The Football Association (FA) is to develop a series of second-screen marketing strategies for fans.

Targeting commercial growth through creating  familiarity with the FA brand, it hopes that the approach will lead to more engagement with England supporters.

This will, the Association believes, give their content greater strength for its sponsors to exploit and thus strengthen sponsor position during major tournaments.

At the moment, each nation’s football association is often side-lined by the official partners of FIFA and UEFA during the World Cup and European Championship.

Stuart Turner, the FA head of commercial, said:

“The World Cup is not our event, it’s FIFA’s. It’s very difficult from a media valuation perspective for our partners to get any cut-through at the World Cup. FIFA gives us leeway around our own press conferences and our training camps, however, that’s from a traditional media sense.”

The fast approaching World Cup in Brazil is going to be the first test bed for the initiative. Under plans being finalised, second-screening is set to play a big role in the FA’s presentation of all England matches in the tournament.

Drives in the pipeline include putting live statistics and video replays in front of fans during matches.

With the transmission of behind-the-scenes footage also being discussed, the move represents something that the Association has wanted to do for some time, but was waiting for the right moment. As more and more companies, large and small, embrace the trend for interacting with live TV coverage, the English footballing body has decided that the right time is now.

Turner continued to explain:

“Our challenge is to know more about our fans … By using social media, we’re able to know more about those people and their preferences.”

He went on to highlight how taking a more proactive role in social will help to change the opinion many people have of the FA as boring, staid and not very dynamic.

Steven Morris