Peter Moore grew up in Liverpool in a family with multiple generations of Liverpool FC fans. While working for Reebok, Sega, Microsoft and Electronic Arts, he carried his passion for the Reds everywhere. When he lived on the West Coast, a time zone not conducive to watching live English Premier League broadcasts, Moore set his alarm for the middle of the night.
Last year, Moore became Liverpool’s CEO. This season, his club went all the way to the Champions League Final. (Liverpool will play Real Madrid in Kiev, Ukraine on Saturday.) Meanwhile Moore has overseen a major investment in a new technological platform to better understand and engage an international fan base that is estimated to number 771 million people and a television audience of 440 million.
His own experience as a fan both near and far from Merseyside has helped educate his plans. “We have a local heart with a global pulse,” Moore said.
A video produced for this season, “This Means More,” drew 22.4 million social and web impressions with a cumulative watch time totaling five years. Moore said the creation of such content is about driving value to the Liverpool fan experience as well as learning more about which fans engage with the content.
“If we don’t know who you are, it becomes useless,” he said. “It becomes a fleeting YouTube video that we all watch. And so the technological challenge we have is linking that content with data so that the theoretical 771 million people who put their hand up and say, ‘I follow Liverpool,’ that our team in Liverpool gets to know you better.”
The fan platform is being developed internally in collaboration with companies like IBM and Oracle. “Instead of taking off-the-shelf software, we built bespoke programs that would allow individual system integrators to come in,” Moore said.
Moore, who oversaw the massive growth of the FIFA video game as EA Sports president, is also one of the most accessible Premier League executives. While in New York to speak at the Leaders Sport Business Summit, Moore visited local Liverpool fans at Carragher’s, a pub named for former Reds star Jamie Carragher. He also tweets.
“I think I’m the only Premier League CEO who’s on Twitter,” Moore said. “Is it a hairy ride from time to time? You bet. But it’s about engaging. It’s about showing that I care. If you’re the CEO of Liverpool Football Club, you damn well better show you care. The best way that I find to do that is talk to our fans every day on Twitter—to give them information, to help them the best I can, to give them my opinions. Do I get a lot of . . . feedback? I get feedback. It comes with the territory. I think the value of engaging is worth the downside of being called things that [would make] my mother turn over in her grave.”
We know what scarf Liverpool FC CEO Peter Moore will be wearing at the Champions League Final!
Big thank you to Peter Moore for joining us last night in NYC. #Boss #LFC #LiverpoolFC @PeterMooreLFC @NYCKOPITES pic.twitter.com/9KhP7lqDFH— Carraghers New York (@CarrasNYC) May 21, 2018
Following Moore’s presentation at the Leaders event, he sat down with SportTechie for an exclusive interview.
(Note: This interview has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.)
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SportTechie: When you talk about Liverpool’s global pulse, how has your own experience informed that vision?
Moore: In my role, I believe, and what I tried to portray on stage, there was the uniqueness of the club. I’m not saying—I want to be clear—that we’re better or in some way superior to other football clubs. We’re just different and unique. As a marketer and as someone who’s responsible, in my mind, for the fans and their wellbeing, welfare and their emotional wellbeing as being a Liverpool supporter, you have to understand that and embrace that. That’s why you saw that content that we put up there.
[Note: While on stage, Moore showed a video clip of a packed stadium singing Liverpool’s anthem, “You’ll Never Walk Alone.” Only at the end did he reveal that the match was played in Melbourne, Australia, where 95,000 fans filled a cricket stadium for a preseason friendly.]
A lot of people wouldn’t know where that was. That’s why I didn’t say where it was, and then I said it was 10,500 miles away—that’s Melbourne, Australia. It’s not Liverpool.
SportTechie: Liverpool’s sister team, the Boston Red Sox, are among the clients of Fan Manager. Why did you choose to build your fan platform from within rather than seek an existing solution?
Moore: Our business is very different. We need deeper levels of engagement that are global. Global-building systems, global currency systems, managing fans in Malaysia, Indonesia—and I’m sure the Red Sox don’t really worry about that.
SportTechie: How much collaboration is there with Fenway Sports Group and the Red Sox?
Moore: I talk to my bosses on a regular basis, and [Red Sox president] Sam Kennedy is a good friend. In regards to our respective businesses, we do get interaction with Fenway Sports Management who are Boston-based, who help us when we think about strategies for our major global partnerships. They’ve been very helpful in a number of those relationships. But, day to day, what Sam and his team do and what we do—we’re brothers from a different mother. We have to deal with our fans in our way, and they have to deal with their fans in their way.
SportTechie: An eagle-eyed reader a year ago spotted a job description that mentioned esports at Liverpool and, given your background, it seems like a natural fit. What’s the play?
Moore: We are in particular looking at what the Premier League plans to do this fall, this winter. They have publicly stated they are going to build an esports league utilizing the 20 teams as contestants in that, and we’ll certainly be a part of that.
I think it’s important to reach out to the millennial generation to make sure that we are paying attention to a difficult generation that’s growing up but isn’t necessarily like you did, like I did—your dad kinda led you to what you watched, where you went. That doesn’t exist anymore. These kids don’t even come into the living room anymore. They’re on Twitch, they’re seeking content from their favorite YouTubers, they’re making sure their Fortnite clan is ready to play at night, all of that stuff. They’re growing up differently than we did, so you’ve got to reach in. Live in their world.
SportTechie: In Brooklyn, a soccer complex recently opened whose stated intention was to recreate FIFA the video game in real life. Fans are choosing real-life allegiances based on preferred teams and players to use in the game. How much has that video game not only just mirrored real life but come to influence it?
Moore: Oh, it’s definitely influenced the real game of soccer, football. I was deeply involved with it, obviously. It was a major part of our growth at Electronic Arts. It was the gold standard for the digitization of the video game, going away from “here’s a game, play it, finish it, put it away.” And the emergence of Ultimate Team, which could be the most successful digital platform in video game history is exactly what you’re talking about: understanding the players, the clubs, the strategy, the formations, which player even from past years—Franz Beckenbauer, Pelé, George Best—who you can bring as part of your legends team.
Our research at EA when I was there would back that up 1,000 percent, the influence that we have had on the current generation.
SportTechie: You discussed a major investment in renovating Liverpool’s training center, Melwood. How ubiquitous is technology in training?
Moore: We refer to it as science, sport science. To your point about sensors, all of our players wear GPS tracking devices [STATSports]. They will wear that. They’d hand them in when they’re done. The analysis of how far they ran, their speed. More and more we’re looking at biometrics rather than simple tracking of distance and speed. It’s a scientific way of looking at your players, tracking their progress, understanding who’s been lazy in training, who’s hiding.
For our sport science team currently at Melwood, which is where our first team is soon to move over, a major part of that is having enhanced enhanced facilities for the sport science part of our club.
SportTechie: What technology will Liverpool adapt next?
Moore: I always use myself as Exhibit A. I sat there in San Francisco at 4 a.m. waiting for one of those damn 12:30 [GMT] kickoffs and got the coffee going. I always analyzed my feelings as a psychologist, sociologist [would]—I’m watching it but I wish I were there but of course I can’t be there. How can I, through tech, be closer?
Then I found myself, the last few years, watching Twitter. Until I realized about two, three years ago that the TV lag—I will always remember seeing “goal” [on Twitter], and it was still a corner kick [on TV]. That was the end of me with a second screen, so I put that away.
Whether it’s virtual reality, which a lot of people talk about, can I be in the lower-main stand or on the Kop and put my helmet on and “I’m here” rather than TV?
How do you make it, not a 10-feet experience but a 10-inch experience? Those are the things we’re looking at. The content that we do—and not in any way transgressing our Sky Sports broadcasters—but where can we put cameras? People love the tunnel cam. The video of Salah on the breakaway and Ray jumping up and down. It’s just a static camera that looks down the tunnel onto the pitch, which we can do. We can’t put cameras everywhere.
There’s this video of [Mohamed] Salah who zooms by and people put it to Benny Hill music, and it’s brilliant to watch. And the reaction of our first-team operations guy and a policeman hugging each other—it’s brilliant. Innovative ways to show, as we call it, Inside Anfield.
We take a lot of money from Sky Sports and BT so there’s only so much we can do, but we find innovative ways of giving you a little bit of a taste of what’s going on.