Real Sporting’s Outside-The-Box Approach To Social Media And Esports Is Attracting A New And Younger Audience

The Spanish soccer club, Real Sporting, recently launched the pioneering Mareo Education & Research Lab while also becoming the first Spanish club to create an escape room in a football stadium. Now, as the club looks to grow further in the digital sphere, Real Sporting has brought about an important transformation to its Twitch channel and has worked with sponsors to enhance its esports offering. These two progressive approaches are helping the club grow digitally and are attracting a new and younger audience.

With the Twitch channel, it was previously solely used for esports streams, but Real Sporting breathed fresh life into it by launching a weekly show called “Puerta 18,” (Gate 18 in English), with the name coming from the fact that their home stadium of El Molinón has 17 gates. The show will open up a virtual gate to the fanbase and is broadcast every Monday, with a different guest each week. Many times, the guest will be a current first-team footballer, but Real Sporting will also highlight B team players, women’s team players, club legends, and famous Real Sporting fans.

“We’ve seen that the younger generation wants new channels to interact with their favorite players,” said Carlos Llamas, Director of Communications at Real Sporting. “That’s why we came up with the idea of giving the Twitch channel a fresh boost. We want the guest and the fan to have a relaxed time during our show, for it to be pure entertainment and for there to be a special connection between the two parties. We want all fans in general, and the younger ones in particular, to see Real Sporting as a family and to feel like members of it thanks to our channel.”

Very few soccer clubs have put together a weekly show like this on Twitch, so Real Sporting is ahead of the curve in this sense. They’re also leading the way when it comes to agreeing to sponsorship deals for the club’s esports team, which competes in eLaLiga Santander. They have a main shirt sponsor in Genyus School and also an official travel agency in BCD Sports.

(All information was provided by Football Espana)