From The Sunday Times:
Which nation boasts the greatest number of Manchester United supporters? The answer, by a huge margin, is China. Compared with their fanbase of about 10m in the UK and Ireland, market research tells the club it has at least 23m serious followers in the world’s most populous country. If, amid the exhausting schedule of United’s Far East tour, Sir Alex Ferguson come up with a few footballing reasons why they would be better off preparing for the new season within the peaceful environs of their Carrington training ground, there are 23m counter-arguments to shout them down.
United hit China for the first time in their history today. Go east, far east, is this year’s mantra of the footballing marketeer. Just as United are arriving in Beijing, Real Madrid will be departing it for Tokyo, having played an exhibition match against Beijing Guoan yesterday. There was the usual mobbing of David Beckham while the Spanish giants were in the city, but it is United who believe they have China in their hands.
have such a foothold there, without ever having set foot within its borders, is the loyalty of the Chinese towards clubs rather than individual players. While celebrity is king in other parts of the Far East, particularly Japan, in China a different ethos pervades.
United’s modern rise coincided with the rebirth of Chinese football (the country’s first professional competition, the C-League, was inaugurated a year after United won the Premiership for the first time, in 1993) and many of the Chinese who looked abroad for a foreign team to support alighted on United. Their thinking has not budged since.
"We did some market research in China, Japan, Korea and Hong Kong after David Beckham left us, and the only change we noticed was in Japan," said Peter Draper, United’s director of marketing. "If you look at Japan in terms of how they market lots of products, they are very personality-led. But apart from in Japan, the Beckham factor did not have any effect on our popularity whatsoever. We take the view that the team is everything, and that is something that is set by the boss (Ferguson). He doesn’t like people popping up as megastars."
The Telegraph:
Later there was a Nike soccer clinic involving eight players, and other PR stunts are planned with Audi, Budweiser, Pepsi and Vodafone. The tour is not just about signing up new companies - two more are promised in China and Taiwan - but helping existing sponsors gain exposure in the China. Even without the commercial tie-ups, United will earn a fee of around £3 million for their four matches in the Far East, starting with yesterday's 2-0 victory over a Hong Kong representative team, but the club's business ambitions go much further. According to market research, an astonishing 23 million people in China describe themselves as United supporters - more than double the figure for Britain and Ireland combined. The new website deal will be the first step in identifying how they spend their hard-earned yuan. United's marketing director, Peter Draper, said: "The website is a great place to understand who they are. Knowing who our customers are and understanding what they want is the big challenge.'' Given the undeveloped nature of the Chinese market, United are not the only club looking to establish a foothold. "Real [Madrid] are in Beijing just before us and Bayern Munich are also looking to be there,'' Draper said.
The good news for United is that there is already evidence of strong brand loyalty. Even the departure of David Beckham had little discernible impact on the club's popularity. Draper said: "We did some market research after David Beckham left us in China, Japan, Korea and Hong Kong, and the only change we noticed was in Japan. If you look at how Japan market lots of products, they are very personality-led. We take the view that the team is everything, something that is set by the boss. He [Sir Alex Ferguson] doesn't like people popping up as megastars."
Yesterday, most of the cheers in Hong Kong's national stadium were for Ryan Giggs, though the marketing men must have pinched themselves at the sight of Chinese winger Dong Fangzhou scoring a superb solo goal for United to add to Guiseppe Rossi's tap-in.