Players and teams are being trained on the benefits of utilising social media to appeal to a younger fan base
IMG has partnered with the Rugby League to educate its players on social media strategy and profile building.
Dan Chirwa, account director at IMG Digital, is working with Rugby League players (including Bevan French, Junior Nsemba, Matty Ashton and coach Sam Burgess) to help grow the sport and increase awareness of it and the players among younger fans.
The move is getting results, with Sam Burgess and Ash Handley’s combined reels, produced in partnership with the ATP Tennis Tour earlier this year, receiving almost half a million views to date.
Broadcast Sport talked to Chirwa about the initiative. He told us: “Rugby League is trying to find new ways to create revenue, and content and owned athlete IP is attractive for this. It’s about extending the narratives on the field outside of the 90 minutes of play, into this whole conversational piece”.
The issue for Rugby League when it comes to this, Chirwa believes, is there’s a lack of awareness about some of the current key Rugby League players.
He said: “You ask people about Rugby League and by and large, they give you the same names from the past. You ask them to name someone currently playing and they’ll struggle. So, the job for us is to find a way to tell the story of a new generation of athletes.”
The benefits for the athletes of ramping up their social content also need to be made clear, said Chirwa. “You have to explain what’s in it for them – they can find a way to build their own profiles, monetise their own profiles, and then we can bring new sponsors and new finance into the sport”.
IMG started working with the Rugby League during the last Rugby League World Cup, in 2022, with “quite intensive” one-to-one coaching to explain how to make reels, video posts, and so on. “It’s helping them improve and build confidence,” says Chirwa. “One of the biggest things is fear of doing wrong, which is a stronger deterrent than the reward of doing right.”
To encourage the next generation of players to engage with social media from the off, IMG Digital takes part in training during the Rugby League rookie camps. These are attended by 100+ emerging players across all Super League clubs, and centres on educational seminars on health, mental health and nutrition. IMG Digital runs digital media sessions at the event, where Chirwa and his team run through good and bad examples of digital content, and show players how to create their own digital content.
When asked for an example of some standout examples of his team’s work with Rugby League, Chirwa points to a collaboration with Wimbledon that saw players Jodie Cunningham, Ash Handley and Sam Burgess at the tennis tournament answering questions that tied in Rugby League and tennis.
The content published as cross-collabs whenever the players they mentioned were playing. So, in Handley’s case, he mentioned Nick Kyrgios, who loved the content and posted across his own channels. Kyrgious has 6.3 million followers and Handley’s Rugby League-focused content ended up being one of the most viewed videos on those channels that week.
Chirwa said: “It’s not a difficult thing to organise, but it’s just about being strategic. Ash is great for stuff like this because he’s really just an outgoing guy and really across it. It just worked like a dream.”
Broadcast Sport also spoke to Adam Whiteside, head of digital and membership at Rugby League Commercial. He echoed Chirwa’s points, saying: “I don’t think as a sport we’ve told the stories of our players away from the field very well, and people probably aren’t familiar with the personalities we have in the game.
“That’s where myself, Dan and others from Rugby League Commercial and IMG are working to try and nurture those personalities a bit and get them out across the social media channels”.
Whiteside says Rugby League is currently going through something of a cultural change and IMG coming on board has helped us “push that a little bit more with players”.
“As a sport, it’s got to help us try and reach new audiences. That’s a big issue for Rugby League. We need to reach new audiences. We have an ageing fan base, so we’ve got to reach younger audiences. The best way to do that is through channels like Instagram, TikTok and YouTube, where the younger demographic sits. It’s the personalities that will pull those people in – relating to these players will engage the audience and get them through the turnstiles.”
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