Digital and Social Media in Pro Sports: Analysis of the 2013 UEFA Top Four

Just like other businesses, so do professional sports teams use multi-functional websites and other online vehicles to connect to their audiences providing news, match day information, player statistics, and shopping opportunities among others. However, with the rapidly grown popularity of social media and mobile computing, the service expectations and functional requirements for digital online presence and interaction have also changed. We studied the characteristics of the 2013 UEFA top four football teams' online appearance, that is, the mix of official team websites and their social media and mobile applications. By building on past studies that had explored professional team websites by using the TEDS framework for information artifact evaluation, this investigation replicated the same 'human agent-centric' approach, but also included in the study the teams' social media and mobile channels. The results suggest that the official websites of the 2013 top-four UEFA teams have slightly improved over time. However, the official team websites have lost importance relative to social media and mobile channels.