The emergence of social media platforms

Running head: SPORT BUSINESS
SPORT BUSINESS
Name of the Student
Name of the University
Author Note

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Introduction
In this world of modernization, social and digital media is considered to be an effective medium
of communication between fans, athletes and clubs. The rising of mobile phone users as well as
social media has changed the outlook of the society, including the engagement of people in
sports. Earlier to the presence of social media platforms, the engagement of the target consumers
of the sports business was highly dependent on offline promotional techniques like campaigns,
news paper as well as through television. Direct communication of the athletes with their fans
was highly rare. However, in this age of technological advancement, more than 73 percent of the
population across the word uses popular social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram,
Twitter , Youtube and others. These social media platforms are used by sports clubs to promote
any upcoming sport events. This in turn helps them to make a huge number of target audience
aware of any program which eventually results in enhancement of consumers. Not only this,
social media platforms have made direct communication between the fans and the athletes
possible. Thus it can be said that with the emergence of social media platforms, the number of
sports fans has got increased to a commendable level. It has changed the way, fans, clubs and
athletes communicate with each other. The purpose of this essay is to evaluate the benefits as
well as challenges associated with the changing social media landscape that can be experienced
by the sports industry. In order to illustrate the answer, football has been used as an example of
sports.
Discussion and analysis
According to Buschlen, Perkins and Kiurski (2019), social media has imposed highly positive
impact on the sport industry. The number of audience in the sports industry has got increased

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drastically after the emergence of social media. First of all, social media platforms like
Facebook, Twitter and Instagram have made direct communication between the fans and the
athletes much easier. For instance, with the emergence of Facebook, fans can easily reach out to
popular Korean Football players like Son Heung-min. It has become easier for people to engage
in sports, follow their favorite athletes, teams or sport clubs on social media platforms and thus
obtain live update of each and every sports event (Adamopoulos, Ghose and Todri 2018). This in
turn results in enhanced number of audiences in any sport events resulting in improved revenue
and profit margin of the organizations established in the sports industry. According to
McCormick (2018), popular social media platforms like Facebook are used by sports
organizations to improve their relationship with thee consumers. Social media platforms are
considered to be the one of the most promotional tools. Considering the fact that a huge number
of people are connected to social media platforms, organizations can approach a huge pool of
target consumers within a highly limited amount of time. In popular social media platforms,
target consumers can directly access the news and updates and communicate with the
organization with the help of massages. This direct communication not only helps the
organizations to understand the specific query as well as requirements of the consumers but also
help the same to develop an effective sports fan-organization bonding. For instance, Veer, N.,
Pawar and Kolte (2019) club represents their fans as a part of their sports family. This type of
bonding enhances the loyalty of the fans towards the sports club ensuring consumer retention.
When it comes to football, social media has become one of the most crucial ways of direct
communication between athletes, fans and club organizers.
Another major benefit of the changing media landscape on the sport industry is a more
developed relationship between the sports athletes and the fans. Social networking provides an

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opportunity to the athletes to share more about themselves, their strategies and their aspirations
than almost any other marketing medium (Bennett et al. 2019). This offers both existing and new
fans the opportunity to get to know the person they are looking up to. The more the fans get to
know about their favorite sport celebrities, the more the experience feels personal. And when
those athletes use social media to connect with their followers, their interest gets deeper. In time,
this establishes a continuing bond between the athlete as well as their fan base that will continue
for several years. Athletes are found to use social media as a medium of retaining their face base.
A good number of athletes are found to directly interact with their fans and offer behind-the-
scenes and daily live shows in order to depict that they care for their supporters. This not only
helps the athletes to retain their fans but also encourages sports enthusiasts to proceed in the path
once chosen by their idols. Fans can share their concerns associated with a specific clubs or
celebrities directly with them. Additionally, the motivational posts by the sports athletes are
found to motivate millions of sports enthusiast to overcome their hurdle and peruse their dreams.
In cases where fans have felt lack of social media presence of the athletes, the athletes have often
experienced a massive decrement in the fan base. Flannery, Harris and Kenny (2020) have
pointed out that another major reason behind sports athletes to be highly concerned about their
fan base is enhanced sale of merchandise, tickets and other products.
Rebelo (2017) has pointed out sponsorship to be a major reason behind clubs and athletes to have
an effective relationship with their fan base. Sponsorship is considered to be one of the best ways
to produce year-round, long-term revenue. But it can be difficult to obtain sponsorships, unless
clubs are looking at professional athletes. Athletes have to get plenty of exposure to win
sponsors. After all, they are responsible, although indirectly, for selling their services. As part of
a holistic sports marketing plan, social media helps athletes boost their online exposure and

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thereby enhance their chances of sponsorship. Some of the biggest football celebrities like
Lionel Messi earn more than 35 million per year in order from his biggest sponsors like Adidas,
Gatorade, Huawei, MasterCard and Pepsi (Thelwell et al. 2018).
Not only this, social media platforms are the most cost effective promotional tools. Posting
massage about a specific events, photos and videos of the same, in majority of the time is free of
costs. Not only this, social media campaigns are helped by several sports club in order to attract
more and more consumers towards the sport event. Holding a social media campaign is a cost
effective promotional technique (Nisar, Prabhakar and Patil 2018). While the only investment
cost includes developing content for the campaign no stakeholders or attendees needs to be paid
for a social media campaign. Additionally, prominent social media presence of athletes and clubs
not only lowers the investment cost but also helps them to save negotiation costs or third party
expanses. While usage of social media as a medium to directly connect with the fans can be
overwhelming for athletes and clubs, these platforms enables sponsors to directly contact with
the clubs or with the athletes they wants as brand ambassador. The greatest the number of
followers of a sport athlete or a club, more is the chance of them to get sponsored by popular
international brands. For instance, Lionel Messi, Cristiano Ronaldo and Neymer are prominent
faces of some of the most popular international brands like Reebok, Adidas and others.
Schulenkorf and Schlenker (2017) stated that before the emergence of social media, it was
difficult for sports athletes and clubs to obtain a handsome sponsorship. A good amount of time
got invested in negotiation. However in today’s world more than one sponsor are found to be
tempted to work with athletes or clubs that are highly popular in Facebook. Sponsors are able to
access the athlete and club by themselves and hence there is no investment on third parties.

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Along with this, negotiations takes place rarely since social media has enhanced the bargaining
power of the Athletes and club to a good extent.
Hogan and Stylianou (2018) have pointed out how social media has become a highly crucial part
for large football clubs to connect with their fans across the world with come even hosting
foreign language Twitter account. Social media platforms like Facebook is increasingly driving
revenue for the clubs since brands are targeting players with large followings for sponsorships.
According to the Daltoitte magazine, in 2020, Real Madrid C.F, possess 201.9 million followers
in popular social media platforms including 109.2 million on Facebook, 62 million in Instagram
and 30.7 million on Twitter (Kitchin, Paramio-Salcines and Walters 2019). In spite of the fact
that Cristiano Rolando one of the most popular players have exited the club, Real Madrid is still
the biggest food ball club present on social media. Thus social media enables the athletes to get
benefited financially by connecting with their fans.
Yoshida et al. (2018) have pointed out another benefit of direct fan to sport celebrity
communication the changing media landscape on the sports business. Considering the fact that
the revenue earned by a specific sports club is highly depended on the amount of audience
available, direct communication of the audience with sport athletes as well as popular spots club
enhances the attendance of the audience to a particular sport event. Before the emergence of
social media, a sport event is promoted with the help of offline campaigns, news paper advertise
as well as through television. As a result of this, the news reached to a limited number of people.
However, with the advent of social media, a single post on popular social media platforms makes
both international as well as local fans aware of a specific sports event. Higher is the number of
followers of a specific club, higher will be the number of attendees (Douvis et al. 2017).
Performances are the foundation of most career opportunities for athletes. However those results

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are only effective if audiences are present at the game, event, and competition. That means
efficient ticket sales as well as consistent attendance is extremely important. Athletes are able to
notice a steady rise in attendance at such competitions through social media and sports
marketing. For example, the 2018 FIFA World cup evidenced a huge flow of audience ranging
up to 3,032000 people including both local as well as international audiences. It is a game of
length. Through sending out newsletters, reviewing calendars, and ensuring social media outlets
reflect when big incidents occur, more people will stay in the loop. So if more people knew
about events beforehand, they would be able to buy vouchers, take time off from work, so make
the effort to show up.
According to the event organizers, social media promotion has played a major part in attracting
audiences to the event (Zavyalova et al. 2016). The usage of social media by FIFA is to build
awareness and interaction with fans in real-time, build web pages along with videos for
supporters illustrating how they can purchase tickets, demand tickets, when they're on sale, and
details about tickets available on the illegal market as well as how to tackle this problem. The
organizers of FIFA utilizes Social Media to get feedback from fans about their venue and
stadium preferences as well as about where they can buy different items, music tastes, as well as
music volume (Chien, Kelly and Weeks 2016). FIFA aims to create meaningful brand results
through the use of social media for fans as well as stakeholders. FIFA continues to give its
consumers and partners numerous opportunities via social media for communication, reviews
(like and dislike) and product creation with the help of Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, the Global
Stadium or YouTube Videos as well as the FIFA.com website.

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Compared to traditional media, promotion through social media cost less, but has a more
effective as well as consistent impact. Just one post per day could make the athletes successful in
the sights of his / her fans, bringing subsequent economic advantages. In fact, the athlete itself
can enjoy more when sharing important information about their activities, which will definitely
contribute to sustainable growth.
While a good number of benefits of the changing media landscape can be pointed out, several
challenges that are associated with the increased usage of social media and digital media
platforms in order to ensure direct communication of the fans with the sport athletes as well as
sports clubs, can be evidenced.
According to Fairley et al. (2016), negative publicity is one of the major factor that can impose
immense adverse impact on the revenue of the sports business due to social media exposure.
Negative publicity in the form of Rumors or based on true incidents can not only ruin the image
and career of the athlete but also can reduce the fan base to a great extent and that too in a highly
limited period of time. Considering the fact that social media platforms are accessed by a huge
number of population both local and international. A single post or a single video depicting
negative massage about a certain athlete or a club can reach to millions of followers within
seconds. Reactions, debates and criticization take place and this in turn leads to reduced number
of followers on social media platforms. One of the major examples of how social media can
completely ruin the social media platform can completely ruin the career of an athletes can be
demonstrated with the incident that happened to Bradley Patterson (Zavyalova et al. 2016).
Bradley Patterson who was an eminent football player at the University of Alabama was thrown
out of his team due to a tweet posted by him about the former president of USA Barak Obama.
He had posted insulting tweet about the president and the tweet within 2 hours had became a

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matter of talk between the Alabama fan clubs. His subscriber’s rate deteriorated majorly and
within 2 days he was asked to resign from the team.
Thus it can be clearly understood that even the smallest action can impose highly negative
impact on the career as well as revenue of the athletes and sports clubs. The social media is a
massive community where everyone is encouraged to enter, so it is very difficult for companies
to track derogatory or even defamatory comments about their products. Besides that clubs or
athletes have the additional responsibility of monitoring comments with media and addressing
them if necessary. However, if the negative comment has already completed social media
rounds, the response may be minimal. According to Chien, Kelly and Weeks (2016), When they
want to proactively fix negative reviews, reputation management tools can help sport business
owners to track negative and positive reviews across social networks and the internet. It should
be kept in mind for any businesses that Customers that have had bad experiences also have the
ability to provide positive reviews. However for this effective marketing and communication
skills with the fans are highly crucial in the sports industry since lack of the same can result in
backfire.
Thelwell et al. (2018) have stated that one of the major challenges associated with the changing
media landscape is that negative comment from the fans can affects the performance of the
athletes. One of the major challenges faced by athletes is lack of expertise to use social media in
an appropriate and effective way. The most common mistakes leading to divesting impact on the
career of the athletes as well as on their reputation and revenue is making political or personal
posts that can lead to controversies. Not only has this, in this age of social media, any act
performed by sports clubs or athletes got viral within a highly limited amount of time. This in
turn imposes negative impact on the subscription rate of the associated club or athletes. For

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instance, the news of FC Barcelona Contract on social media firms to attack Lionel Messi has
gained popularity in recent days. A scandalous article in Catalonia reported that I3 Ventures, a
social media agency, has been hired by FC Barcelona for damaging the reputations of opponent
team players such as Lionel Messi and Gerard Pique, future presidential candidates, former
actors as well as managers (Hogan and Stylianou 2018). After the spread of the news, a steady
decrement of the number of subscribers has been noticed by the mentioned football club. This
example points out two facts. First of all, social media platforms has made it is possible for rival
clubs to deteriorate the reputation of the opponent players that may even lead to ruining of the
player’s career. Thus social media platforms possess the potential to impose highly negative
impact on the revenue and reputation of the sport business. The second fact that can be
concluded from the scenario is that, in this age of social media, irrespective of the fact that
whether a club or an athlete is present on social media or digital media, single news can affect
their motivation, career and business.

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Conclusion
From the above discussion, it can be concluded that social media possess both negative and
positive impact on the sports industry. Social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter and
Instagram have made direct communication between the fans and the athletes much easier. It has
become easier for people to engage in sports, follow their favorite athletes, teams or sport clubs
on social media platforms and thus obtain live update of each and every sports event. This type
of bonding enhances the loyalty of the fans towards the sports club ensuring consumer retention.
When it comes to football, social media has become one of the most crucial ways of direct
communication between athletes, fans and club organizers. Another major benefit of the
changing media landscape on the sport industry is a more developed relationship between the
sports athletes and the fans. Not only this, social media platforms are the most cost effective
promotional tools. Posting massage about a specific events, photos and videos of the same, in
majority of the time is free of costs. However, several challenges associated with the changing
media landscape have also been encountered. Negative. Publicity is one of the major factor that
can impose immense adverse impact on the revenue of the sports business due to social media
exposure. Even the smallest action can impose highly negative impact on the career as well as
revenue of the athletes and sports clubs.

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