More direct. More shocking. More immersive. The innovations in graphics and sound, among other effects, manage to capture the youngest viewer, accustomed to a new language. Generation Z no longer watches football, but rather consumes it far beyond the 90 minutes that a match lasts. At the gates of ElClásico, LaLiga has found in social networks the best ally to connect with this new fan who finds much more than a result on the mobile.
A reality that, however, does not prevent Roger Freixa (21 years old) from having the company of his grandfather for the long-awaited show. “I like to watch a game with my grandfather that we almost always enjoy together since I was six years old,” explains this Journalism student. Watching ElClásico on TV (Movistar) and with his grandfather is the exception, since Roger normally watches football alone and discusses it later on WhatsApp with friends.
“When the game is over, we send each other anything that the other might not have seen.” During the meeting, however, the networks take a backseat: “I try not to look at my phone too much because I feel that if I do I’m going to miss any detail, no matter how irrelevant it may be.” However, this young man, passionate about football and the culture that surrounds him (he is an intern at Panenka magazine), is aware of how the networks have imposed new norms and new stars.
“Social networks have caused us to pay more attention to aspects of the game that were not so relevant before,” he values. That also includes new non-sports perspectives. “The majority likes to see the human face of footballers and not conceive of them as simple professionals behind a ball. In that aspect, Courtois seems to me to handle himself naturally. He is an active guy on the networks, he interacts with people outside of football and participates in different video game games,” he highlights.
Martí Domínguez is 20 years old, he is studying Higher Education in Sports and his passion, in addition to soccer, is Olympic shooting. Like Roger, he started following LaLiga when he was very young, just four years old, accompanied by his grandfather and his father. Sometimes at home, sometimes in a bar. Saturday’s ElClásico will see him at home with his father. Out of the corner of his eye, yes, his cell phone in his hand, although without commenting anything on the networks, where he does follow Ansu Fati and Riqui Puig.
The multitasking that new viewers practice is another of their hallmarks. Dídac Alonso is a 19-year-old young man who, although he follows the competition with his father, it is not unusual for him to combine watching with other tasks. “I tend to see pieces or do other things at the same time,” he admits. But that’s not the only thing he has changed. “We have many more sources of information and opinion. In addition to the fact that footballers can communicate more with their followers,” he values.
Where he will see the next FC Barcelona-Real Madrid is still a mystery, but one thing is clear: “I usually enjoy the important matches with my friends either at someone’s house, by video call or in a bar,” he explains. If friends are far away, then he will discuss it through his group. “Normally I look at people’s opinions on Twitter or Instagram and sometimes I continue doing other things in parallel,” he adds. In his feed, there are quite a few profiles of footballers he follows: Messi, Piqué, Ansu Fati, Riqui Puig and Dembélé, among others.
At the other end of multitasking viewing, we find David Rey. “During the game I don’t usually look at my phone (except if they send me a message) or Instagram or Twitter,” he shares. The only application he consults is FlashScore. He watches the games from television or the computer, sometimes alone or sometimes with someone, and although he does not use TikTok, he does follow the entire FC Barcelona squad. “Also to Joaquín from Real Betis Balompié and Igbekeme from Real Zaragoza,” he adds.
Zidane’s last game with the Real Madrid shirt is the first memory of La Liga Santander for Jose Borgo, a Mathematics student born in 1998. He was barely five years old at the time. He currently lives in Germany, in Aachen, from where he follows the games through Movistar. He watches them alone, but he enjoys them with his friends over a group call if he’s not at someone’s house or at the bar.
Languages ??that connect these new followers with players who are, in fact, the same age as them. Dances, challenges, plays, jokes… New units of meaning surround football to attract the impatient gaze of the spectator before, during and after the game. Contents that, far from what happens in the stadium, have as protagonists young people who speak the same language. Vini Jr., Rodrygo and Riqui Puig know it and speak it fluently.
In the Real Madrid locker room, the Brazilians operate on TikTok as they do on the pitch. Vinícius, especially, shakes the platform with each new dance. At FC Barcelona it is Riqui Puig who is making the difference. He masters the language and shares tastes and preferences with the generation that follows him and who, like him, thrive on ephemeral content designed to entertain and that, precisely for that reason, are highly viralizable.
Short videos (no more than 15 seconds) in which creativity, music, humor, filters, imitations and repetitions of plays have matched the generation that they themselves represent. A new content ecosystem led, in fact, by both teams: FC Barcelona (6 million followers) and Real Madrid (3.9 million followers) are the football clubs with the most followers in the world on this platform that already has more than 1,000 million users.
Alfredo Bermejo, director of Digital Strategy at LaLiga, knows that content platforms like TikTok have been key to connecting with young people. “Generation Z consumes content differently. Everything is more direct, more impactful and evolves at the speed at which trends change. On many occasions, the first contact of these users with the world of football has not been with a 90-minute televised match, but with highlight videos and music on TikTok,” Bermejo assesses.
In this context, the mobile phone has helped to extend the match beyond 90 minutes. Football is not something that happens at a certain moment. It is ‘consumed’ practically ‘on demand’. “We work to be able to generate adapted content in order to win over the fan and give us space in their entertainment time,” they explain from LaLiga. The key is to “know it better to identify new content verticals related to targets that relate to football and LaLiga in a different way.”
LaLiga, on TikTok since April 2019, is about to reach 2 million followers on this platform: “We were the first European league to open a profile and we have also created two of the most massive football challenges in the history of TikTok, each of them with more than 50 million views.” The next challenge? A special challenge called
