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

Sheffield Wednesday matchday programme

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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