Bayern Munich are without doubt one of the strongest soccer teams in the world, and continue to prove it every year. Headed by super-coach Pep Guardiola, they are renowned for their astute tactical awareness, passing and game control. As part of their new Digital 4.0 project, the club are now set to raise their control off the pitch as well as on it.
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The project will form an overhaul of the club’s current digital media channels by completely removing intermediary agencies. In this way, Bayern will be able to have total say over the digital content they produce, but will come under considerable time and financial costs. Not that money will be much of an issue for the global club.
Starting this summer, it will entail every element of their extensive digital network being rebuilt from the ground-upwards. With the ambition involved, it has been labelled as Bayern’s second greatest priority, coming after the team itself. Indeed, this highlights the club’s far reaching vision for fan engagement, one which has previously included linking up with Snapchat and the landmark launch of their first ever US website.
Stefan Mennerich, the club’s director of IT and new media, feels that this unique venture is simply a requirement for Bayern to stay within reach of other European soccer giants.
“The football business, via digitalization, is an international competition and if we want to be able to compete against the big English and the big French and Spanish and Italian clubs, we have to be successful abroad as well,” he explained.
As much as soccer is fixated on results on the pitch, teams must now also convey this, along with team news and updates, to regions all over the world. This requirement, however, is one which Bayern want to improve upon. Instead of purely exporting generic content, Mennerich feels that the fans want more.
“We see that the fans in China and the United States, that they love these Bavarian roots and we want to bring our history and our background to the fans in China and the United States. We want to contextualize the content, that means want to be able to bring another content to a mobile phone user in Japan in the morning than to a desktop user in the evening in Brazil, and we want to be able to bring the content in the way that people expect it.”
Ambitious? Certainly. However, if the Digital 4.0 project in any way matches the team’s recent performances on the pitch, then the list of clubs looking to follow suit soon be very long.