The relationship between soccer and social media is a tight one. Teams are racing to figure out how to be unique with their engagement and how to best reach out to their large group of worldwide fans. Now, Italian soccer powerhouse AS Roma has announced the launch of a new Chinese WeChat account to further connect with fans in China.
WeChat is one of the largest mobile messaging apps in the world and has more than 1 billion accounts, with 650 million being active users. Notably, only 70 million of these are active outside of China. The club has certainly embraced fans in this region, and even wore shirts bearing a message for the Chinese New Year in February 2015. Following this, two months later they were the first soccer club to launch an official WeChat account outside of China.
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For this growing fan-base, this new account will allow Chinese Roma fans to take part in match prediction, follow live scores and radio, read translated official news and even upload their own photos. The hope is that this will cement Roma’s status as one of soccer’s leaders in social media, whilst also profiting from China’s ever-growing interest in soccer. Indeed, Roma has continued to bravely embrace social media’s potential, and even used Reddit to provide inspiration for their website redesign last October.
Recently, Chinese teams have begun to make huge strides in eliminating the distance between themselves and other, more established leagues. This has included purchases of international stars such as Ramires of Chelsea FC ($35 million), and even AS Roma’s Gervinho ($16 million). However, the current gulf in class between the Chinese League and other major leagues will continue to interest Chinese soccer fans who want to cheer only the elite teams. For this reason, reaching out to China seems to be a wise move. If just from a purely financial standpoint, it certainly won’t hurt Roma’s soccer merchandise sales.
However, it is cynical to look on the reason for Roma’s relationship with China as purely business. Instead, it should serve as a benchmark for other soccer clubs to follow in spreading the enthusiasm, excitement and passion that all come with supporting a soccer team. Social media, and platforms such as WeChat, help to do this. And as for Roma, getting to the fans before other teams is a shrewd tactic. Everyone knows that you don’t choose your team; it chooses you.