Sport and digital innovation during COVID-19

When COVID-19 pressed pause on sport competitions around the world, most countries relied on replaying old seasons of their favorite sports. But in the same way that no one wants to watch a movie when they already know the ending, for some sport fans, simply rewatching the old highlight reel just wasn’t enough. No bueno! 

Things were slightly different in Mexico. The Mexican Football Association decided to create a unique online tournament in which the actual club players represented their teams on a virtual playing field - you guessed it - FIFA 20! There were two objectives in mind: firstly to encourage people to stay home, and secondly to entertain and immerse people in the way only sport can do. 

While there was something similar in the UK known as the ePremier League invitational, Mexico’s eLIGA MX was a fully televised tournament, with major sports channels broadcasting the highlights of each round. Twenty matches later, my home team Club Leon won the tournament thanks to Nicolas Sosa. The grand final had over 296K views on YouTube. After the match, Enrique Bonilla, President of the Liga BBVA MX delivered a message to the winning team and a trophy was given to the club.

So what does all this have to do with digital innovation ?

Well firstly, the sports industry is not particularly known for its digital delivery strategy. It is media companies that use digital solutions to transmit matches all over the world. The fact that the Liga BBVA MX made an effort to keep delivering football in a different way is admirable in itself. This portrays the importance of having an agile digital strategy that can be rapidly executed.

The second key element was the collaboration of multiple stakeholders including football clubs, TV broadcasters, EA sports, and the BBVA principal league sponsor, among others. An effective digital strategy depends on either internal or external stakeholder collaboration and taking advantage of the potential synergies.

While this tournament will probably never happen again … or at least (fingers crossed) not for the same reason … This is a great example of how digital strategies need to be agile, flexible and embraced by stakeholders in order to score the winning goal and ultimately succeed. 

If there’s one thing I learnt from these unprecedented times, it’s that digital transformation can start now without needing to wait for the next World Cup to come around. I also learned that footballers can also work from home, who would have thought?

Check out the Tableau dashboard I created to summarise the tournament stats: