AS Roma players Luca Pellegrini and Stephan El Shaarawy during the International Champions Cup in 2018. (Photo by Richard Rodriguez/Getty Images)
Soccer clubs are amassing some of the largest global fanbases in professional sports. AS Roma, a professional Italian football club based in the country’s capital city, is turning to cloud technology to churn out media faster and local offices to better target fans outside of its original demographic.
A few years ago the Italian team only produced content in Italian and English. But it has expanded its digital team dramatically in recent seasons, spreading personnel from Shanghai to Brazil to meet fans in their local markets, while embracing technology to disperse stories faster.
The club now claims to have around 87 million fans globally. That’s still a far cry from the hundreds of millions that teams such as Real Madrid and FC Barcelona claim to have, but AS Roma’s growth is a step in the right direction, according to Paul Rogers, the club’s head of digital media.
“Eventually, our digital media operation had run out of road, entirely,” Rogers said in a recent interview as he reflected on the team’s transition. “We had just Italian at first, then we started doing English-language content as well, but it was all based in the same office. Over the last three years, we’ve grown as a digital team. Now we have an office in Jakarta, an office in Cairo, and we have people in Boston, Brazil, Venezuela, France and China.”
Rogers attributed the team’s digital growth over the past few years to two major things: localized content, fueled by a growing list of satellite offices, and cloud technology provided by a company called Egnyte. The San Francisco 49ers also work with Egnyte, which has helped the NFL team quickly transmit large media files.
“We did a big article once about fans who had tattoos of Roma players. We captured all these pictures, and fans sent in their pictures of their tattoos. But, for example, in Malaysia, tattoos are frowned upon, it’s culturally bad,” Rogers said. Simply using a translating service to quickly convert English and Italian content to regional languages in Asia, South America, and other regions of the world is no longer enough. “We’d rather have people based in actual locations so we can avoid such mistakes, because it’s much easier for them to understand the local culture.”
Of course, outside of producing both localized and engaging content, the team also has to be fast. Rogers said Egnyte—which is like an enterprise-grade version of Google Docs with heightened levels of privacy and security—has replaced the use of WeTransfer at AS Roma.
“We have to be quick,” he said. “It’s now much easier to transfer bigger files.”
Sharing and posting large files has become critical as fans continually turn their attention to video and crave a seemingly unending stream of content both on-and-off-season, according to Rajesh Ram, co-founder and chief customer officer at Egnyte.
“These files are getting bigger than ever before: media is richer. I mean how many videos do you watch compared with pages you read?” said Ram. “I think, when you have those types of files and you need to get them out to the fanbase, you need this type of technology to make it happen.”
