European football’s governing body UEFA is working on its official mobile app for this summer’s Euro 2012 tournament as part of the mobile operator’s sponsorship package of the tournament hosted in Poland and the Ukraine.
The app is likely to be co-branded and will contain functions, such as group tables and match dates, that will prove useful to both fans attending the tournament and those watching it from home.Orange, an official sponsor of Euro 2012 and is present in 11 markets across the continent, has confirmed that it is developing the app on behalf of UEFA although no launch date has been officially set.
However, with a little over 60 days until the tournament kicks-off a launch date can’t be far off as the mobile operator has already raised the curtain on its sponsorship activity in the UK through joint exercises with the relaunched Sony Mobile. Sony Mobile has been named as Orange’s ‘global handset partner’ for Euro 2012 and from next month the two will use their combined web properties get fans to interact about the tournament when online. This will include a co-branded Facebook game, Orange Golden Goal, to win smartphones and tickets to the tournament through events such as the Orange Supporters’ Cup game.
Earlier this year, Orange sponsored the African Cup of Nations tournament, hosted in Equitorial Guinea and Gabon, following a similar deal it struck with the Confederation of African Football. The sponsorship packages from the mobile operator are aimed at bolstering awareness of its customer base in developing markets, it counts millions in Europe but only 150,000 in Africa, according to official statistics.
Although, no official details of the app have been released yet, Total Digital Football did check out an O2 and Adidas sponsored event hosted in London recently where the brands encouraged programmers to develop sport-themed mobile apps using NFC phones. Although NFC phones, devices that can communicate data without contact using the tech standards, similar to Oyster cards, are still niche they are expected to be rolled out massively in the next year.
Adidas’ prize, tickets to a Champion’s League game, was awarded to a developer team that produced an app called ‘Total Event’ which encouraged attendees of football games to check-in to the ground using their NFC smartphones, both at the turnstiles and when at their seats. Theoretically, the app could be used as part of a digital season-ticket and users of the app can share their photos of the action on the pitch with others in the stadium. Fellow supporters can then see how certain incidents appeared from their side of the stadium by looking at another pictures taken from opposing stands.
Although the app is unlikely to be launched any time soon, the app does demonstrate some of the possibilities posed by technology and digital media which brands, such as Adidas, are currently looking at to augment crowd participation in the game. Previously, Manchester City kit-manufacturer Umbro has encouraged users of mobile social network Foursquare to ‘check-in’ to the club’s Eastlands stadium using Foursquare in a bid to get supporters to interact while at the ground.
By Ronan Shields
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