After a 13-year hold-out, Manchester United have finally become the last Premier League club to launch their own YouTube channel under the tagline ‘Now Playing On YouTube’.
The hero launch video opens with a simple channel mobile screen shot, followed by Juan Mata welcoming the viewer and inviting them to come and have a look around.
The welcome spot highlights the strands and topics the club channel promises to cover – which include match highlights and stylised action, exclusive player features, behind-the-scenes views, academy highlights – before closing with a call-to-action from manager Jose Mourinho.
The new Man Utd official channel promises an inside look at the clubs operations and offers access to its personalities and academy.
On launch day, 22 February, the channel came pre-loaded with around 100-plus videos spread amoung a category set that spans First Team, Famous Faces, Goals and Action, Utd Greats, Ninety Two, The Foundation, MUTV, Classic matches and Uploads.
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A regular subject of digital/social sector criticism and wonder, Utd’s lack of a YouTube channel hasn’t stopped them from becoming the most viewed and most searched for Premiership side on social media.
This season alone, unofficial MUFC content has generated around 843m YouTube view – more than any of its English club rivals and an impressive 60% rise on the previous year.
The appetite for Man Utd club content on YouTube is huge.
Within the first 24 hours, this simple, basic welcome video had already notched up 360,000 views (with 8000 likes and, inevitably, some 184 dislikes) and after just five days it had past 6.5m views (to put that in context, in 14 fewer days it the creatively unheralded Utd launch spot is just 1m behind the much-lauded and much ad industry admired Nike ‘Nothing Beats A Londoner’ – see case study).
While within that same opening the day the channel had generated 130,000 subscribers.
Not bad first day statistics and millions more will surely follow.
And they will need to if Utd are to move towards matching self-styled biggest club in the world rivals Real Madrid’s 2.8m subscribers (and 4,371 videos) and Barcelona’s 3.8m (and 6,881 videos).
UEFA’s annual ‘The European Club Footballing Landscape’ report shows that Real Madrid and Barcelona are the world’s most popular clubs on social media with Man Utd following (well) behind in third spot.
Away from YouTube, the report shows that 14 European clubs have more than 10m Facebook likes and five have more than 10m Twitter followers,
While the data also shows that in general players are more popular on Twitter and clubs more popular on Facebook, it is also worth noting that the leading player in terms of social media, Christian0 Ronaldo, boasts more Twitter followers than Real Madrid and Barcelona combined (65.3m) and more Facebook likes than any of Europe’s biggest clubs (122m).
Looking at social media data from La Liga from the perspective of the nationality of visitors to club websites, the report finds that seven of the top eight clubs have more visitors from abroad than from their own country.
Barcelona boasts the highest percentage in that list with 91% of their visitors coming from overseas.
More specifically, Barça’s site gets 9.5% of its users from the United States, compared with 8.9% from Spain – showing what a truly international attraction the club is.
The new Utd channel means YouTube can now boast official content from more than 300 football clubs across 40 different leagues.
(In the league table of league YouTube channel subscribers, it is La Liga that leads the way with 1.9m subscribers, followed by the Bundesliga (1.1m), then Ligue 1 (851k) and Serie A (492k).
Manchester United retained its position as football’s highest-earning club in consultancy Deloitte’s annual Football Money League rankings in January 2018.
Despite failing to qualify for the lucrative 2016-17 Champions League and its on-pitch performance paling in comparison to Spanish behemoth Real Madrid (which won both the Champions League and Spain’s La Liga), the broadcasting might of the English Premier League enabled Man U to remain at the top of the financial league table.
Deloitte’s rankings – which combine commercial deals (eg sponsorships and shirt sales), match-day revenues and broadcast income – show that the ever-increasing share of clubs’ turnover from broadcasting has now reached a record high of 45%.
Links:
Manchester United:
http://www.manutd.com/en/IndianMegastorePage.aspx
https://www.facebook.com/manchesterunited/
http://www.manutd.com/en/Club/Sponsors.aspx
https://www.instagram.com/MANCHESTERUNITED/
https://plus.google.com/+MANUTD
https://www.pinterest.com/manutd/
