The chief operating officer of Manchester United, Michael Bolingbroke, has said that football clubs should not just be after quick money on offer from overseas sponsors’ interested in the Premier League. He said that clubs need to focus most of their marketing on the core fans or they run the risk of damaging the brand.
Bolingbroke was speaking at the annual Global Leadership Summit at the London Business School. Manchester United has 333million fans across the world and 139 million of these are core fans. These figures come from research carried out by TNS Sport in 2007. Brand Finance has labelled it the most valuable sports club in the world.
United say that their core fans are more important than any sponsors or broadcasters to the club’s marketing strategy. Bolingbroke backed this up by saying that getting the insight from these core fans had been critical in recent years to the club’s commercial success.
He said that although core fans are not a key revenue driver, they drive growth with the atmosphere they provide at the club and their invaluable insight. The club maintain interaction with their global fans by interacting with the core fans and Bolingbroke says this is more important to the future of the club than sponsors or broadcasters. He said that other clubs should be wary of alienating their core fans by going after quick money.
Manchester United make their strategy work by asking how core fans like to be treated as opposed to, say corporate fans. There are differences and United use these to make all their fans happy especially on match days. Manchester United have, however, also been one of the busiest clubs when it comes to overseas sponsorship, signing deals recently with telecommunication companies, Globul and Du.