A report by video intelligence reveals the breadth of sources that football fans get their kicks from.

During a match, UK football fans spend an average of 39 minutes are spent on a second screen 47% of fans watch more than two matches live on a match day.

Club websites lag behind social media, sports sites and news sites as information sources
The Football Consumption Report aims to understand how football fans access information about the beautiful game in the multimedia landscape of 2021. It gives clarity into behaviour across account the multiple types of media, various sources of information as well as the overwhelming amount of football available.

The report reveals a number of behaviours:

Second screening is now almost ubiquitous: 86% of football fans actively use a second screen in addition to a live game. An average of 39 minutes of match time are spent with the second screen in the UK.

Fans tend to be more interested in post-match analysis than pre-match. For example, UK fans spent 212 minutes consuming content in the week after matchday, compared to 149 minutes in the lead-up. Social media and specialist sports websites are the most common places to find this additional information, but the usage is diversified: clubs’ own websites lag behind general publisher sites, which take almost the same amount of viewing time as sports websites and social media.

As to how users choose which sites they read, that comes down to Trust (says 46% of respondents), Convenience (43%) and the Mix of Media (39%). Regarding that mix, the largest group (46%) prefer a mixture of text and video, while 23% look for video only, and 20% text only.

Variety is also important when it comes to the type of reports published: 30% look for detailed match reports, and a significant majority, 60%, are interested in a combination of match highlights and reports.

When it comes to advertising, a clear preference was articulated regarding contextual video ads – 87% of fans who accept ads on digital media preferred contextually placed video ads and 60% of those preferred those as a pre-roll

Video intelligence CEO Kai Henniges said, “Our study shows that rights holders have unlimited options to reach pre-engaged fans, a live-only strategy really limits their potential. This new data gives them crucial information for creating the right mix of distribution and usage of content to attract fans.”

“With the end of the seasons approaching, and then summer international tournaments this year and next year, this is crunch time for publishers and rights holders to use automated, contextual video content for scale.”

Please contact Kai Sackmann, Director Sports Partnerships & Strategy, vi ks@vi.ai to request the full study, or for more information.

About the survey

The Football Consumption Survey was undertaken by CensusWide commissioned by video intelligence. Just over 2,000 self-identified football fans took place in the survey across the UK and Germany in March 2021.