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Footballing giant Manchester United fired up its powerful marketing machine in China, aiming to net new business and convert more than 40 million Asian fans into customers.
With Asia seen as a key market for the world's richest sports club, Manchester United executives were in Shanghai as part of an Asian marketing tour to pitch the team to major potential sponsors for the 2006-07 season.
Manchester management
has already determined that it will embark on a two-week tour of Asia during
the 2005-06 season, and is in negotiations to return to China where it claims
it has more than 23 million fans and which it last visited in 1999.
For Manchester United, long on the vanguard of marketing the team outside its
home pitch, China, Japan and Korea are now crucial strategic markets in the
age of globalising football, marketing executives said at a briefing here.
"We're not just a sports club, we are an international brand ... and building that brand is very important," said the team's commercial director Andy Anson.
Arguably the globe's most popular sports team, with an estimated global fan base of 75 million, the London Stock Exchange-listed organisation is clearly, as it claims, "more than just a football team."
Under a mission statement that reads: "To be the best football club on and off the pitch," Manchester United is a cash-hungry operation that is keenly aware that Spain's Real Madrid and Italy's Juventus are set on matching the global sports marketing strategies it has spearheaded.
The club, which last year pocketed 43 million pounds on turnover of 173 million pounds, a 24.8 percent profit-to-revenue ratio, has built up a staggering array of businesses, which include merchandise stores, restaurants, football schools and a team cable television channel, to help sell its brand.
"This no longer seat of the pants marketing," said the group's marketing director Peter Draper.
A web of licensing, franchise and sponsorship agreements promotes the star-studded team that in turns helps pay the million-dollar salaries of the likes of Paul Scholes, Ruud van Nistelrooy and Roy Keane.
Its sponsorship deal with US sportswear company Nike is worth some 300 million pounds over 13 years, while primary sponsor, Britain's Vodafone, has signed another four-year agreement worth some 10 million pounds.
It also inked a joint venture deal with the mobile telecommunications provider to distribute via cell phones match clips and results.
Manchester executives said they would continue to focus branding strategy over the next five years in Asia and the United States, where it successfully toured last year and will again this summer.
Over the past three years the English Premiership team has opened at least 10 of its own "Mega Stores" across Asia, while last week it forged a five-year deal with Barclays Bank to promote the club's team-branded credit cards around the world.
In southwestern China's Chengdu city, a Manchester United-themed restaurant opened last year and plans are afoot for eateries throughout the continent in hopes of further cashing in on the interest many Asian nations hold on the English game.
"One of the overall themes we work with, which is about embracing our fans as customers, people who transact and have a transactional relationship with Manchester United," said Anson.
More restaurants and football schools would be forthcoming in China, Hong Kong and Singapore as early as this summer, added Draper.
In another example of United's willingness to embrace China, the club earlier this year signed teenage striker Dong Fangzhou, before promptly off-loading him on loan to Belgian side Antwerp.
For those critics who accuse Manchester United management of turning football into a marketing exercise, Draper said the team was "Guilty. Guilty as a marketing machine."
"We have no high ideals for ourselves of what it is we're trying to achieve," he said.
"Today, given
the financial state of football and the way we have to compete on an international
basis, we can't do it with our backsides just on seats."