“I have no religion, I have no God. Liverpool Football Club is my religion – it’s a way of life for me.”
Born in Singapore – almost 11,000 km (6,800 miles) from Liverpool’s Anfield Stadium – Vijay has been waiting for his team to visit his hometown since 2011.
He’s not the only one. Earlier this month, more than 50,000 fans packed Singapore’s National Stadium for a friendly between Liverpool and Crystal Palace.
After three years of a Covid travel ban, English Premier League teams are once again criss-crossing the globe on pre-season summer tours.
The financial importance of these trips can hardly be overestimated. As Manchester United reported a commercial revenue loss of almost $56million (£46.8million) in 2021, the club said it was “mainly” due to disruption from Covid, which included the cancellation of the club’s pre-season tour first team in India belonged.
Now that restrictions have been eased, many clubs are returning in droves to their key overseas market.
“Asia is our largest single region in terms of fan base,” Liverpool chief executive Billy Hogan told the BBC.
“Someone once said to me that you can stand at any airport and get on any plane and have a reason to go there and find Liverpool fans. But a third of our global support is here and we believe there is tremendous opportunity in Asia.”
This summer, Premier League rivals Manchester United opted to visit Thailand and Australia, where they also played against Liverpool and Crystal Palace.
Tottenham Hotspur, meanwhile, went to South Korea, the home country of their superstar striker Son Heung-min.
From a sporting point of view, these trips make little sense. Long flights across multiple time zones, high temperatures and muggy weather are not ideal preparations for a new season back home in England.
“It’s not my favorite pastime,” said Liverpool manager Jürgen Klopp in response to a question from the BBC at a press conference.
“First and foremost I’m a coach and if we could do two weeks in Austria and train there twice a day that would be better.”
“But we know how big our fan base is in Asia and being close to them is a wonderful thing.”
Actually, the debate in top football has long been settled. The commercial case has clearly won and executives will feel reassured by the high demand in the region this summer.
New figures reported this year show that for the first time ever, the Premier League will derive more revenue from international broadcasters than from domestic channels in its home UK market. Asia alone is expected to account for $1.4 billion between next season and 2025.
In South Korea, Spurs’ spectacle against a local all-star team sold out in 25 minutes. It also became the most-streamed sporting event in the country’s history.
Meanwhile, Bangkok promoters felt comfortable setting the starting price for a Manchester United-Liverpool friendly at $136. In Singapore, the cheapest tickets are $107.
These prizes are significantly higher than fans in England would expect for a competitive game, but ultimately they represent the powerful appeal of the Premier League’s top clubs.
A Liverpool spokesman told the BBC: “We have not set these ticket prices, we receive a set fee and we do not receive a share of the ticket revenue.”
How much teams get paid for these far-flung friendlies is typically closely monitored in the industry, but analysts say the fees alone are unlikely to justify the trips, especially when travel and staff costs are factored in.
“Teams don’t really make a lot of money directly from preseason games, maybe a few million dollars a game at the top,” said Kevin McCullagh, Asia Pacific editor of SportBusiness magazine.
“But there is a bigger game at play. This is about brand building and fan engagement in a market that will deliver much larger long-term revenues from broadcast rights and sponsorship deals with Asian brands and companies. This is where the real money is. “
While in Singapore, Liverpool signed a new shirt sponsorship deal reportedly worth more than $240 million with Standard Chartered, an Asia-focused bank.
Aside from helping to raise a sponsor’s profile on the global stage, football clubs can also provide them with ready-made treasure troves of consumer data.
For example, Manchester United estimates that its Customer Relationship Management (CRM) database contains 50 million records. On social media, they had 176 million connections last year.
In return for their sponsorship money, a brand and its marketing department often gain valuable insight into the consumer behavior of millions of fans who have registered or engaged with the club at some point in the past.
“The first thing big brands will ask for is fan data,” McCullagh said.
“Before they invest, they want to know how many fans a club has, demographics, age, how many males, how many females, their income profile and things like that,” he added.
However, it is television money that has propelled English football to the top financially.
For many years, other sports leagues – including European soccer leagues – have looked with envy at the Premier League, which first came to Asia and established trade ties in the 1990s.
The Premier League’s competitiveness, strong fan culture and connection to the English language have all helped it become the most watched sports league in the world, attracting a total of 3.2 billion viewers worldwide.
Half of the world’s fanbase and a quarter of TV viewership, the Premier League says, is in the Asia-Pacific region – even though games often end in the middle of the night.
But experts say retaining all of those fans will be a challenge, especially with a much wider range of pastimes and lifestyle consumption options available to younger generations.
Last year, Florentino Perez, the president of Spanish giants Real Madrid, said: “Young people are no longer interested in football. They have other platforms to distract themselves.”
This view, coupled with predictions that TV revenues will eventually decline, convinced some executives at Europe’s top football clubs that a new competition would need to be invented to keep fans engaged.
Last year’s ill-fated European Super League – a ‘closed shop’ format in which five English Premier League clubs would have competed – was seen by many as appealing to millions of fans around the world, particularly in Asia, the dear elite would see clubs rather than the mediocre teams.
But it was eventually scrapped after a furious backlash from fans, both in the UK and around the world.
“European football clubs shouldn’t be making assumptions about Asia, they have to fight for every dollar they make,” says Simon Chadwick, global sport professor at Emlyon Business School in France.
“Asian consumers are smart, cultured and perceptive. It could even be argued that Asian fans have become somewhat disengaged from European football in recent years, so clubs should be neither arrogant nor naïve in assuming that Asia is the goose is that laid.” the golden egg.”
Mr Chadwick also said the prospect of competitive Premier League matches abroad – something first proposed in 2008 – was unlikely in the short to medium term, although the debate will eventually resurface.
Back in Singapore, Vijay takes off his shirt and shows his back. It’s covered in Liverpool tattoos and the years of every single trophy won in the club’s history. He is optimistic about the future.
“My dad was a Liverpool fan and the first thing I did to my little daughters was put a Liverpool shirt on them. That will continue for generations, believe me.”
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