HOW TO HELP FANS OVERCOME CHALLENGES
ADDRESSING THE KNOWLEDGE GAP T he ‘knowledge gap’ here is not a lack of knowledge around football as a sport, or the tactical detail. Rather, it is lack of knowledge about the
MAKE INFORMATION EASY TO FIND Much of the knowledge about women’s football that fans feel they are lacking – such as match locations, when and where to watch on TV or where to buy tickets – is already available online via club websites. That then raises the question of why fans are not finding it, and suggests that the issue is one of ease of access. To make the information unmissable, it needs to be available and made very obvious in places where fans already consume football content, so they do not have to trawl through site navigation to find it. Each month the average fan posts or shares 13 football-related posts on social media sites, spends 4.3 hours watching match highlights on social media or streaming services and spends 3.8 hours browsing the web for football-related news and content. To meet fans where they already are, clubs can leverage club-specific locations such as the website as well as pushing women’s team news to social media or on men’s team highlights reels.
women’s club game on a day-to-day level – for example, simply knowing when and where matches are being played. It is a recognition of women’s football’s historic absence from the media landscape; the sport at club level has simply not (yet) been able to make itself a regular part of fans’ media diets in the way men’s domestic teams are. Sometimes this has been a resource issue, either in the media (where there are still comparatively very few dedicated women’s football reporters, or even women’s sport reporters) or in clubs, where specialists may be expected to work across men’s and women’s teams, or where there may just be fewer personnel working solely for the promotion of the women’s team. Our research suggests that the key to addressing this knowledge gap is to make information available in ways which are tailored to fans’ existing consumption habits.
36
Made with FlippingBook interactive PDF creator