Dubai: On and off the field, La Liga’s relationship with Saudi Arabian football is growing.
In early March, the La Liga FC Futures U14 tournament was held at the Mahd Sports Academy in Riyadh and was won by Spanish club Villarreal.
The competition was organized in partnership with the Kingdom’s Ministry of Sports and featured 12 teams, including eight EA Sports La Liga teams – Barcelona, Cadiz, Atlético Madrid, Sevilla, Villarreal, Real Betis and Osasuna – as well as Italy. AS Roma. , Portugal’s SL Benfica, France’s Olympique de Marseille and Saudi Arabia’s own Mahd Academy.
Just last week, Barcelona-based Espanyol became the latest Spanish club to welcome a delegation from the Saudi Future Falcons programme, with the Kingdom’s team beating the La Liga reserve team 3-2 at the Dani Jarque Sports City.
A number of other collaborations have taken place and Maite Ventura, La Liga’s managing director for the Middle East and North Africa, says more projects are set to come to fruition in the coming months and years – all in line with La Liga’s mission to grow its brand. Is part of.
“In the Saudi case our goal is to understand that the popularity of La Liga and the popularity of football in Saudi is very high,” Ventura told Arab News at La Liga’s headquarters in Dubai. “I think more than 80 percent of the population loves football, so we wanted to be there. It is one of the leading countries in the region, so it was very important for us to be there.
“We don’t just want to be there with a small project,” he said. “We have many different projects there, with the General Entertainment Authority, with the Ministry of Sports, and (recently) we were in Riyadh celebrating FC Futures, which Villarreal won. “We want to know about the countries in which we have La Liga fans.”
Off the pitch, other ventures include the opening of a themed bar and restaurant LaLiga Twentynine and the world’s largest football museum, Legends, in Riyadh in collaboration with Saudi events company SELA and GEA.
“So, that’s our mission there, it’s all about connecting with the fans, connecting with the core institutions out there,” Ventura said. “We want to be there, and we don’t want to be there just doing FC Futures, we want to be there for a long time, and we want to be there for our fans.”
When La Liga’s office in Dubai opened in 2014, it became its first office outside Madrid, providing an essential insight into spreading the Spanish league’s brand.
“Our president, Javier Tebas, understood that in Spain population is the limit, so the only way to keep growing was to go beyond our borders.”
Dubai was seen as the ideal strategic location from which to conduct operations in the rest of the region.
“This marks the 10th anniversary of not only the Dubai office, but also the international expansion strategy,” Ventura said. “It has been a long journey, but to actually be working in the MENA region, where football is the number one sport and where La Liga is the most consumed competition, it has been a pleasure.”
At the regional level, Real Madrid and Barcelona have enjoyed massive support in the Middle East for decades, while others such as Atlético Madrid, Athletic Bilbao and Valencia have also earned large followings. La Liga’s mission is not just to promote its collective brand, but also to promote individual clubs to an Arabic-speaking audience.
“We’re doing it in different areas,” Ventura said. “From a data perspective, we are working with about 12 clubs in La Liga, we are managing their Arabic social media accounts, we are planning weekly content for them to connect with their fans.
“Clubs have also understood that their fans are not only in Spain, Valencia or Sevilla or Vigo, but they are also in Cairo, Dubai or Jeddah,” he said. “So, that stuck in their minds and over the last four to five years, clubs have changed their strategy of going abroad and connecting with their fans. For us, we started with just three people in 2013. And, right now, we are about 20 people working just for the MENA region in eight different countries.
As well as its strategic projects in Saudi Arabia, La Liga representatives are also working in Qatar, Morocco, Egypt and Iraq.
“At the moment we have three people who live entirely in Baghdad, because we have a very interesting project with the football association there,” Ventura said. “Ultimately, our way of doing that is to always be on the ground, physically right here, understanding who our fans are, how they consume our product, how they like it, and that helps us in this Allows to understand the market and obtain intelligence and go to clubs to explain to them how it works.
“For example, living in Morocco is not the same as being in Dubai or Baghdad. Our mission is fundamentally to increase the brand value and value of TV rights to reach other audiences, other profiles, and of course, generate commercial opportunities for La Liga and the clubs.
In 2022, La Liga and Dubai-based media multinational Galaxy Racer signed a 15-year joint venture to promote the league’s brand in the MENA region and the Indian subcontinent.
“We are absolutely convinced that for La Liga to enter any market, we need to team up with a partner. It doesn’t matter whether it is the local authority, the football federation, the local league or the club. We’re here to connect with fans, to connect with people who love football in every country. So, it is not like we are in Dubai, and we are managing everything from here. In the case of Iraq, we have a strategic agreement with the football association there. We are working with them to transform the local league, the Iraqi Stars League.
Ventura revealed that the highest number of users from the region registered on La Liga’s app come from Iraq, and that technology and artificial intelligence are the ways through which Spanish clubs will reach fans, as in the cases of Sevilla and Deportivo Alavés. . To gain an advantage in the area of scouting and recruiting players, name two.
“We (La Liga) are working very hard to strengthen the brand of each club,” Ventura said. “Because clubs don’t rely only on their players – if a player leaves, the club has to remain strong. So, undoubtedly, these are very important lessons that we have been working on over the last 10 years. First it was international strategy, they understood it, and for example, they are doing a lot of work in the field of technology, and certainly AI will play an important role not only in this region, but in La Liga in the coming years around the world. Is going to play a role. ,
“Each club has its own approach,” Ventura said. “Some of them have very strong grassroots systems. Some of them are busy involving themselves too much in technology. Each of them are experts in (ways of) entering the market. It is not the same from one club to another and he has understood that correctly.”
Ventura expects to sign more partnerships in 2024 and beyond.
“Last year, it was very important because we partnered with Galaxy Racer,” he said. “In the MENA region, 50 percent of the population is under 30 years of age. We are very focused on connecting primarily with the youngest generations, the Millennials and Gen Z population. So, from this season onwards, we have started creating a lot of local content. This means that here we are creating content in Arabic for our Arab fans. Right now we have a very strong strategy. We recently launched the first Arabic podcast from La Liga, it’s called ‘Vamos La Liga’.
He further added, “We were expecting bigger numbers, but the response has been amazing. “We had more than five million views on the second episode with (famous journalist) Achraf Ben Ayad.”
Ventura says the episode was one of the most consumed pieces of content produced by La Liga’s global accounts.
“The experience has been amazing, and we will continue to increase (the amount of) local content, and we are working with a lot of content creators. “We will have very big names on this podcast very soon,” he said. “We are very focused on producing local content, and by that I mean everything will be in Arabic and with people from the region.” . So the experience was very good.
“We’re also making documentaries, we’re also making other types of programs and everything will be rolling out in the coming months so it’s very exciting.”