This summer saw Liverpool make a welcome return to pre-season tours.
Having had their plans ended for such tours during the summers of 2020 and 2021 due to the impact of the pandemic, the Reds headed out on their first long haul trip since they went to the US in 2019, taking in the sights of both Thailand and Singapore this time around.
Packed crowds witnessed a defeat to Manchester United in Thailand and a win over Crystal Palace in Singapore, while the club's legions of fans in the region were able to connect with their heroes up close, with Liverpool's squad involved in open training sessions and marketing appearances as well as their two competitive games.
The return of pre-season tours was a welcome boon for Liverpool's commercial department too, with commercial director Ben Latty out in Southeast Asia during the tour alongside club CEO Billy Hogan to deliver on current partnerships as well as seek new opportunities. While Latty and Hogan were in Asia they inked a new four-year front of shirt deal with Standard Chartered for what is believed to be in excess of £50m per season for the Reds from the 2023/24 season.
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Speaking Exclusively to the ECHO, Latty said: "First and foremost the tour needs to be something that Jurgen and the team are comfortable with.
"(The decision to go to Asia) was unity of every single department across the football club coming together and making a decision on where we go that has the club's, total best interests at heart, and clearly football will lead that. The most important bit was that it worked for Jurgen and the team.
"It's a great opportunity for our commercial partners to activate with the team on the ground in those markets.
"There's the commercial partners element of this, but for us it's the fan interaction as well. We appreciate that there's a there's only a finite amount of access to Anfield throughout the season and it's incredibly hard and expensive for people in Asia and around the world to come and watch a football match in the UK. To actually go into those markets and take Liverpool to them is really important."
It is also very valuable for the club's longer term commercial strategy with the overseas market for the Premier League, the most watched and followed league in world football, continuing to grow.
While the so-called 'big six' of Liverpool, Manchester City, Manchester United, Chelsea, Arsenal and Tottenham Hotspur have all be able to make inroads there is still a large amount of untapped revenue that clubs have yet to find a way into.
Speaking to sports business website Off The Pitch, Neil Joyce, CEO and co-founder of The CLV Group, a data-driven transformation consultancy, address CLV Group's annual Fan Relationship Index report which claimed that £700m of untapped revenues were still out there for clubs in the UK, US, India and Indonesian markets through harnessing data in a more meaningful way when partnering with commercial sponsors to offer fans improved digital experiences.
Joyce believes that switching from brand partnerships to fan partnerships is the way that football is heading when tapping into the overseas market, with focus on improving the entertainment offering through launching paid premium content plays, virtual matchday experiences and e-sports propositions.
Joyce told Off The Pitch: "I think the clubs need to view them as audiences and create multimedia propositions and assets around reaching those fans and getting direct fan engagement going that way. They need to think of themselves as 'mini-Disneys' (a phrase also previously used by Gerry Cardinale, founder and managing partner of RedBird Capital Partners, the investment fund that owns 11 per cent of Liverpool owners Fenway Sports Group) . But in order to provide this, clubs need to master the data on who their audiences are.
"We’ve worked really heavily within the entertainment industry. We understand what technology, what data, what content, what resources they need to make this really successful.
"If you start to get under the bonnet of what the global fans want, the clubs can then start to build those frameworks around the content that they have and tailor those offerings depending upon what those audiences actually care about, what they want and what they need.
"So the opportunity is there for the clubs to create the content and develop more content. Obviously, it doesn't necessarily span the legacy of what Disney has, but from an asset perspective and ticking boxes around what they need - they have all of those assets in place to do it."
Football is big business, and in order to succeed on the pitch there are often tough business decisions that go hand in hand with it to ensure that it is paid for and that the biggest clubs can maintain pace with their rivals.
Finding new ways to present virtual experiences as the technology opens up is one, as is the monetisation of content around the club. The latter is something that Joyce urges much caution over, however.
"Monetisation could be a dirty word if not worked through very very carefully," Joyce said.
"Trying to put a price tag on your match day fans viewing virtual matchday content is not going to fly.
"Casual fans who probably live at the other end of the country and don't go to the game: there's less sensitivity around it because the research that we've done is paying out that they want more engagement, they're prepared to pay for it, they already pay for virtual experiences in other verticals as well.
"Those global audiences: They're the ones that really want to pay. That's where the real revenue opportunities are.
"I think though, when we went through the report, there's obviously clear communication strategy required to each of those different segments because otherwise you potentially have a European Super League fiasco in terms of miscommunication, lack of trust with the people that you need the most."
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