Thursday, 15 May 2008!
HandWritten on; 15:49
Publish date: April 26, 2007 For all its success at home, it is the Premiership's global reach that sets it apart from other sports leagues. That reflects good business sense. "We're a small island with a relatively small population," says Richard Scudamore, ceo of the Premier League. In Britain, "there's going to be limited domestic growth" for teams. But while the indicators at home are "fairly maxed out" — match-day attendance, for instance, averages 92% across the League — Scudamore says that recruiting the legions of potential foreign fans offers "huge global scope.”
The nature of the game helps. Purists have often mocked the English style of football, but with its fast pace and all-action style, it is undeniably exciting — especially in markets where football is relatively novel. Ask Dittha Jumpakaeg, p.r. manager for the Liverpool Thailand Fan Club. The Bangkok local doesn't remember exactly how old he was when he first watched Liverpool on TV, but he was hooked by the side's dazzling control. "It seemed the other side never touched the ball,'' he says. (They didn't.) Germany's Bundesliga occasionally aired in Thailand, Dittha says, but the German matches seemed slower, the players older. "Thais," he adds, "like a fast-paced game." (In 2004, then Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra actually tried to buy into Liverpool.) Now some 41 million of Manchester United's estimated 75 million fans worldwide are in Asia, according to MORI, and in a report for England's Football Association this year, academics at Warwick Business School found that 14% of Chinese football fans polled said they owned a Manchester United shirt.
Adding an Asian player to the ranks can help. Four Premiership teams now have Chinese players on their books, and since welcoming South Korea's Park Ji Sung into their line-up in 2005, Manchester United have become big in Seoul. Three-quarters of South Korea's football fans see the club as their favorite European side, according to Birkbeck, and more than 650,000 South Koreans have signed up for a club-branded credit or debit card since their launch a year ago. By launching local-language websites, teams can tailor marketing to fit an individual country, drumming up local advertising and sponsorship revenue. As part of its lofty pledge to become the world's biggest club by 2014, Chelsea, owned by Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich, launched a Mandarin website in January in conjunction with Sina, China's leading portal; in late March, the club unveiled another aimed at South Korea. The London team is also playing benefactor. Apart from hosting the Chinese Olympic football team in London in February, the club sponsors the Asian Football Confederation's Vision Asia project to develop grassroots leagues across China. Next summer, Chelsea will embark on its first-ever tour of China.
Review
The EPL has managed to capture a large market share in the soccer industry by appealing to people across the globe with foreign players, differentiating itself from other leagues and lowering the degree of substitutability. The exclusively fast-paced nature of the EPL is another factor contributing to its popularity.
~ Yu Ming
