admin
The England giants had a traumatic 24 hours — starting with a 0-3 defeat to Juventus on Tuesday, their worst Champions League loss ever. Then, on Wednesday morning the Blues announced that their manager Roberto Di Matteo had become the eighth manager in nine years to be sacked by the club — with the tweet being retweeted over 5 000 times.
Twitter covered the busy day on their UK blog, highlighting the following as key stats. The mentions spiked at about 9am on Wednesday in the UK when Chelsea broke the news of their manager’s sacking via Twitter. Chelsea as a keyword was tweeted over one million times. Chelsea dominated the Twitter trends — with up to five individual items trending about the story in the UK, followed by it trending worldwide. The story also trended worldwide.
This was a prime example of how powerful social media channels have become in football. The fact that Chelsea chose to break the news about Di Matteo’s sacking via Twitter shows how much times have changed, whereas previously print, radio and television would have been first to the bite.
Even here at home, it’s hard to overstate what a boon the Internet has been for football fans. Fans can now share their views instantly and on multiple platforms, and receive responses from other fans in seconds.
Four years ago, Soccerlens was born in UK out of a desire to share opinions on football with a wider audience. The market for ‘general’ football sites may seem saturated now but for football fans around the world, there are still plenty of opportunities to share their thoughts and be heard by thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of fellow football fans.
A local of forums are being used with a number of clubs having their own Facebook pages, talk of Chicken Inn, FC Platinum, Highlanders, DeMbare.Coms, Ajax and New West FC, among others. The forums are for football fans and God knows who moderates the discussions and blocks fans that turn rude and vulgar. What is interesting about these forums is that club executives are not involved and they serve as a platform for fans, although the Zifa Central Region runs its Facebook page, with another page for Zimbabwe Football Association, which I’m sure Zifa CEO Jonathan Mashingaidze has nothing to do with.
The difference between blog and forum communities is important in context of how you want to experience football online — forums are full of banter, not a lot is taken seriously, you need to speak up or you will probably be lost in the crowds, and members are quite loyal to the site. It’s not to say blogs aren’t the same, but as the onus in forums is on the community members to initiate and maintain conversations, it’s more distributed and therefore more varied, and you can find your own pace instead of having to write at a fixed schedule.
Twitter made its name by assisting journalists around the world to break news easily and instantaneously, and it’s no different in football. You can follow the top Real Madrid journalists to get breaking news about who Madrid are signing, updates on ongoing press conferences, links to interviews, information on upcoming matches, etc etc. Madrid is just one example, this applies to football across the spectrum, and of course to unofficial fans and teams and footballing regions around the world.
Football information sharing is made ridiculously simple by Twitter, but it can easily lead to ‘too much information’ and a case of you missing out on what’s really interesting for you if you end up following everyone.
Facebook, the world’s largest social networking site is an obvious place for football fans to share opinions. Sometimes it’s as simple as someone posting a link to a football news story on their Wall, or maybe a Wall to Wall conversation about football between friends.
On a larger scale, most media outlets will have a Facebook page, where they make posts and fans can react with comments. The key to using Facebook is to understand that it’s built on sharing, so the most basic use is to share interesting links from around the Internet with your friends.
Blogs, news organisations and really popular journalists also use Fan Pages to help aggregate their fans and also share information directly with them. It’s a good way to get updates from your favourite websites although in many cases there’s quite a lot of crossover from Twitter.
It was certainly a lot easier to follow football matches around the country this season while watching your favourite team. Things got heated up when Highlanders and Dynamos got involved in a tight duel. With Highlanders playing at Barbourfields, Dynamos fans would choose to pay their hard earned money to enter the stadium, but spend their time glued on their cell phones following updates on Facebook for the Dynamos game where ever the Glamour Boys will be playing.
And when their favourite team scores, they would erupt into celebrations, and even players on the field of play knew the signals that their main competitors elsewhere had found the back of the nets, or had conceded, when their own fans erupt into celebrations when they have not scored a goal.
The cyberspace made the 2012 season a remarkable one, although there were some naughty ones who would post wrong results, just to get people confused. When Dynamos play Monomotapa in the final of the Mbada Diamonds Cup this afternoon, the rest of the country will follow the game on Facebook, thanks to the technology.
Gone are the days of waiting for the game to end so that one would make a call to find out the results of other matches, they are made public as they happen, real time kind of updates and they certainly changed the complexion of football this season. I wonder if we would have witnessed the same excitement and intensity in stadiums this season without the use of the social media.
Even coaches took up the initiative and communicated with their supporters, which brought them closer as a family. Talks of the wonders of technology.
For comments and contributions, email [email protected]. You can follow this writer on Twitter and Facebook.
Online Reporter