Real Madrid on Tuesday night unveiled a new mobile app that the club has been developing for the past 10 months. A key step in the development of the app was consulting fans on the content they wanted, the format they preferred and the types of devices they would use. The final product released by Real Madrid does not follow a specific model the club wanted to emulate, but those involved in the conceptualization looked at hundreds of apps used by teams and leagues around the world, including the official apps of the NBA and NFL. Fans who had the previous app will receive a message telling them to download the new app, which will look to provide localized content to the club’s widespread network of followers. Real estimates that less than 5% of its nearly 450 million fans live in Spain, and one of the app’s priorities, according to club Media Dir Rafael de los Santos Navarro, is to provide fans in Colombia, for example, with a steady stream of information about James Rodríguez and other topics relevant to that specific market. The club’s old app was essentially a mirror of Real Madrid’s website, while the new one is designed to break from that mold. De los Santos Navarro: “We want to have a completely different application that is a combination of many things.” Some of the features of the new app will include exclusive content of players’ activities on gameday, including footage of travel from the hotel to the stadium. Fans in attendance at games will have access to replays and different angles of certain plays, while fans viewing from home will have access to statistics and information tailored to a TV audience. Updates on the action will also be available to fans who cannot view the game on TV. The new app will first be available in Spanish and English, and de los Santos Navarro said the club is working to eventually make it available in all the additional languages in which its website is accessible: French, Portuguese, Indonesian, Chinese, Japanese and Arabic. “We don’t want to rush with the languages, because we don’t only want to do a translation, we want to do a localization,” de los Santos Navarro said. “We’re now really thinking about the Chinese market, which for us is key. We’re trying to create an application that is fully localized to the Chinese market, not only the translation of the current app that we have, but we want to localize it.”
