I am currently on a study tour with my counterpart from Carlton Football Club, Ian Coutts, visiting a number of sporting organisations in the United Kingdom, USA and Canada, in a 14-day whirlwind experience.
I have just come from a meeting at Arsenal with Michael Leavey, the General Manager of Arsenal Broadband Ltd, and it was quite an enlightening experience to spend a couple of hours with a man of his knowledge and experience as a key executive of one of the four most powerful English Premier League clubs.
He threw some amazing numbers at us... 200,000 members, a 300-million pound business per annum, around 1.9 million Facebook followers, which they anticipate will grow to over 2 million. They also sell over 4 million pounds of merchandise online every year and are looking to double that in the next couple of years.
It is a massive operation, with an equally massive communications team, which pumps out around 20 news articles per day specifically for their website, which attracts 111 million unique visitors annually.
The first thing to notice about Arsenal is the highly impressive Emirates Stadium, which was built in 2006 and has a capacity of around 62,000. It has amazing branding around the stadium which embraces the club’s history, with giant posters depicting past greats standing arm-in-arm across various sections of the perimeter.
There is much to learn from an organisation of this magnitude, particularly in the way the club communicates with its members because obviously the club cannot accommodate all of its supporters with the match day experience.
While it does have an imposing operation, the football team does not train at the club’s base, which is one advantage we have and something we must use to the fullest.
I am now off to Saracens, a rugby club with a reputation for having outstanding community-based programs. I am looking forward to meeting a member of their marketing team to learn how the second most popular code in London wins its share of media exposure.
As part of this trip, we are also visiting Sky News, with Enda Brady taking us on a tour and we are spending a day with the English rugby team which is currently in camp in preparation for upcoming internationals.