THE AGE OF SOCIAL COMPETITION IN FOOTBALL: SOCIALMEDIA CONTENT OF CLUBS IN DELOİTTE FOOTBALL MONEYLEAGUE

Abstract: The purpose of this study is to analyze the social media content of the first 20 football clubs in 2015/2016 Football Money League released each year by Deloitte, which is a firm that provides services to its customers about audit, consulting, corporate finance, risk management and tax with the cooperation of thousands of professionals working in independent firms worldwide. The study used descriptive analysis method; the clubs’ social media accounts of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Google+ were analyzed one by one and their various posts were collected under specific themes and sub-themes. The results of the study showed that the clubs’ posts were grouped under 23 different main themes and 94 sub-themes and the most frequently posted main themes were match day, informing, training, story, interaction, tagging, custom chart and celebration-greeting- commemoration, while the least posted were posts in other languages, humor, location posts and posts of emotion. Today, social media is an important channel of communication for the sport phenomenon followed by masses, as it is for all organizations. The unique capability of social media in communication presents commercial opportunities especially for organizations, which are global brands. When the financial reports are examined, it can be seen that there is a positive association between the sportive success and the income levels of clubs, which want to come to the forefront in competition. It can be said that clubs should place importance on marketing based communication works for sustainable financial success. Thus, it is thought that the development line of football clubs will be associated with their skills of using existing communication technologies and in addition to other expansion measures, clubs should lay great stress on the social media factor and they should not neglect social media. As a result, it has been determined that the evaluated clubs are attempting to enrich Social Media channels with different content in order to integrate and interact with their supporters.