Legia Warsaw is the most honoured club in Polish football history, standing with 15 Ekstraklasa Champions titles and 19 Polish Cup titles. Apart from dominating Polish football, the club is also excelling in technological advancement and treats it as one of its top priorities. Let’s dive into Legia Warsaw’s digital transformation journey!
An article by Joachim Stelmach from our FBIN Business Network member TISA Group.
Legia’s challenge
One of the biggest challenges that football clubs (or sports clubs in general) face in today’s world is adequate digital transformation to adapt to new conditions in the market. What has changed in the football industry? The COVID-19 pandemic and Generation Z engagement issue prove that a football club is no longer just a sports team, but plays a massive role in the entertainment industry and competes against other media giants.
Legia Warsaw’s challenge was no different. With the pandemic restrictions of closing down of the stadiums, Gen Z’s falling engagement and growth of other non-football projects, the club required a set of tools, e.g.
- to build effective social media communication across many media channels,
- to accommodate both football and non-football content, and allowing its smart and easy management,
- to sell tickets, provide online fanstore to the supporters, run loyalty programs, implement solutions based on tokenisation and collect GDPR consents from their consumers.
As a solution to the problems, TISA Group, a member of the FBIN Business Network, proposed the implementation of UMPIRE, BRISK and WICKET tools. Let’s take a closer look at them.
Managing tons of engaging content
UMPIRE serves as a content management system (CMS) for the club’s new website and mobile app, which TISA Group has delivered in 2019/2020. Legia Warsaw required a platform that would accommodate the management of both football and non-football content. Outside of football, Legia also actively pursues other areas of sport, including volleyball and basketball, but also runs a charity foundation and children activities.
UMPIRE’s flexible grids and modules designed for various types of content provide accessible building of fan engagement by sharing football, non-football and lifestyle content. The editorial team can publish video and photo content, products etc., with speed and agility. Creating new modules or modifying existing ones has never been much easier!
The implementation of UMPIRE as the new integrated content management platform has been a significant digital step for Legia and allowed the club to grow its community, delivering more diverse content and engaging, personalised fan experience via the website and mobile app.
Creating engaging content within seconds
Legia Warsaw was looking for a solution to build an effective social media communication that would allow Legia to simultaneously share posts across their various media channels using pre-prepared templates. Legia wanted to uniformise their shared content with their existing visual identification to build fan engagement.
BRISK introduces features such as producing stunning visual and interactive content in an instant. By automating the publication process and integrating it with the club’s match centre, fans will receive match updates on their social media feeds. When connected with other TISA products, e.g. UMPIRE, BRISK presents automated information flow about the match, players or stats.
Since its implementation in July 2021, Legia Warsaw has used BRISK features to a huge extent, including pre-match, live and post-match posts and updates of Polish Ekstraklasa and UEFA Europa League matches, but also beyond matchday posts regarding Legia’s players birthdays and other events.
The success of capturing and using first-hand data
Legia needed to collect, store, integrate and classify first and third-party data in order to enhance and personalise communication with their fans. TISA came up with a solution tailored to their needs – WICKET, a customer identity and access management (CIAM) tool.
In the case of Legia Warsaw, WICKET helps with:
- Integrating data from FanStore, ticketing system, fan account, website & mobile app – all in one place!
- Managing the ticketing system based on the wallet assigned to the fan account.
- Transferring data to external vendors such as SalesForce.
- Running a loyalty program for supporters.
- Gathering and managing GDPR & other legal consents from supporters in one place.
- Establishing ALM [Access Level Management] so that the exclusive content is visible only to the people with the right permits.
- Preparing a special marketplace & wallet for Tokens created by Legia.
Legia Warsaw has successfully implemented WICKET. The integration of data between the website, mobile app, fan account, FanStore, ticketing system, and SalesForce leads to enhanced decision making by various departments in the sports club.
Conclusion
Legia Warsaw’s digital transformation has proved to be a successful process leading to the expansion of Legia’s online presence and the improvement of its online resources. However, there’s more yet to come, as digital transformation is a continuous process!
Any sports club or organisation that wants to play a significant role in providing entertainment to the masses will need to adapt to the current circumstances and needs. The earlier you do it, the greater your advantage over others!
