In a league of our own

The English Football League was the first-ever competition in a sport that has since taken over the world. And it’s still the biggest in Europe, with 72 members, three leagues and domestic rights of over £600 million.

The EFL has embraced the digital age, and every club now has its own website offering fans news, information and live matches. However, this shared digital platform was getting creaky: user unfriendly, difficult to update and straining to cope with the functions we’ve come to expect from a modern web site.

EFL Digital, responsible for managing all this, needed a game-changer to future-proof their digital ambitions.

175 of the world’s best agencies went into the hat to win the prize of becoming the EFL’s long-term digital design and development partner. After a tough tournament, we raised the trophy for a seven-year deal.

We made some big promises to our new teammates:

• Deliver the best possible fan experience.

• Make the most of commercial opportunities.

• Create a platform that wouldn’t break down easily and was able to evolve.

• Make it easy for clubs to publish content.

• Provide high-quality support.

Delivering 65 stable and effective websites in just nine months is no walk in the park. But it is easier when you adopt an agile delivery methodology and focus on building what matters to the EFL: its clubs and fans.

All three of our audiences were looking for different things:

• Fans wanted to go to sites everyday looking for news on their favorite teams.

• Clubs wanted a unique website and the ability to publish what they wanted, when they wanted.

• The EFL needed a digital platform that could cope with anything the future could throw at it and provide an income stream for clubs and partners.

We spent six weeks immersing ourselves in the EFL, the clubs and their fans. The target was a “minimum loveable product” that gave all the clubs a brilliant place to start: a platform we could then enhance over the next seven years.

• We made sure the design framework was flexible enough so each club could make it their own.

• We provided an initial club base template with equally flexible components.

• We created a Live Match Centre for those not able to attend games.

• We brought it to life with data, a club curated blog and social integration.

Sports sites in the UK, especially football sites, have tended to use a hit-and-hope approach to advertising.

We provided something more likely to reach the back of the net. We created an elegant solution for sponsors and partners that integrated advertising into the sites, increasing engagement and providing a less jarring experience to users.

We developed new revenue streams through a subscription model that gave access to NeuLion. This offered live streaming for international fans and radio commentary for UK fans. It could be paid for on a game, monthly or season-long basis.

In just nine months, we managed to turn things around for the EFL. It was a massive job involving 66 different visual themes, 1 million content items, news stories and assets with six Episerver DXC environments and 12 multisite instances per environment.

The result is a platform that now hosts 80% of all UK football websites and offers so much more: