Which nation boasts the greatest number of Manchester United supporters? The answer, by a huge margin, is China. Compared with their fanbase of about 10m in the UK and Ireland, market research tells the club it has at least 23m serious followers in the world’s most populous country. If, amid the exhausting schedule of United’s Far East tour, Sir Alex Ferguson come up with a few footballing reasons why they would be better off preparing for the new season within the peaceful environs of their Carrington training ground, there are 23m counter-arguments to shout them down.
United hit China for the first time in their history today. Go east, far east, is this year’s mantra of the footballing marketeer. Just as United are arriving in Beijing, Real Madrid will be departing it for Tokyo, having played an exhibition match against Beijing Guoan yesterday. There was the usual mobbing of David Beckham while the Spanish giants were in the city, but it is United who believe they have China in their hands.
One reason they already have such a foothold there, without ever having set foot within its borders, is the loyalty of the Chinese towards clubs rather than individual players. While celebrity is king in other parts of the Far East, particularly Japan, in China a different ethos pervades.
United’s modern rise coincided with the rebirth of Chinese football (the country’s first professional competition, the C-League, was inaugurated a year after United won the Premiership for the first time, in 1993) and many of the Chinese who looked abroad for a foreign team to support alighted on United. Their thinking has not budged since.
“We did some market research in China, Japan, Korea and Hong Kong after David Beckham left us, and the only change we noticed was in Japan,” said Peter Draper, United’s director of marketing. “If you look at Japan in terms of how they market lots of products, they are very personality-led. But apart from in Japan, the Beckham factor did not have any effect on our popularity whatsoever. We take the view that the team is everything, and that is something that is set by the boss (Ferguson). He doesn’t like people popping up as megastars.”
A quick search of Chinese-language websites reveals many more hits for “Ryan Giggs” than “David Beckham” and more for “Manchester United” than “Real Madrid”. The figure of 23m fans is drawn from just 10 Chinese cities in a United survey.
“China’s such a huge and diverse country, with a large rural population, that it’s hopeless trying to extrapolate, but the real number of United supporters is probably much bigger,” said Draper. A recent independent survey estimated that 79% of Chinese people — about one billion — had heard of Manchester United, and nearly half of those considered themselves supporters of the club.
These sort of statistics make United the most attractive outfit for promoters, media-rights holders and sponsors, despite Real Madrid’s bellicose boasts about supplanting them as the world’s biggest club. Seeking to grow their supporter base is merely one business reason for United’s visit to China.
On a tour promoted by the international sports marketing giant IMG, the club will earn between £3m and 4m in match fees alone for eight days’ work. Even more important is the effect the club’s presence in China has on would-be sponsors. Nearly every big company in the world is trying to get into China, whose market has such potential that a car manufacturer has paid about £100m to have its name associated with the Beijing Olympics — purely within the Chinese domestic market. United’s reach within the country will let them extract ever greater fees from their “golden circle” of sponsors — Audi, Pepsi, Budweiser, Vodafone, Nike, Air Asia and ING are all partners in the current tour.
For United it is win-win-win. The more sponsors they help bring to China, the bigger their match fees and the more fans they can attract. “If you’re working with the right kind of brands, they can put you in places where you can’t go yourself,” said Draper. “If you can have Manchester United on a Pepsi can or a Budweiser can, that’s incredible exposure. It’s good for us and it ’s good for companies like Pepsi, so it becomes a virtuous circle.”
Liverpool, Arsenal, Everton, Manchester City — and Chelsea, increasingly — also have large Chinese followings. An extraordinary 360m people watched Manchester City draw 2-2 with Everton in January 2003, with Li Tie playing in the Everton side and Sun Jihai, the China captain and national football hero, lining up for City.
Nothing levers greater interest in this part of the world than the national pride associated with a homegrown footballer playing for a top European club, which is presumably why United included in their touring party Dong Fangzhou, a 20-year-old Chinese striker signed from Dalian Shide. Having been farmed out to Royal Antwerp, he has been struggling to get a game in the Belgian Second Division. “He’s quick, strong, athletic and I think he’s got the material to do well,” Ferguson told a press conference in Hong Kong. Dong came on as a substitute against Hong Kong yesterday and marked his debut with a goal. Ferguson promised Dong would play a sizeable role of United’s game against Beijing Hyundai on Tuesday.
However, Draper notes that Dong will influence United’s growth in China only if he proves to be a decent player. “You’ve got to be able to perform, haven’t you?” he said. “What makes you a star is being a top sportsman, then everything else follows. For us, if Dong made it, it would be huge. The same goes for Park Ji-Sung (United’s recent Korean signing from PSV Eindhoven). If he is half-decent and gets half a run, it will be huge.”
Park is a sporting deity in Korea. Peter Brookes, managing director of MUTV, reports that the number of subscription inquiries his channel has received from Korea “has gone through the roof”.
MUTV is another factor that United believe will give them an edge. “Plenty of clubs are coming to the Far East, but it’s just to take the match fee and run,” Draper said. “What are they doing, after they play, to cement their relationship with local fans?” When United leave China, the heavy artillery of their marketing department will be rolled out. As well as producing a Chinese website and extending MUTV’s reach in the area, the club is launching a credit card in the Far East and giving away free merchandise to Chinese fans joining their international supporters’ club, One United. As a goodwill measure, the club is supporting various Unicef campaigns in China and is directly funding a programme in Sichuan to prevent people-trafficking and help its victims.
Manchester United Soccer Schools (MUSS) is beginning courses in Hong Kong. MUSS has even signed a deal to provide coaching to the national Under-15 and Under-17 teams in conjuction with the Chinese FA and Nike.
Set against all of this is the fact that United’s game against Beijing Hyundai is the only one on their tour not to have sold out in advance. This may reflect current disillusionment within China about its domestic game. Although China invented football (in Shandong province, home of Confucius, 3,000 years ago), a professional structure has yet to take hold and the Chinese Super League, a successor to the C-League, is in crisis after Siemens withdrew sponsorship and, amid match-fixing and financial scandals, a breakaway was proposed by the country’s top club, Dalian Shide.
The country is still in mourning China’s failure to qualify for the 2006 World Cup. They went out in the preliminary Asian qualifying stages in agonising fashion, finishing second to Kuwait, who scored four in the last 24 minutes of their final match versus Malaysia to eliminate the Chinese on goals scored.
