The morning after the season before: fighting disengagement in sport

An all-time classic? Definitely. The best ever? Perhaps. Is Mahomes the GOAT? Time will tell. What's not in doubt is that there were some fat heads on Monday morning in Kansas City, the rest of the US, and all across the worldwide NFL fan base, after Super Bowl LVII delivered in spectacular style.

However, now the dust has started to settle on one of the most viewed annual sporting events in the world, now the analysis is petering out, and now that conversation has turned, the inevitable fact is that the NFL off-season has begun. Indeed, the NFL has the longest offseason of all North American sports, this year's Super Bowl taking place only 157 days after the regular season opener.

This presents a commercial headache for many businesses that rely on NFL content, one that will last longer than the many caused by fans’ celebrations or their drowning of sorrows. How can the NFL, its member franchises, fantasy sports platforms, bookmakers, and the wider content ecosystem continue to engage their audiences over the next seven months?

The current approach for the NFL, and many other sports bodies, is to create new content to drive engagement. The league feels the need to fill the empty week between the Conference finals and the Super Bowl with the All Pro event. The challenge of making this content relevant is shown by the new Games format that the All Pro event has adopted this year in a bid to revive fan interest.

There are valuable stories around the annual player draft, but this event is milked over the course of three days. HBO’s Hard Knocks series, now over 20 years old, reliably delivers compelling content, but in this case the league is selling its brand rather than attracting engagement on its own digital properties. These are islands of content in an otherwise extensive ocean of time. Now that historic movie windowing across platforms has virtually evaporated, sport represents the last bastion of premium live content, which is why it is the cornerstone of so many subscription products. Although, as DAZN has found recently, this is still no guarantee of instant profitability.

For adjacent businesses, the task is even more difficult. While there are 62.5m fantasy sports players in the US and Canada, 54% of whom participate in an NFL league, and more than 50 million Americans will bet $16bn on the Super Bowl in 2023, there is no guarantee that fan interest will transfer to other sports. More so, while there is a broad positive correlation between fandom across different sports, Emory University’s Fanalytics research unit found no more than a 0.57 r2 correlation between any of the big four North American sports, soccer, the Olympics, and esports.

Perhaps content creation and cross-selling are not the answer. FT Strategies believes that sports organisations should focus first on a broader understanding of engagement to unlock fan attention during the off-season. There are five broad areas of focus.

Collecting a range of data (demographic, qualitative, psychographic) from a variety of sources (surveys, interviews, diary studies) will help sports organisations build detailed audience segments and personas. In turn, this will enable them to better understand audiences’ wants and needs during the off-season, and to become more user-centric rather than product-centric.

Using a composite engagement score, such as RFV (recency, frequency, volume) as used by the Financial Times, can help sports bodies go deeper into understanding the drivers of engagement than they would otherwise do using volume-based metrics, particularly as sports consumption has moved to non-linear and IP-based platforms. This approach also fuels better prioritisation and experimentation practices and can unearth some unexpected drivers of engagement.

Investing in the collection, management and deployment of first party data will help sports businesses optimise their customer knowledge, marketing and advertising sales operations to deliver a better user experience at a time when a bad on-site experience might drive users away (watch our webinar on first-party data here). Creating a registration value proposition is a key part of such a strategy and can help improve engagement through personalisation and recommendation algorithms.

Understanding how different types of content serve different purposes for audiences can help sports companies streamline their content production operations and deliver the most appropriate content to various audience segments. For example, understanding which content (high quality of reading, low reach) drives value for core audiences who are likely to stay during the off-season, and where to distribute this content, will help retain their most valuable users. Formulating a strategy around evergreen content - repackaged / updated stories or articles that are not time-sensitive - will also underpin broader engagement levels; Wired recently reported that 40% of its traffic comes from evergreen content.

Anticipating potential audience disengagement or churn from subscription products will help sports firms head off the problem at the pass. Working on creating fair value exchanges across a varied portfolio of product tiers and packages, and assessing churn from these products using a propensity model, supported by proactive outbound communication with audiences can preserve built-up engagement capital.

These are just some of the many ways to address the seasonality problem, but the range of options available should not be a cause for complacency. Fanalytics also tracks overall levels of fandom and notes that these are falling; 51% of the US population were sports fans in 2021, but this fell to 39% in 2022. At the same time, the proportion of sports apathetics rose from 8% to 23%.

This is just one element of the burning platform of sports business sustainability. Others include how to attract and retain younger audiences, and how to price premium content as subscription models proliferate across media and other industries. These are topics that we will discuss in future articles.

But for now, many businesses are about to feel the particular pain point we have discussed here. The question is, if you are a sports organisation, what is your engagement hangover cure of choice?

Tim has more than 15 years' experience of building direct-to-consumer propositions including in specialist sports roles at Two Circles, the England & Wales Cricket Board (ECB) and MTM Sport. He has led the Subscriptions Academy for three years, the flagship programme of our partnership with Google News Initiative, supporting multiple European publishers in improving their reader revenue performance, devising North Star frameworks, and building strong governance structures. He is also a huge fan of US sports (Packers, Avalanche, Blue Jays) and has won his fantasy NFL league in four of the last five seasons.