Sports fans want to get as many insights as possible. We want to feel a part of our favourite team’s success. We dream about sharing the locker-room with the players and exchanging a few words with them. Is it always possible? It is not for teams with millions of fans all over the world. However, as the sports business landscape becomes digitalised more and more, this existing gap was recently filled by Dugout – the ultimate destination for the football clubs worldwide.
It’s been a while since Snapchat became the new area of social media. Its success could not be ignored by sport clubs. Southampton was the first Premier League side to create an official club account to increase supporters-club interaction and engage more fans. It could be considered a surprise at that time, but the app became a massive success – the number of active daily users of the app was recorded at 158 million in the last quarter of 2016, according to Statista (2017).
But the space on Snapchat was not football exclusive, so that’s how Dugout came out. The proposed model can be divided as seen below.
Dugout creates a feed consisting of the main content posted on social media by their clubs and players. In addition to this, they have content exclusive for Dugout which can be a good reason of checking the newsfeed of the app when you work on it.
At the moment, just a select number of clubs and players are on Dugout. If under the clubs’ umbrella we can find big Premier League sides or the Spanish giants: Real Madrid and Barcelona, the players section is quite generous, but it misses the most marketable players in the world: Messi, Cristiano Ronaldo and Neymar.
All in all, with clubs trying to expand their social presence as much as possible, it’s no wonder that a lot of them chose to make a step further on Dugout. However, how likely are their fans to follow them on there too, considering the existing timely information received on Twitter, live content present on Facebook, images and videos from Instagram and the experiential content from Snapchat? Probably not that many, as at the moment Dugout misses a strong USP. However, they seem to be growing and they are definitely worth watching.
Andrei Angelescu 