World Football Summit speaks exclusively to Kike Levy, Southern Europe Lead Sports at Meta, about the metaverse and the key pillars football clubs need to adopt in the face of new monetisation opportunities. This interview features in the latest edition of WFS Digest, our insider’s guide to the latest and most relevant thoughts and practices from within the football industry. You can read the full interview here: https://worldfootballsummit.com/metas-kike-levy-football-clubs-should-focus-on-digital-development-monetisation-and-innovation/

WFS: Many football teams need to generate new opportunities, revenue and ways to reach the fan more in the short term. So, within the range of solutions Meta offers, what opportunities can these teams take advantage of?

Levy: Right now the metaverse is a long-term game. Football clubs have to focus on the platforms available to them. We like to structure our work with partners on three pillars.

Firstly, audience development, which is how clubs can generate their content to build their audience, build their community and provide the opportunity to create a digital experience to interact with fans.

Once that audience has been built, monetisation strategies can be considered, and this comes mainly from three different avenues: monetisation through video content to generate direct revenue through advertising; the second avenue, which clubs are not exploiting as much as they could, is the eCommerce part which includes merchandising sales; and the third is branded content, how to use the distribution that clubs have and how to generate quality content to generate value for sponsors and that the returns on investment that sponsors can show are greater than those of shirt sponsors or billboard sponsors in the stadium. The biggest opportunity for branded content is that the inventory is virtually infinite.

The last pillar is innovation and thinking about strategies on the metaverse or other new products and how to invest to be at the forefront with all these technologies.