The DataPOWA view on the most important talking points in the worlds of sport sponsorship and digital.
REAL REIGN IN POWA INDEX
Real Madrid are the most valuable football club in the world, according to our latest POWA index rankings.
The POWA index draws on a range of data points to offer a comprehensive assessment of which rights holders across the world of sport offer the best value for sponsors.
As the official Real Madrid website reveals, our latest rankings placed the Spanish club as the highest positioned football team, ahead of their fierce rivals Barcelona, who placed in third.
Manchester United (sixth), Liverpool (ninth) and Arsenal (tenth) also ranked, while the Premier League, Champions League and La Liga came in fifth, seventh and eighth respectively.
Top of the tree is the NBA, which is the most valuable sports property in the world.
For more on this story, please visit RealMadrid.com.
RIVALS PREDICT BRIGHT FUTURE FOR TEAM SKY
The chief marketing officer of Team Movistar is confident that their rival Team Sky will quickly find sponsorship.
It was announced in December that Sky would bring its association with the cycling outfit to a close at the end of 2019 and so far there has been no firm news on who will fill the gap, throwing the team’s future into doubt.
However, Juan Pablo Molinero believes that the team will survive the indecision and have a bright future ahead of it.
“My common sense and my business sense says that for sure they will have a sponsor,” he told SportBusiness Sponsorship. “They have riders under contract and operations planned for the mid-to-long term.
“[Team Sky general manager] Dave Brailsford is a very smart guy and knows how to do business – it’s just a question of timing and adjusting all the pieces of the puzzle.”
For more on this story, please visit SportBusiness
HOGAN FOCUSES ON OFF-FIELD STRENGTH
Liverpool’s chief commercial officer Billy Hogan has underlined the importance of sponsorship deals to on-field success in an interview with The Drum.
The Premier League club is in talks with New Balance and a handful of other companies about a kit manufacturing deal once the trainer brand’s contract ends next year.
The deal could be one of the biggest in Liverpool’s history, and Hogan believes it and other partnerships like it are key to ensuring long-term success.
“While it’s always about success on the pitch, it’s also about ensuring we build really strong relationships as you can’t always count on the on-pitch performance because it’s such a competitive league.
“A partner invests with the club. And that investment is directly impacting what happens on the pitch. That revenue is then transferred into the opportunity to run the club and to invest in players.
“That’s a benefit to us. But we need to be able to then deliver a benefit to that partner and so that comes through a shared understanding of what their business objectives are, and then how we can use the various mechanisms that we have to help deliver against that.”
For more on this story, please visit The Drum
UNITED’S OFFICIAL APP LEADS DOWNLOAD LEAGUE
Manchester United’s official app is the most downloaded in football, according to the club’s managing director Richard Arnold.
As well as leading the way in football, the app is also performing well above other sporting benchmarks, with month-on-month growth happening across all metrics.
“We need a period of time to really understand the detail trends and what will continue,” Arnold explained. “When the app was brand new, the record-breaking engagement statistics we were seeing – in terms of dwell time, video time, and frequency of visits – would be the most fervent.
“Even in our uppermost expectations, the continuation of that trend as we’ve added more and more fans has surprised us and consequently underlined the need for us to analyse deeply and to also be patient in determining at what point we are settling on what the long-term trend will be.
“A lot of time and attention went into analysis and testing of what works with apps. We did that all around the world with different kinds of apps in different kinds of environments.
“The product that we eventually launched certainly wasn’t the first in the world but we aim to make it the best. That has been borne out and we believe that is very important in the sustainability we are seeing with the engagement of fans.”
For more on this story, please visit SportsPro Media
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