Disclaimer: jMac‘s great blog post about mobile opportunities in football served as the inspiration for this blog post. Some ideas are shared, but I tried to build up on it.

2010 is going to be the year of two major sports events – the Winter Olympic games in Vancouver and the FIFA World Cup in South Africa. Since the Olympic games are around the corner and most of the opportunities there are already being worked on I share my views on what is going to be hot this spring and summer and in the upcoming seasons, specially in the web and mobile world.

I’ll start with a short scenario you probably know if you ever attended a big football match or if you are old enough to remember the anticipation of every game in last World Cup (or your local competition).

The World Cup is a specific event as basically the whole world breaths football for a month, everyone becomes a football expert, even your wife or girlfriend who usually can’t name a single Barcelona or Man. Utd. player.

Reference

Even if I come from a small country, where the largest stadium has a capacity of 13.400, I have attended many football matches on several stadiums – Amsterdam Arena (Ajax Amsterdam), Camp Nou (Barcelona), Wembley (England – Slovenia) just to name a few – and I feel confident that I can tell how it feels to be part of a large event. I also attended all Slovenia’s home matches in the World Cup 2010 qualifiers, so I can compare the experience.

As most of you, I’ve also experienced how it feels like to watch a match with your friends from your favorite pub, organize or attend a party for the Champions League Final (one in particular, where your team is leading 3:0 and looses on penalties :))

I am an avid Football Manager player with over 10 years of experience in managing teams from several divisions and leagues (and most importantly I know how one can get hooked by a computer game regarding one of his passions).

Event buildup

In times of big events, such as the World Cup a very important part of the whole experience is the event buildup. The months before the initial kick off can be used to propose nice little services as part of a broader campagin. Those services usually serve to build up the first contact between the brand and the consumer and start a conversation. The services should be free, the returns for the brand will come later on. People like free stuff :)

Neat little examples of such services can be:

• collect virtual player cards (Panini – Coca-Cola example)
• personalize your mobile with team specific themes featuring the sponsor’s brand (wallpaper, ringtone…)
• online/mobile fantasy football tournaments
• AR penalty shootout
• social network betting (with bonus points from a specific brand)
• {insert your idea here}

Most of these examples can be used for season long tournaments as well, but you need to define the right target group there and find those football enthusiasts that will appreciate them

Of course this must be just the beginning of the engagement model and you can spin from here, but let’s go to match day.

At the stadium

Getting there

Let’s suppose you are one of the few fortunate souls that got the stadium tickets for your favorite match. The next thing is to plan how to get there. Wouldn’t it be great that there was an application (or web/SMS) on your mobile to help you do just that. And while you are going you could meet new friends on the way.

Once you get to the stadium this same app would guide you to the right entrance (that sector B is never where you expect it to be) and your very own seat. No need to stay in line to ask 3 stewards for help.

Warming up

If you are like me you don’t want to miss the pre-match beer and the teams warming up. Watching the stadium fill up is also a special feeling, but you can get a bit bored in the 45 minutes you have to wait for kick-off. It is amazing how many opportunities are there for brands to start a conversation in that idle time, but very few of them acknowledge that showing a commercial on the video-wall is not a conversation.

New platforms that take advantage of telco and web communication channels to enable genuine engagements are popping out and it is becoming easier to create pre-match games, quizzes, real-time voting and other scenarios. The beauty of these scenarios is that viewers do not feel spammed, but become engaged as part of the pre-match. Qootia can be used to engage the viewers in such a scenario.

The pre-match time is also great to snap and share pictures of your position, not only with your friends home via Flickr, Twitter of Facebook, but also with the other lucky people on the stadium and those stuck in the queues described in the next paragraph.

A very important aspect of the pre-match warm-up is the how to get you (and your friends) a beer + something to eat and not get stuck in an endless queue. An app that tells you where the best food stand is along with the queue lengths might come handy, and while you are using it you could probably make an order and pay it, straight from the queue.

The Game

Well, one should really focus on the game while it is played, but a ton of photos and messages get shared with friends home or in other parts of the stadium. Several innovative services can be introduced on top of this, such as fan competitions, interactive games and man of the match real-time voting… Wouldn’t it be great to have a service that would allow people to stream real-time video from the stadium on one side and deliver the content in a web based video wall fashion on the other side.

After

To get home from the stadium one needs to locate the exit, find the best mean of transportation and hopefully avoid the longest queues. Good pubs and bars are a good alternative, but finding them might be really hard, specially those that have the right brand of beer.

While you are celebrating the victory you need to be careful about how much you had to drink, so an intelligent drink counter, that locates the nearest taxi and calls it when you had enough to drink, might come handy.

In public (squares, fan zones…)

During big sport events in foreign countries it is quite common to watch the match along with your peers in a public place. During the World Cup many cities create so called “fan zones” with large digital displays that broadcast matches. Masses of people gather in order to watch the game and have a good time before and after it. Similarly to stadium video walls these digital displays also serve only as a one way communication channel. Once again, Qootia can serve as the bridging platform, enabling interaction between the displayed content and its viewers.

Locating your friends, the best food stand and the coldest beer is often difficult – another problem that someone should try to solve in an augmented reality fashion while they are at it.

At the pub

This is a social event. Usually a bit smaller than the stadium one or fan zone one, but very social. People engage in genuine conversations and rant about referee decisions, bad formations, players and so on. How can technology help in this scenario? First of all you need to locate where your friends are (if you did not arrange a meeting at your pub of choice via Facebook). Services like Foursquare and Gowalla are showing the path, but from my point of view they will not be able to take full advantage of these niches as well as brands can. Nike is leading the way in terms of concept and I would not be surprised if Heineken or a similar brand will follow soon (before the World Cup of course).

During the match you follow your Twitter stream to share those same opinions with your friends in another town or check the photos from the game being posted in real-time by someone you know who was lucky enough to get a ticket and is watching the game at the stadium.

At home

The ritual of watching games on TV is changing quickly. During the last Euro cup Twitter was full of real-time debates regarding dubious offside and penalty decisions. My guess is that people comment games also on IM services, and most probably in 2010 we will see a lot of that on Facebook too. It might be a good option for smart brands to enable these conversations in an engaging manner.

Another fact – young people do not watch games on TV as much as they used to and most importantly those people are not willing to pay premium for any match! There are viable alternatives around the web, specially Chinese P2P TV channels that get re-broadcasted by fans on their web live-streaming platform of choice (Justin TV, uStream, Livestream.com …). Online betting companies are aware of this trend and often offer free live-streams of football matches in order to attract potential betters.