Adobe Digital Insights sets foot on the field to talk football. We look at the 2017 Champions League Football tournament, teams, and sponsors, the slow growth of top sports websites, and which social network should be used for maximum engagement and authentic experiences.

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Key Insights
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• Sports M&E sites are showing slow growth globally
• Sponsorship engagement on social static during the tournament
• If you want to connect with your audience Instagram is the experience vessel
• Creatives crave competition in relation to football
• Europe is a land of opportunity for Women’s football

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Visits to sports websites showing slow growth
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Visits to M&E (Sports) websites are seeing slow growth (8% since Jan 2015)
Bigger players aren’t growing as much as the smaller sites

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Sponsor mentions stay stagnant on social during tournament
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Sponsor recognition online stays static throughout the tournament, and
amount to only 8% of the conversation when combined with tournament
mentions.

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Champions League has more international presence
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FA cup and Champions League tournaments are played simultaneously, UCL has a much greater international
appeal than the FA cup (oldest recognized football tournament)

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Instagram is the more authentic social vehicle
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TWITTER INSTAGRAM
Twitter Following:
Total Tweets:
Average Likes:
Average RT:
Average Shares
Messi
is
missing
52.7M
2,886
56.1k
15.1k
1.5k
Cristiano Ronaldo Lionel Messi
Instagram Following:
Total Posts:
Average Likes/Plays:
Average Comments:
72.8M
190
3.78M
43.7k
102M
1,828
3.43M
21.3k
Cristiano Ronaldo Lionel Messi
Some of the highest engagement we observed when looking through their content were videos of their family.

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Is there a cost of bad behavior on the field?
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Juventus are also the “bad boys” of the
tournament with the only red card and the
most fouls committed 167
During the 2014 World Cup match between Uruguay and
Italy, Luiz Suarez took a bite out of an Italian defender his
social sentiment plummeted (-.015) and his mentions
increased 5.5x that of May 2014.

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Creatives seek out competition
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Creatives are all about competition 6 out of the top 10 football images
purchased depict a football stadium/competition.
1 2
3 4
5 6
7 8 9 10

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Europe is seen as the ground for growth in Women’s football
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As we look at some of the top women athletes social following, Eugenie Le Sommer (FR Midfielder/Striker) has amassed
over 150k followers on Instagram & Twitter.

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Methodology
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 Report based on analysis of over 10B+ visits to top sports websites from January 2015 to April 2017
 262M social engagements (mentions, page likes, followers, video views) from September 2016 – April
2017 via blogs, Facebook, G+, Reddit, Twitter, Dailymotion, Flickr, Instagram, Tumblr, VK, Disqus,
Foursquare, Metacafe, Wordpress, and YouTube
 Data from different Adobe Experience Cloud solutions:
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