Insights from Arnaud Lieutenant
Since joining the Royal Belgian Football Association (RBFA) in October last year, at the top of Arnaud Lieutenant’s in-tray, the federation’s Digital, Innovation, and Technology Director is exploring new ways to connect fans, players, and staff as part of its ongoing digital transformation.
This covers all areas of innovation, including technology integration across the RBFA’s digital infrastructure, as well as the federation’s focus on fan engagement via its RBFA #DEVILTIME mobile app, which has gained more than 500,000 users since its re-launch in March 2021. Above all, the digital platform works to connect subscribers with an RBFA membership ID, which helps the federation better understand user behavior, including the content they enjoy the most, while giving the federation a helicopter view of its fan base.
A built-in user wallet allows fans to buy and store matchday tickets via the application while also connecting subscribers to the Official RBFA shop. In addition, users gain access to the RBFA TV video-streaming function and other news content. Given its ability to collect multiple streams of user data via a single platform, this presents the RBFA with an opportunity to scale its product development in the years to come. Meanwhile, it also provides a centralized digital touchpoint for the federation to collect and ingest fan data.
Having seen a peak in engagement during the Qatar 2022 men’s FIFA World Cup, one area of focus, Lieutenant says, is to grow the RBFA’s grassroots audience – in addition to its men’s and women’s national team fixtures – while delivering a combination of content that serves to generate a higher level of weekly users above and beyond football’s major international tournaments.
While demonstrating a strong level of digital maturity and social media engagement, cited in N3XT Sports’ World Cup Data Report 2022, Lieutenant and his team are working to “simplify and augment” its dataflow, as part of a drive to personalize content for every stakeholder across the elite and grassroots games, including notably fans, players, coaches, clubs, leagues, and officials via its continually evolving digital portfolio.
1. What are the main objectives of the RBFA’s digital transformation? And what opportunities do you see to evolve?
As a football association, we focus on several objectives when it comes to digital transformation: (1) to enhance the fan experience and bring them unique content that they won’t find on TV or other digital channels; (2) to improve everything related to the matchday experience, before, during, and after the game; and (3) to sustain our commercial objectives by getting to know the fans we cater to and providing a platform for targeted commercial content.
These I would say are the three main areas for improving fan engagement, while at the same time we also want to enhance the experience for all of our amateur players and use “digital” to make the player’s life easier, including how they interact with their coaches, their clubs, and other team members. There are options for us to develop both the fan and player experiences and is part of our ongoing digital roadmap.
2. How do you measure ‘data quality’? And what value does it deliver to the business?
In terms of data quality, the challenge for a football association is to be able to connect and consolidate a lot of different data from a lot of different systems. There is a huge opportunity to build fan and player identification into our digital framework and to learn more about our audience, and whether they are a fan, a player, a coach, or perhaps a referee.
Our objective is to develop a unique overview of everyone who engages with the RBFA product and who we are interacting with and how we go about it. While I am still relatively new to the RBFA and the structures we have in place today are of a good quality, one’s digital transformation is continually adapting. Therefore, how to build and position the backbone of all of our competitions, within our digital framework, is a huge part of our digital strategy.
In terms of data quality, the challenge for a football association is to be able to connect and consolidate a lot of different data from a lot of different systems. There is a huge opportunity to build fan and player identification into our digital framework and to learn more about our audience.
Arnaud Lieutenant
Digital, Innovation, and Technology Director, Royal Belgian Football Association (RBFA)
3. How do you go about growing and retaining audiences? What influence do major tournaments provide for building advocacy in your product?
Audience growth and audience retention are key metrics for measuring your digital capability. Our national team games provide a platform for generating engagement via our products and the men’s and women’s FIFA World Cups are massive events. Nevertheless, these are pretty low in frequency, so when you have an app that targets your national teams, we have maybe seven or eight windows per year when we observe peak audience engagement. So, the key question is how we can keep our users engaged throughout the year and might – for example – include an opportunity to target the amateur players.
For us, if you look at the audience during the World Cup, we have impressive numbers across our digital platforms and social media channels, but the challenge is always what we do next when the tournament is done, which means reflecting on how we operate during these periods. In my opinion, grassroots is an untapped resource that football federations can do more to engage. It’s this area where federations have an opportunity to increase engagement across all of its games, every weekend, by leveraging its entire football ecosystem.
4. What does the future of fan engagement hold for the RBFA?
As the federation invests in its digital and data infrastructure, being able to scale without disrupting dataflow is a key aspect of our role and is centered very much on our user-identity management capability. That is pretty obvious, right? There a lot of federations going through that process too, through the development of a single sign-on (SSO) function and a unique user identification of stakeholders including fans, players, coaches, referees, club administrators, etc. Today my vision is to build the foundational blocks for our digital ecosystem that will give us scope to address the future challenges and opportunities as the industry continues to evolve.