Fútbol

During the 2020/21 season, with large in-person events not yet possible, LaLiga collaborated with clubs and broadcast partners to find new ways to help global audiences to continue building new insights about the competition, allowing the league’s international following to grow.

The result was LaLiga Ultimate Xpert, a global competition that set out to find the top Spanish football fans around the world and gave broadcasters the chance to create unique content across multiple channels to further engage their audiences.

Through weekly questions offering exclusive prizes and experiences, LaLiga Ultimate Xpert reached an audience of millions in more than 100 countries with hundreds of thousands actively participating. Achieved in just a few weeks, the results demonstrate the popularity of the competition beyond Spain and the strong relationships that LaLiga maintains with its broadcast partners.

“The response from broadcast partners and viewers has been extremely positive,” said Maria José Silva, head of LaLiga Experience, the team within LaLiga’s audiovisual department that organises LaLiga Ultimate Xpert. “The competition allowed partners to offer engaging content throughout the week, while also telling stories about clubs of all sizes. The engagement we saw proves that interest in LaLiga extends to all clubs of the competition and across all continents.”

Global involvement

In previous years, LaLiga Experience brought viewers, journalists and influencers to Spanish stadiums to create additional content for broadcast partners and help them in further promoting their broadcast in their territories. Due to the restrictions of the Covid-19 pandemic, there was a need to adapt in 2020/21.

Between December and May, 20 different contests were organised, one for each club of LaLiga Santander. Featuring current captains and league legends such as Carles Puyol and Fernando Morientes, a series of video questions were shared by broadcasters to their audiences with exclusive prizes and experiences on offer.

For viewers and subscribers, there were weekly prizes of football shirts and official PUMA footballs on offer and the opportunity to become the 2020/21 ‘Ultimate Xpert’ in their country, bringing with it the chance to form part of LaLiga Experience in 2021/22. This will include trips to Spain, when the conditions of the pandemic allow it.

For broadcast partners, entrants were incentivised to tune in to LaLiga Santander shows as many of the questions were asked or answered at half time breaks or during complementary programming. Viewers were also directed to broadcasters’ social media platforms or landing pages to enter.

From Spiler TV in Hungary to SPOTV in South Korea and from DirecTV and ESPN in Latin America to Supersport in Sub-Saharan Africa, LaLiga partners around the world were quick to embrace the campaign. There were more than 3,100 publications on social media, with over 2,800 of these made by the broadcasters themselves, in addition to the posts from LaLiga and its clubs and players.

Creative approaches that generated results

To help achieve the best results possible, LaLiga worked side-by-side with partners to promote the competition in new ways. The league provided ready-to-go templates for the broadcasters with more limited resources, while also allowing for partners to adapt the contest in their own unique way.

This flexibility sparked some original approaches from partners such as Astro in Malaysia, which introduced QR codes to their streams to direct viewers to the right page for entering the competition. Eleven Sports in Portugal asked followers to explain why they should win the contest in a creative way, while SportsMax in the Caribbean revealed their winners through the spinning of a roulette wheel, creating a separate programming event that excited viewers.

“Within the audiovisual department, our commitment to broadcast partners is to develop engaging new content that is based on their audience needs, for which we provide technical, creative and human resources” Silva added. “This has been the case for many years, which allowed us to move quickly when it came launching this contest, while maintaining unique local flavours.”

With more than 180,000 broadcaster’s subscribers participating in LaLiga Ultimate Xpert, the contest achieved its objectives of providing exclusive content, creating loyalty between broadcasters and their audiences and generating visibility for Spanish football programming around the world. The initiative also increased traffic to broadcasters’ websites and attracted new followers on their social media profiles; social posts alone achieved engagement of more than 1.1 million.

The initiative also proved very successful for LaLiga and clubs, with the campaign discussed in more than 130 articles globally. LaLiga also worked with clubs to organise additional content, such as interviews, providing even more material to the broadcasters.

“Embracing this new format has brought us closer to our partners and their viewers,” Silva concluded. “As well as offering new content, there was a clear sense that everyone was working together to overcome the challenges we faced. Everyone is looking forward to returning to stadiums next season and resuming the kind of in-stadium activities that LaLiga Experience is known for, but after the success of this year, interest in the competition has never been higher.”