Professional sport is slowly easing its way back in Australia. But one of the big concerns for teams, sports marketers and broadcasters is the lack of fans being allowed into the stadiums.
Rowdy, chanting, cheering supporters are, after all, part and parcel of what makes top-class sport such a spectacle.
But there are a few ideas out there – some aided by modern technology and some a little more traditional – that team marketing managers may like to think about for upcoming AFL, NRL, Super League or A-League games.
The NRL has, of course, already made headlines with its The Fan in the Stand scheme to put cardboard cut-outs of fans in stadiums. The basic idea is that fans pay to have cardboard cut-outs of themselves, using photos that they submit, placed in the stands.
But things have gone somewhat awry after one fan with a strange sense of humour used an image of Harold Shipman, Britain’s most prolific serial killer. Another submitted a photo of Dominic Cummings, the controversial political advisor to British PM Boris Johnson.
But other sporting codes may find that idea a bit too copycat for their tastes anyway.
Here’s one initiative that Aussie sports marketers may want to avoid.
When the South Korean professional football league opened in May, the authorities tried to create a semblance of atmosphere by piping music into the empty stadiums.
The concept wasn’t too successful. So the following week FC Seoul, a team from the national capital, thought they were onto a winner when they placed some very human-like dummies at strategic points around their ground.
It was going well until startled TV viewers realised that the stand-in ‘fans’ were actually sex dolls!
Following a huge outcry, the club apologised for causing “deep concern” to fans, saying the dolls had been delivered due to a “mix-up” with the supplier.
But the K-League authorities weren’t buying it and said that FC Seoul’s actions had deeply humiliated female football fans and damaged the league’s reputation. The club was fined a record $81 000.
The tech-crazy Japanese have come up with their own way of enabling soccer and baseball fans to be part of the action when their respective seasons open.
The Yamaha Corporation, best known for its musical instruments, has developed a Remote Cheerer system that lets fans watching games on television in their living rooms cheer, or boo, the players on the pitch via their smartphones, sending either a pre-recorded shout-out or their own personal message composed in the heat of the moment.
The voices they send to their players – plus, presumably, the odd insult to the opposition – will reverberate around the stadium in real time, transmitted by giant loudspeakers. In a trial conducted at the 50 000-seater Shizuoka Stadium Ecopa in the prefecture of Shizuoka, 58 speakers were placed around the ground and fans were able to decide which of the speakers they wanted their message to be sent to.
The company declined to say whether the app can be used to suggest that the referee or umpire require a guide dog, or to question the dubious parentage and social habits of opposition players and coaches.