A few weeks ago we wrote an article on Real Madrid’s new partnership with Microsoft. The mobile app has since launched and we got a chance to speak with Real Madrid CEO Jose Angel Sanchez and Microsoft Chairman of Emerging Markets Orlando Ayala on their partnership and Real Madrid’s transforming digital presence.
Real Madrid now have a platform to help understand and adapt to their over 400 million worldwide fans.
“Seventy years ago when the soccer economy was based on ticket sales, the president of Real Madrid built a huge stadium to house 120,000 people,” said Jose Angel Sanchez, CEO of Real Madrid. “He thought that having biggest stadium would provide the biggest revenues so he could be able to acquire rights to biggest players in the world. That’s exactly what Santiago Bernabéu did. Now we have over 450 million fans so we have to build the virtual stadium to put them all in, and understand what they are expecting from us so the club can benefit from what they want.”
This virtual stadium has taken the form of a mobile app. Partnering with Microsoft, Real Madrid launched their official Real Madrid App on Windows Phone, iOS and Android on May 19.
“The application has been a joint effort for the past year,” said Orlando Ayala, Microsoft Chairman of Emerging Markets. “Fans will be able to see the replay of multiple camera angles inside and outside the stadium, they can adjust 250 statistics and compare team to team or player to player in real time. And the app will learn behaviors by itself so we can continue to make it better.”
The application is equipped with every feature a fan could want to follow their club. That includes game highlights, match summaries, exclusive video content, news, player cards, Real Madrid TV, and links to shop and ticketing services.
Fans will even be able to cross data and discover important information that could benefit their club. Sanchez describes the control the app gives their fans as a “complete transformation of culture.”
“The relationship with our fans is unique,” Sanchez said. “The passion and love, the quality of the relationship – people love to give you all the data they have. It is not like you are defending yourself from advertising from a company.”
And when Madrid is not using the data fans provide, they are gathering data based on the social behavior of fans, and their interactions with the app.
“It is not about creating an app,” Sanchez said. “It is about transforming the club in the digital world and developing analytics tools to understand what the fans are expecting from us and changing the relationship with them to where they interact with us. It is not only us providing them things.”
Real Madrid faces a unique challenge interacting with their fans: of the 120 million who follow the club on a digital platform, less than 5 percent are in Spain.
“So this is a unique institution that can really talk to a huge community of fans who are outside somewhere,” Sanchez said. “The essence of the partnership with Microsoft is about knowing and understanding who our fans are. We saw this as an opportunity to engage with them in more personal ways and to create a new fun experience for them.”
But the club and Microsoft understand that their interactions with fans is only step one. The fans must have the ability to interact with each other. So Microsoft created the Talk feature that allows fans to open a window and message friends and fellow fans around the world about their experiences with the club.
Microsoft proved the strength of their relationship with Real Madrid earlier this week at the annual Ignite Conference in Chicago, where Microsoft invites the top 100 of Fortune 500 companies. Jose Angel Sanchez was the only guest invited on-stage alongside Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella.
Jose Angel Sanchez Director General @RealMadrid takes the stage at #MSIgnite. http://t.co/sxsp6hm2pl pic.twitter.com/knG0OPCiDe
— Microsoft Ignite (@MS_Ignite) May 4, 2015
“To be honest, we are leading the way of approaching this matter with Microsoft,” Sanchez said. “We have always felt the need of leading new processes in the football industry and this is exactly what we are doing now.”
The app already has over 1 million downloads and a 4.6 rating on Google’s app store.
Real Madrid’s final La Liga game on May 23 against Getafe will be users’ first gameday experience with the app.