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May 3, 2023

Editor Note: Andy Marston takes the controls on Wednesday mornings. You will find his latest Sports Pundit column is below. I'll be back tomorrow before Adam Grossman rounds out the week on Friday.

TikTok Presents Opportunity for Rights Holders to Build Fandom Outside Traditional Broadcast Model

​For the first time in the club’s 140-year history, Burnley FC’s women took to the pitch at Turf Moor this past weekend.

While it was the first time the team drew a significant audience in-person, it is no stranger to capturing an audience online–having racked up over one million views on their TikTok live streams.

In the process, the team has created a blueprint for how emerging sports properties looking to build a fan base can leverage non-traditional broadcast channels to achieve that goal.

Burnley FC chose to lean into TikTok in 2021, inking a deal that made the social platform the women's sleeve sponsor and a rights distribution partner.

TikTok has been streaming the women's games since and the club's chief operating officer Mark Thompson said the additional exposure has led to commercial growth and greater financial investment from the club. 

“As a result of the increased awareness and engagement [through the platform], we've definitely seen increased traction from brands–who demand a holistic approach to investment from their preferred partners."

TikTok has provided creator training for Burnley's female players to help its 'first creator football team' get the most out of the platform and showcase their personalities.

“The team has taken a truly innovative approach to engaging with the TikTok community, which shows how our platform can help sports organizations reach fans outside of the traditional broadcast model,” Arthur Guisasola (global sports partner manager, TikTok) said.

Much of Burnley's success on the social platform comes from the way the TikTok algorithm functions.

“The problem with social media when you're starting [out as a new sports property] is that you have zero people to put your content in front of, [so] it's very hard to grow,” Kane Kallaway (founder, Espresso) said. 

However, platforms like TikTok, YouTube Shorts and Instagram Reels are algorithmically driven "meaning they will surface content to people that [you] don't follow,” Kallaway added.

The algorithm has helped emerging musicians with few existing followers go viral (see: Lil Nas X, Lizzo, Megan Thee Stallion, and Doja Cat).

Emerging sports properties, like World Jai-Alai League (WJAL), have also been able to leverage it to build a fan base (or at least find one faster than it would have otherwise). 

WJAL has tallied almost 300,000 TikTok followers since starting to live stream matches less than a year ago.

“The first day we did it, we had 50,000 unique viewers. We now average about 100,000 unique viewers for every game day,” Scott Savin (chief operating officer, WJAL) said. 

And by live streaming to the social platform, WJAL is able to reach an entirely different audience than the one it previously attracted. 

“The audience we're going after [by streaming to TikTok] is probably a 21-39 year-old primary audience that's never seen the sport and we're exposing it to them [for the first time]," Savin said. "We have what's left of the old audience, but that's not who we're going after. We're really trying to get an entirely new audience from what used to come and watch Jai Alai.”

To do that, WJAL has had to provide viewers on the platform with a differentiated experience; one that helps them to understand the game as it is being played. 

“While our broadcast that's going out to ESPN or FTF Sports has a [traditional] commentator, the TikTok broadcast has our person doing her play by play [commentary], but, primarily, she’s just answering questions as they come in [from intrigued viewers],” Savin said.

The league also posts educational videos between matches to answer frequently asked questions and stoke further interest in the sport. 

The successes achieved by the Burnley FC women’s team and WJAL should provide food-for-thought for upstart rights-owners seeking to reach new audiences.

But there could also be an opportunity for more established rights holders, like the Phoenix Suns, who recently announced plans to distribute games on a non-exclusive basis, to stream live on TikTok.

More on the Suns' plans for a multi platform distribution model coming tomorrow morning when JohnWallStreet returns.

About the Author: Andy Marston leads growth and marketing at Zone7, a proprietary AI platform committed to helping sporting organizations unlock greater performance data insights. Based in London, he founded Sports Pundit in 2020. In addition to this column, he publishes a ‘Highlight Reel’ newsletter each Friday breaking down key stories from across the industry. You can find him here.

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The Albachiara Chronicle by Roger Mitchell

Roger Mitchell and his podcast AYNE look at the uncertain waters of sport and finance, to try and better understand the risks facing the business of sport

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Recent Story: America hates losers, with one exception.

Excerpt: In the land of the American Dream, where there are de facto no limits to your ambition; in the mean streets of callous indifference, where there is no safety net or sympathy for the loser in life, SPORT, in America, does exactly the OPPOSITE.It has no pathway to promotion. It’s a closed shop. No matter how good you become, you aren’t getting in. American Dream, my arse. It’s a post-modern class system.Americans also reward the despised loser, with the top draft pick of best player next year!Isn’t that curious? What an absurd contradiction. They seem to prefer to trade-off and sacrifice the Ryan Reynolds thrills and heartaches of promotion and relegation, in a deliberate aim to lower the risk profile, and protect the asset value of the private feudal club. They thus set up their sport to incentivize “tanking.”

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