Professional Sport Clubs and Web 2.0

Abstract

This paper reviews relevant Internet, business marketing and sport marketing literature to identify two key challenges and opportunities available to professional sport organizations in the new Internet Web 2.0 environment. It also reports on a pilot study
about how major professional sport teams are responding to these challenges and opportunities. The pilot study focused on multimedia use and visitor-involvement offerings on websites of several professional clubs in each of four top-tier leagues in North America and England. Several differences among team websites in respect to media offerings and user-engagement experiences were found. These included the findings that some sport organizations are employing various methods to create online communities and are building secondary websites for visitors, while others are not. The results suggest that most teams in the sampled leagues are taking advantage of at least some opportunities for providing media services and user-engagement experiences to website visitors, but they may be missing other such opportunities.